Director Emerald Fennell knows how to tap into a zeitgeist. Her 2020 film Promising Young Woman captured the high that #MeToo activists were riding after the downfall of Harvey Weinstein. Her 2023 film Saltburn mirrored modern young people’s confusion over whether they want to eat the rich or be the rich. In “Wuthering Heights”, her most controversial project yet, Fennell tries to tap into the romance craze. As the current book market can attest, women can’t get enough of smutty stories about monstrous men. Instead of adapting the Brontë novel faithfully—as the quotation marks around the title indicate—Fennell has chosen to tap into that market, flattening the complex, intergenerational tale into tropes and vibes.
Fennell proved with 2023’s Saltburn that she is first and foremost an aesthete. Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Cathy (Margot Robbie) have never looked more sumptuous. In “Wuthering Heights”, the camera ogles Elordi’s broad shoulders and chiseled abs. The costumes are vibrant and purposefully anachronistic—reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Both films purport to tell the story of “fated mates,” a popular trope in the romance genre. “I’ve crossed oceans of time to find you,” Dracula tells Mina, while Cathy says of Heathcliff, “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
Although Fennell uses that famous line from the novel, “Wuthering Heights” takes many liberties with the plot. Fennell erases Cathy’s brother Hindley and gives Heathcliff the Maleficent treatment: He’s no monster, he’s just misunderstood. In another departure from the novel, Cathy and Heathcliff consummate their relationship. They copulate in carriages and kiss in cemeteries. The director lets Cathy and Heathcliff’s lust for each other overshadow their love, to the point that their souls’ meeting after death feels like a sick joke.
Fennell may be an artist, but she’s also a businesswoman. (So is Robbie; she and her husband own the production company behind all of Fennell’s films.) And the movie business is in trouble. Hollywood is competing for eyeballs with TikTok, Twitch, and—believe it or not—books. The fiction books market is expected to hit $12.4 billion by 2030, with romance novels representing a huge portion of those sales. These aren’t your mother’s romance novels. As writer Hilary Layne details, trends like fanfiction, romantasy (the romance and fantasy genre), and BDSM have pushed romance fiction aimed at women into edgier and edgier territory. How is a production company that doesn’t want its film to have an NC-17 rating supposed to compete?
“Wuthering Heights” tries to reach the kind of woman who buys an “I don’t watch porn, I read it like a lady” bookmark. Yet women’s interest in the romance genre is not merely sexual but emotional, making story just as important as smut. Unfortunately, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is nothing but the latter. “Enemies to lovers” is an extremely popular romance trope, with good reason—what woman doesn’t want to command that kind of transforming love?—but Fennell never manages to convince the audience that Cathy and Heathcliff are enemies to begin with. In fact, the scenes depicting them taking care of each other as preteens are sweet. As an adult, Heathcliff says Cathy’s the only thing holding him back from beating her father or murdering her husband, but when the next scene shows him desperately dictating letters to win her back, why would the audience believe him? He’s not the “fiend” or “devil” of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Fennell’s Heathcliff barely even registers on the Richter scale of toxic love interests.
All of which raises the question: Do women actually desire monsters in real life? “If men are monsters, if masculinity is a monstrosity, but women keep desiring men, and the more masculine the better, then women must desire monstrosity,” Oliver Traldi writes in a recent essay examining Hollywood’s latest offerings and the male psyche. But we should not confuse what women want from escapist fiction, which they can read from the safety of their couch, with what they want from real life. In a video with more than two million views, a millennial comedian jokes about his disappointment that his girlfriend has no interest in reenacting scenes from her “fantasy smut” novels with him. (He is clearly referencing A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, which, coincidentally, Robbie may be adapting.)
Millennial Fennell may be tapping into a dark romance zeitgeist with “Wuthering Heights”, but she’s also going against the grain when it comes to younger viewers. Despite Gen Z’s pornography habits, headlines proclaim that Zoomers are uninterested in sex or even sex scenes in movies and television. The perception is so pervasive that actress Olivia Wilde is practically begging Gen Z to buy tickets to her new film I Want Your Sex. One of Wilde’s younger costars said she hopes the film inspires risk-averse Zoomers to have sex, adding, “Sex can be lighthearted. It doesn’t have to stare into your soul. You’re not staring into the abyss.”
But perhaps modern society has removed all the deepness and darkness from sex—and the abyss of desire is what Gen Z craves. When they can’t find it in real life, they find it in romantasy. If there’s any moral to the story of “Wuthering Heights”, it’s that sex is serious. It’s special, and it does bond two people forever. Whether Fennell intended it or not, that’s a message that will resonate with viewers young and old.
