Goth Ick

At first it seems as though we might be immersed in an interesting film. The deceptive opening scene of British writer-director Emerald Fennell’s ubiquitous “Wuthering Heights” is promising: in blackness, what sounds like sex is revealed to be the anguished gasps of a man being publicly hanged. His spectators include some gleeful children and a nun, surrounded by a Punch and Judy theatre set and juicy fruit pies instead of popcorn. We discover quickly that the dying criminal has a hard-on. The scene is not subtle, but it hints at a world of ideas, effectively consecrating us into a violent society that conflates sex, death and entertainment. The crowd is turned on in the execution’s aftermath, couples are making out with abandon. It’s more base and debauched than bodice-ripper, hinting at the politically charged, the subversive. This is to be Fennell’s unsentimental vision, then, of Emily Brontë’s 1847 gothic novel of dashed romance between two grubby outsiders—Cathy, who sees the hanging and is thrilled by it, and our anti-hero, Heathcliff—in a time of servility and hierarchy, squalor and sadism.

But after the surprising-if-clunky fake-out entree, it soon becomes clear that the film baits the culture in much the same vein as Fennell’s 2020 debut, Promising Young Woman, a feminist rape-revenge story without real bite. What is billed as potentially radical, shocking even, reveals itself to be far less interesting. So, too, the satiric rabble-rousing pledged in Fennell’s 2023 class-conscious Saltburn makes way here for something staid. Hollywood’s new affair is not just post-Titanic but post-Wicked. Anyone deemed ‘other’ is afforded a neat and compassionate backstory, moral complexity be damned, one of the scourges of contemporary filmmaking at odds with Brontë’s refusal to explain motives and be tidy (vexed consequences are more her gambit).

In 2004, only five of the ten top-grossing box office films in Australia were not sequels or franchises. In 2024, nine were franchises, and the tenth was It Ends With Us, which frankly doesn’t count, being the most bland IP you can imagine put to the service of monetising domestic violence stories. Further monopolisation of culture looms with Netflix’s takeover of Hollywood movie studios. Like so many mass-cultural events right now, “Wuthering Heights” left me feeling hollow, cheated and more than a little exploited. As the film went on, I became convinced that our culture—let alone Robbie and husband Tom Ackerley’s LuckyChap Entertainment, a hype-generating machine meets film production company—does not have the maturity to truly reckon with stories in which care stands adjacent to cruelty.

It hints at a world of ideas, effectively consecrating us into a violent society that conflates sex, death and entertainment.

Stories find fresh resonance in new contexts, and the fate of Brontë’s wretched characters could find any number of parallels today. Obstetric violence in maternity wards. An overrepresentation of Indigenous youth in prisons. Widespread political complicity in the most devastating genocide of our time. Abuse within families and households. The hard force wrought by police institutions that claim to protect the community. A film that truly tries to dig into the routine suffusion of kinship, custodianship and protection with bloodshed, along with a genuine, human exploration of obsessive love, would be fascinating. Our society would greatly benefit from this kind of cultural reckoning.

Emerald Fennell does not have this kind of adaptation within her sights. As a writer-director, she is free to draw as much or as little from the original novel as she pleases. But the crux of her solipsistic mission—framed throughout the publicity campaign as a hormonal evocation of her own fevered teen reading of the book, distanced in quotation marks and conjuring what she calls star-producer Margot Robbie’s ‘big dick energy’ and Jacob Elordi’s Byronic leading man qualities—lays the ground for a zombie Wuthering. It evinces precisely what the late Mark Fisher dubbed hauntology, neoliberalism’s cultural fixation on resuscitated nostalgia at the expense of new dreamings. In the process, we lose the future, or at least our capacity to imagine it afresh. Call it the shock of the old: recycling familiar styles rather than innovating. Or call it impactful entrepreneurialism, judging by the solid box-office figures so far.

A summary of the original story reveals just how much rethinking a contemporary cinematic adaptation might need to justify its place in what Walter Benjamin called the tradition of ‘storytelling […] the art of repeating stories’. It’s the late 18th century. The dark-haired, impoverished Earnshaw family has been living on the Yorkshire moors for hundreds of years. Catherine Earnshaw and her adoptive brother Heathcliff, who was collected ‘starving’ and ‘houseless’ from the streets of the slave port of Liverpool by Cathy’s gambling father (or so Mr Earnshaw claims), share the desperate, inseparable love of children. But in adulthood, she agrees to marry the anodyne Edgar Linton, heir to the nearby Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff vanishes into the mist, reappearing three years later with a mysterious fortune and determination to wreak revenge on his lost love and everyone around her, not least by marrying and then abusing Linton’s younger sister, Isabella. Years on, the two couples’ children remain mired in the misery established by their parents.

One originality of the novel was its focus on ordinary people and their constraints. Servants appeared, for instance, as more than light relief or foreground. Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, told much of the story—the first narrative element cut by Fennell. In the Brontës’ world, servitude and slavery remained a fact of life. Everyone was always dying—mothers, sisters, Emily herself. Wuthering Heights spread the gospel of a gothic experience of reasonless tragedy true to this life experience.

“Wuthering Heights” left me feeling hollow, cheated and more than a little exploited.

‘Is Wuthering Heights amoral?’ asked the London Review of Books podcast late last year. Of course, and deliberately so, we evidently needed reminding. The novel is batshit crazy and uncanny, with sarcastic and combative dialogue. Incest taboos inhabit the text. Its world is fratricidal. Grotesque. The characters gnash and claw and gnarl. I’ve heard writers posit that the story is set in the animal world: Heathcliff is like a dog on its hind legs, a major turning point occurs when the neighbours’ mutt bites Cathy and much of the text has a feral energy. The published book was initially met with so much disgust that Emily’s older sister Charlotte is rumoured to have destroyed a manuscript for a second novel.

Meanwhile, Brontë’s immature vision of stricken love as explosive and life-wrecking was exciting to a young person without much—or any?—knowledge of loving and softness: all tumult, not much tenderness. Hardly surprising. The circumference of Brontë’s life was very narrow, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, without the firsthand, transformative experience of romantic love. In her biopic, Emily (2022), Frances O’Connor resolved this conundrum by speculating an affair between the author and a young priest consummated on the dirt-strewn floor of an abandoned stone cottage. The truth might be more mundane.

I’m not here to demand empty fidelity to an original text. Neither do I personally see art as a handbook for living. I would never interpret Cathy’s self-annihilating war cry—‘I am Heathcliff’—as an invitation to dissolve myself into another. I found the new film’s ahistorical cellophane gowns and sculptural latex to be quite playful, pointing to Fennell’s deftness in overseeing costuming, design and other visual hallmarks of filmmaking. She can indeed curate a set of fun, effective cinematic elements. This is the coldest, windiest film I’ve seen in some time, and production designer Suzie Davies’s Thrushcross Grange seeps with ironic cool. In the ever-present publicity blitzkrieg, Robbie, who plays Cathy, has called the film ‘twisted’ and ‘bold’—and stylistically, this is true.

Tonally, the film veers from pantomime to self-serious melodrama, and this is felt in the performances too. Given that Robbie is a legitimate movie star of the kind Hollywood probably thought it couldn’t manifest anymore, and that she managed to turn a plastic doll into a real, empathetic human character, it’s curious to see her careen into cartoon mode before regaining her footing in her character’s earnest, heartbroken, chest-thumping scenes dotted throughout the film. Meanwhile, her fellow Australian actor Jacob Elordi plays Heathcliff very well, not as a monstrous goblin but as a more relatably broody heartthrob.

I’m not here to demand empty fidelity to an original text. Neither do I personally see art as a handbook for living.

But to what end? Why are we here? What are we doing, except acquiring IP in a fatal doom spiral of mass culture without bringing anything substantive to the story’s legacy? What was it that made Brontë’s gothic novel so compelling?

Background to the perverse tornado of insane love, the stench of colonialism certainly helped. Heathcliff’s original description as a ‘little Lascar’ was an illusion to those from South Asia trafficked by British sailors. Overlooking these core elements, in which the means of sought-for wealth and status are illusory, ill-begotten and cursed, Fennell glides to an easier interpretation: an ill-fated, transcendent story of romance denied, with a recurring appraisal of viciousness spoken in love’s name and a dash of basic British class analysis. The result is thematically vacant, a flat hologram stripped of ambiguity and richness. And after a decade of Hollywood’s profiteering of diversity, equity and inclusion, what does colourblind casting (Hong Chau and Shazad Latif, perfectly good in unmoored roles) mean in a historical film without any interest in imperialism? There is a timely yet missed opportunity here to revitalise the vision of the imperial gothic: an unidentifiable Other, storming in with uninherited wealth, destroying English families and unveiling a monstrous Anglo paranoia of ‘reverse colonisation’.  After all, the Brits have never truly released that fear (see: the long sneer of Brexit and its attendant legitimising of anti-immigrant hatred).

Fennell might be a collector of moments, which are what make a very good trailer. But a film is more than a series of vignettes. Ultimately, her sensibilities are deeply conventional, slugging us with a brutally obvious dollhouse metaphor—Thrushcross Grange as a gilded cage for women trafficking their own feminine beauty value for status—as well as a rote corset-lacing scene in which a lady demands to be writhed ‘tighter,’ a well-trodden cinematic byword for torturous norms of social restriction, rather than a rigorous rethinking of gender.

“Wuthering Heights” is all marketing. Despite the throwback poster, which sells a stale image of female submission, I, for one, enjoyed the year-long viral social-media campaign which spilt visceral, textural, viscous promises of sweaty fingers and raw food. As a mass cultural experience, the anticipation was shared, cool and enticing, with skilfully edited and tantalisingly shot video. It all seemed to promise a new, perhaps sleazier take on a familiar story that is all too easily glorified; after all, it’s taken an awful lot of cinematic revision over the years to hallucinate Brontë’s story into a grandiose romance. But the joke’s on me: I was trolled and the campaign was selling a lemon. Fennell’s strain to be eye-popping can’t disguise that she is following a tried-and-true path of a century of filmmakers trying to recast mad love as real love.

The saddest irony is that blurring—or even obliterating—the border between film and marketing may be the project’s goal; indeed, Robbie’s professed aim as a producer is to spark storytelling commodities that ‘feel like they have the potential to penetrate culture’. In this business venture, the filmmaking team is triumphant. If Fennell sees herself as a shock auteur though, there’s not much in her extravaganza that delivers. Are we to pretend that masturbation, oral sex and Fifty Shades-esque bondage are really so provocative in 2026, or that more hasn’t been suggested in the lusty history of film? Italian filmmaker Franco Piavoli filmed sex as a form of unity with the natural, animal world, treating humans in the same way he shot bugs and swaying grass and fish, in 1981. Perhaps a chaste relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff was deemed implausible for audiences today. The portrayal of an actual physical affair reduces the more nebulous evocation of ‘mysterious sex and love in the misty night air’ to a series of baggy, generic scenes relaying the conventions of adulterous passion.

‘Darkness’ is a cliché of cultural production today. The new “Wuthering Heights” is true-to-source in that it suggests love itself is a destructive force in perennial combination with death. Hollywood’s first major version in the 1930s erased this perversion altogether. Director William Wyler fought the censorship office, but the unconsummated aspect of the tale was, in some nontrivial way, perfect for the beginning of the puritanical Hays Code era, the moral guidelines overseeing what filmmakers could put on screen for decades leading up to the late 1960s. Cathy and Heathcliff were sexless, the former’s pregnancy is censored altogether and a new Christian ending had the pair walk as ghosts toward heaven. (It’s debatable whether Brontë’s couple were redeemed by death.) Idealised, the 1930s movie found a way to be perfectly orthodox: Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff was slighted and empathetic rather than a living hurricane and the ball scene in which Cathy first experiences Linton’s mansion was rendered aspirational. As much can be said almost a hundred years later about the delivery of Fennell’s iteration. See: Robbie’s goth-deluxe parade of custom red-carpet ensembles revelling in designer cachet; the Instagram cross-posting inviting viewers to emulate Robbie’s flushed Chanel blush look and buy greedy, merchy spin-offs in the form of overpriced brand-partner ‘inspired’ candles, knitwear, cookies and açaí; the eventual alignment of the Sydney premiere with the launch of Hailey Bieber’s Rhode skincare at MECCA—all traffic in the same adoration of the elite that the film emptily points to in Cathy’s immaculately costumed ascent to wifedom.

The saddest irony is that blurring—or even obliterating—the border between film and marketing may be the project’s goal.

Much can be learned from how a filmmaker depicts Brontë’s ball scene, which brings out the differences between a stable boy and a wannabe ascendant lady, and therefore the stricken demands of love and social mobility. In 1954, Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel avoided the ball scene altogether—as does Fennell—swerving back to the realm of disturbance with a vision of tormented love robbed of fulfilment in death. In his revision, sexual repression is fatal and absent is a sublime afterlife in which Cathy and Heathcliff are finally together in spirit. For Buñuel, their love was an anguished hell, hardly idealised. In Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, it turns out that everyone is just trying to chase the redemptive dream of obscene riches, which is kind of dull.

It’s both unfortunate and telling that Fennell’s Burton-esque retread emerged in the same week as the latest Epstein files drop, in which the redacted spaces really do relay something sickening about our society’s relationship to degradation, wealth and gender (beware the aesthetic power-move of Ghislaine Maxwell’s spiky, socialite, prison pixie-cut). The film’s release also meekly follows the Super Bowl Halftime show, which truly and regularly manages to summon the vibe-spectacular in mass pop culture that cinema once was. Bad Bunny’s set was so elaborate and transcendent this year, complete with slavery-referencing sugar-cane foliage costumed extras. The Super Bowl Halftime gets the people going. How often does big-budget cinema still pump our blood in this way?

Nothing is cutting-edge about this film. Celine Song’s romantic drama Materialists (2025) had more to say with less cynicism on the subject of marrying for money. Baz Luhrmann set Jay Gatsby’s lavish parties to the hypnotic thump of Jay-Z rapping more than a decade ago, years after Sofia Coppola inaugurated the trend of slicing contemporary culture into period dramas. Much earlier, Martin Scorsese’s theological dramas merged the sacred and profane in relation to earthly and divine love.

Any student of Alfred Hitchcock knows that the key narrative strategy of melodrama is to withhold information—to carefully conceal and reveal. In a fog of belated edgelordism, Fennell’s strategies are more basic—traditional, even. She embraces out-of-time aesthetics, an increasingly mainstream decision given the success of TV’s Bridgerton. She simplifies narrative complexity, cutting the book’s nested frame narrative and the far-reaching consequences of the story of a trip to Liverpool for the next generation of unkind residents of the Heights’ godforsaken landscape. She converts suggestion to literalism, a plague of recent cinema, manifesting a physical affair between Cathy and Heathcliff, and reifying Heathcliff’s sadism to Isabella in the form of a consensual leash and collar in the costume design.

These decisions mean that “Wuthering Heights” does something it doesn’t mean to do: illustrate its own sick role in a culture dominated by the dynamics of decay and repetition, in which we are haunted by the cultural ghosts of the past and the afterlives of endless remakes. Our future may be as doomed as Cathy and Heathcliff’s, wandering the moors of a paradigm seemingly destined to rehash the past, only worse.

Rebranding the troublesome aspects of Wuthering defangs its strange power. I searched for meaning in Heathcliff’s emergence as Isabella’s consent-seeking fuckboy/dom. I could only conclude that the weak BDSM reframing might not mean anything beyond being a form of attention-seeking in a film lacking either any discernible mental activity or a coherent gender politics. A deviant book has been systematically stripped and extracted for less problematic moments and lewks appropriate to today’s standards. Fennell herself, meanwhile, has recast the role of filmmaker as a Warner Bros-backed content creator.

Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is too messy, too rudely populated by miscreants for all of this. And, apropos this, where are all the miscreants and eccentrics in the arts and society at large? This film left me pondering this very question. Fisher asked us to pursue originality in art, politics and ideas. Even as politics goes berserk, caving to the fascistic and anti-democratic, mainstream culture is oppressively ubiquitous. In music, pop stars like Taylor Swift are Thatcher-like in their adoration of assets and business trends, openly exploiting capitalism rather than querying it.

Where are all the miscreants and eccentrics in the arts and society at large? This film left me pondering this very question.

And yet it is musicians who seem to conjure Wuthering Heights best. Charli XCX’s bridge-burning ‘Chains of Love’ is Fennell’s best decision, its astringent cello strings sitting beautifully alongside Kate Bush’s 1978 classic tribute. Both tracks pulse with unleashed witchiness, which might be the true essence of the Heights lore. Meanwhile, the film’s portrayal of a miscarriage—a persistent lacuna in our pronatalist culture and a major divergence from the book’s plot—is almost incidentally interesting, except that Fennell doesn’t really seem to have much to say about the common phenomenon of pregnancy without live birth beyond squeezing it for aestheticised gore.

What remains unchanged is the fact that Brontë crafted a bendy, breathable story that many still love to theorise for themselves. Wuthering Heights has been claimed as a trans narrative, a queer gothic, an allegory of class conflict and a canonical Victorian novel. It has attracted Freudian interpretations and been, predictably, damned as valorising toxic masculinity in today’s ambient mood of political literalism. Boo!

With this latest drag through the mud, Wuthering Heights is, in the parlance, a vibe, in the way that everything once counter-cultural—feminism, mood, energy—is up for grabs. The novel is at heart a ghost story, though that’s too thorny, otherworldly and unhinged for Fennell, who axes Cathy’s pitiful, wailing spirit, scratching at the window in abject, unfinished misery. What’s left in “Wuthering Heights” is a slick, normie film that stands in for hauntology, late capitalism’s state of cultural stasis.