Welcome, friends, to the inaugural meeting of the Support Group for Concerned Citizens Against the Saltburning of Wuthering Heights.
It has been brought to our attention that one Emerald Fennell, the writer and director of that embarrassingly over-hyped movie about the wee Irish actor from The Banshees of Inisherin fucking a freshly dug and populated grave, has set her sights on a film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. What’s more, actors Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi have been announced as the lead characters of Catherine and Heathcliff.
First, some reactions on this casting news gathered from within the group:
“Hard pass from me”
“Did she [Fennell] read the book?”
“This is a mistake of gargantuan proportions”
“Elordi is not Heathcliff. So, no”
“No.”
“Hell no.”
A scan of our initial concerns can be summarised as: the boy Elordi – handsome as he may have been in Saltburn – is no Heathcliff. And as much as Margot Robbie appears to be able to turn her talents to any character, without a decent Heathcliff there is no Cathy. Wuthering Heights is about the pain and brutality of loving what you fear and fearing what you love, all conveyed in Emily Brontë’s startling, poetic prose. Elordi and Robbie simply do not read as brutish, muddy, and crazed purveyors of the best and worst of human nature. Too polished, too Hollywood, too Saltburn.
But though we may be twitchy about the casting, this dispatch is really to convey the far greater fear that Fennell is going to Saltburnify one of the greatest, most gloriously batshit, gothic masterpieces to ever haunt the Yorkshire moors. Wuthering Heights deserves the very best and we’re afraid Fennell has not proven that she is such (an example of the very best being of course the Emma Thompson (screenplay) and Ang Lee (Director) collaboration that produced the 1995 film adaptation of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, which is perfect). It has been reported that Fennell is down to write, produce and direct Wuthering Heights and this group considers this trifecta to be a huge mistake.
Should Fennell be let anywhere near any Brontë is the question.
Members of this group loathed Saltburn with the fire of a thousand suns. I can hardly describe the despair that came upon me in the final scenes of that film, it is unutterable! But my disdain in general can be wrangled into the following list of the film’s major flaws:
- Weak plot. The script felt like maybe a third draft. We needed the twentieth. We did not need to be walked through exactly how all the murdering happened, it was incredibly obvious.
- Poor character development. Did anyone actually care when anyone died? No. Because the characters were dully drawn at best, unimaginative and uncared for at worst.
- Confused references: the mashup of The Talented Mr Ripley, Agatha Christie, Midsomer Murders, and Cruel Intentions didn’t gel. The plot had none of the satisfying backbone of Christie or Highsmith or Horowitz. The collision resulted in the distinct tang of aesthetics over style. It wasn’t gothic enough to be gothic or thrilling enough to be a thriller.
- Waste of Carey Mulligan.
- Crimes against Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s banger ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ which will now forever be associated with the silly and bad ending of a floppy film.
I went into Saltburn with a partially open heart. I wanted to like it more than Promising Young Woman, which I had mildly appreciated. But Fennell took my heart and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me. An attempt to analyse why Saltburn riled me so completely finds that deep down I know it could have been so much better. And also that this one film got in the way of probably 1,000 far more accomplished scripts languishing because their writers don’t have the social or financial capital that Fennell has access to. For balance I will force myself to say that Saltburn did reveal flashes of … not quite brilliance but at least excellence: Carey Mulligan as the vapid friend at the mercy of Rosamund Pike’s turn as so-rich-she’s-cooked lady of the manor; Richard E Grant shone as the hopeless, skewered, grief-stricken lord of the manor.
But Elordi? The only interesting thing about him in Saltburn was his eyebrow piercing. He’s going to need to unveil a hell of a lot more charisma if he wants to do justice to one of the great chaotic, love demons in all of art. Heathcliff is weather. Unsettling and mesmerising and magnetic. He is the wicked, wild slip that was eroded out of Catherine thanks to class and gender expectations. Also, Heathcliff says shit like this: “You teach me now how cruel you’ve been – cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they’ll blight you – they’ll damn you. […] Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you – oh, God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave?’
This passage may offer a clue, I suppose, to why Fennell is compelled to make the 23rd film adaptation of Wuthering Heights. She does seem to enjoy a character that loves to the grave and beyond. And look, who among us doesn’t understand the compulsion? Wuthering Heights is a cult book for freaks and normies alike. Who among us hasn’t wanted to flail about the moors all hopeless about the division between our hearts and our minds?
And yet we, The Anti-Saltburning Society, have grave doubts. Wuthering Heights has spawned a vast array of artistic spinoffs, most of them shadows of the founding story. Kate Bush’s perfect song and subsequent fan-made mass dance mobs are an exception. Which leads us directly to the elephant in the room: the panic-inducing suspicion that Fennell might use Kate’s song in the film? I fear this is inevitable. We know Fennell loves pop music. And we know she’s not super fussed about historical accuracy. We also know that Cruel Intentions, one of the inspirations for Saltburn, is a retelling of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses. And while we’re here, what if Fennell leans so far into her late 90s x early 2000s influences that she produces a Frankenstein’s monster of Wuthering Heights meets She’s All That meets Britney Spears’ music video for the 2003 hit, Toxic?
And yet. If Fennell does want to do Wuthering Heights then perhaps we should hope that it is precisely that kind of translation that she makes – an ahistoric retelling over an attempt at a faithful, historically and textually accurate adaptation. Perhaps we ought to hope that Fennell tugs this gothic classic so far out of context that we can only see the vaguest of Brontë pencil marks underneath. It worked for 10 Things I Hate About You, and it worked for Clueless. It definitely worked for Cruel Intentions.
The question remains, however: does this adaptation even need to happen at all? I’ve counted over 20 film adaptations of Wuthering Heights made between 1948 and 2015. And that’s not including 2022’s Emily Brontë biopic, Emily, starring Sex Education’s Emma Mackey (which was OK: Mackey was compelling, and the story managed to weave a lot of Brontë theories, but it made a ludicrous mistake with a silly out-of-character secret sex romp with a tutor which would have been better left as simmering but unrequited desire).
Ultimately I put forward a motion that we beg Fennell to leave off. We’ve had Tom Hardy as Heathcliff, we’ve had Juliette Binoche as Cathy. Can we please just leave it there?
All those in favour say, “Haunt me, then!”
Items of business for our next meeting: thoughts/fears/prayers for Baz Luhrmann’s Joan of Arc and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.