As the end credits rolled and the next Charli xcx song began to play, I turned to my mum and told her that Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” was crap. She was, understandably, taken aback, and told me that she didn’t mind it. I wasn’t going to ruin our mother-daughter evening together, so when we sat for our Wagamama ramen and fumbled about with our chopsticks, I asked her what she liked about it.
“It grabbed my attention,” she said.
A fair point. Moving picture to moving picture, there’s enough to, at the very least, tickle your visual fancy when watching “Wuthering Heights”. But there’s not enough meat to flesh out the legs of the barebones story; we end up watching a feature length trailer of erotic imagery and dull sex scenes. The book, which Fennell has made clear is far too dense and complicated to adapt to film (if this is the case, then why bother?) never details any explicit intercourse. And yet, there’s an underlying eroticism to it. It’s not healthy, per se — it’s a devilish desire that burbles in your loins when something is oh-so-wrong yet oh-so-right. That, in itself, is a sensation to question, and one that never truly gets held accountable in Fennell’s mindless dry hump of a love story.
Harkening back to Halina Reijn’s taboo erotic thriller Babygirl (2024) and Steven Shainberg’s more comedic Secretary (2002), two films which I often watch alone, the underlying element these have that “Wuthering Heights” lacks is desire. Yearning. Craving. If I’m going to be crossing my legs in the cinema, I need to spend time with the characters and see them lust for one another. In Babygirl, Romy (Nicole Kidman) and Samuel (Harris Dickinson) embody a similarly obsessive dynamic to that of Cathy and Heathcliff; some may say the same of Lee (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and Mr Grey (James Spader) in Secretary, though their ending is far happier than that of its original text by Mary Gaitskill. But Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are given a script that attempts to establish a longing that is merely fleeting.
Writer Gina Frangello breaks down desire into three components: The Fantasy, The Physical, and The Psychological. The Fantasy is perhaps something you imagine on the brink of orgasm, but not always what you truly want. We cannot always control what we fantasise about. To describe your deepest fantasies to someone is to build intimacy with them. The Physical is the sensations and activities you do want to enact; the sensations that turn us on. The Psychological is about connection. Listening to someone, caring for them, and developing an attraction. Curiosity about them as an individual.
Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” lacks The Psychological, a great irony considering the dense and complicated text it was adapted from. The Psychological aspect of Cathy and Heathcliff’s connection is stripped of its meaning without the reasons for their taboo attraction being investigated. We explore their backstory as children, but without the cruelty of Cathy’s brother Hindley (who Fennell chose to shoehorn into the character of their father, confusing the family dynamics and the grounds for Heathcliff’s vengeance). We touch upon the class commentary in a surface-level way similar to how Fennell does in her 2022 film Saltburn, noting Cathy’s desire to climb the social ranks, but dampening the complexity of her position in a family of landed gentry. We have no reference to Heathcliff’s ethnic ambiguity and how this contributes to his mistreatment and as a barrier to his and Cathy’s romance. We are left with what the internet has dubbed a “smooth-brained” edition of Emily Brontë’s two-volume epic.
As such, we touch upon The Fantasy — that of Cathy and Heathcliff longing for a life of wealth — but instead their combined desire for a more luxurious existence being expanded upon and how out of reach this feels due to Heathcliff’s status as a “dark-skinned gypsy”, Fennell fixates on their flimsy interest in egg and bondage. The egg, acting as a symbol for vaginal discharge at the point of ovulation, presents itself when Cathy’s sexual intrigue for Heathcliff reaches its peak. First when they are at Wuthering Heights and spying upon the servants Joseph (Ewan Mitchell) and Zillah (Amy Morgan) as they enact their sadomasochistic tryst in the stables (and event that does not happen in the book and involves the yasssification of both characters), and second when Heathcliff makes his return to the moors, somehow breaking, entering, and placing them in Cathy’s bed at Thrushcross Grange. The egg and bondage, instead of being a lusty visualisation, feel like nothing but sexless allusions.
Fennell only allows The Physical to flourish in her tale of obsession and vanity, sucking “Wuthering Heights” dry of any eroticism that may have existed in its original text. As Broey Deschanel states in her video essay ‘Emerald Fennell’s Cinema for Dummies’:
I’m a big proponent of sex scenes in films… but their presence [in “Wuthering Heights”] does not enrich the story. It actively undermines it. Spice is so popular at the moment — just look at the success of Heated Rivalry — because when done right, it enhances the spectator’s sense of yearning, and so much of what drives the eros, the desire between Heathcliff and Catherine, is its negation, the inability to consummate their love… Even it its misguidedness, Fennell couldn’t even get the spice right. Fennell literalises that desire so bluntly that whatever tension or passion or yearning there should be gets snuffed out. To make Heathcliff and Cathy’s bond solely about sexual desire rather than about platonic bonds and survival and entitlement is yet another horrible disservice to Brontë’s work.
To trivialise The Psychological and Fantasy aspects of Cathy and Heathcliff’s desire for one another is to remove any meaning to their relationship or to Brontë’s critique of class-based society, racism, and vengeance. Consequently, any and all sex scenes that occur between the two feel as erotic as rubbing two Barbies’ mounds together: fascinating, but dry.
Watching Babygirl in the cinema — which, thankfully, I did not see with my mum — was a very different experience. Instead of hopping from one intensely saturated scene to another, each one disjointed from the last, the moments of tension were left to revel in their taboo. A glass of milk becomes a symbol of primal urges in a way that pays homage to the antagonists of A Clockwork Orange and The Boys, demonstrating the villainy of Romy’s actions as she enters into a dominant-submissive arrangement with her much-younger intern, Samuel. It’s effective in a way that Cathy’s eggs fail to be, a fair less subliminal, a far more on-the-nose semantic.
Similarly, when a friend and I watched Secretary together, the non-sexual kink scenes couldn’t help but make us giggle with awkwardness as we sat next to each other, witnessing the eroticism unfold despite there being no egg, no bodice-ripping, no explicit sex before us. Lee, bent over Mr Grey’s desk, reading out her poorly typed letter as he lifts his hand and spanks her each time she stumbles upon one of her mistakes. Unacceptable behaviour that is consented to with the slightest brush of Lee’s pinkie finger against Grey’s; a Fantasy turned Physical with their complicated Psychological connection. It’s a moment that is decidedly unerotic in Mary Gaitskill’s short story of the same name:
I read: ‘Dear Mr Garvy: I am very grateful to you for referring…’ He began spanking me as I said ‘referring.’ The funny thing was, I wasn’t even surprised. I actually kept reading the letter, although my understanding of it was not very clear. I began crying on it, which blurred the ink. The word ‘humiliation’ came into my mind with such force that it effectively blocked out all other words. Further, I felt that the concept it stood for had actually been a major force in my life for quite a while.
The experience is more traumatic with Gaitskill’s description, which translates into the event we see unfold in Shainberg’s Secretary, despite the pinkie-finger reassurance. There’s still a great air of unease to the interaction, suggesting a close proximity between the fear, guilt and arousal our protagonist feels.
We, the audience, are left to judge these interactions for ourselves. Do they arouse us? Do they repulse us? Do they do both at the same time? The complexity to desire and its three components is for us to process and understand in our own minds. Yes, the power dynamics are wrong and do not necessarily reflect what we might want in our realities, but we can still imagine it on the brink of orgasm because that agency remains with us.
This is what “Wuthering Heights” lacks: trust in its audience to judge the actions of our protagonists for ourselves, to decide if their sexual attraction to one another arouses us or not. At every point, Fennell seeks to justify Cathy and Heathcliff’s actions. They were prevented from being together by their conniving maid Nelly! Heathcliff isn’t bad, Isabella has consented to his ill treatment! Cathy isn’t that attracted to Edgar, so of course she has an affair with Heathcliff! We’re treated as such morons that it’s impossible to care whether either of them lives or dies, let alone if they decide to bump uglies or not.
In having Cathy and Heathcliff’s selfish behaviours justified, any moral questions regarding their obsession for one another are brushed off with lazy, rushed excuses that strip the story of its central conflict: forbidden desire in 19th century Yorkshire. In both Babygirl and Secretary, we reach a resolution with our flawed characters, who are forced to face the consequences of their interactions. “Wuthering Heights” deprives us of any resolution in erasing its entire second volume and refusing to show how abhorrent Cathy and Heathcliff truly are. Desire is contradictory and can be a moral quandary in itself; to dilute this is to make a cake with no egg.
