Dissenting opinion: Why Emerald Fennell’s 'Wuthering Heights' is good, actually.

I mean no disrespect to my estimable colleagues who’ve done the hard work of putting this bracket together, but since they’ve asked the staff for input on adaptations that should have been on the list, I’m here to say it’s straight-up cowardice to not include Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights on this bracket. Because it is a genuinely good adaptation, damn the discourse!

Before you descend to the comments/clutter up my mentions about this, some context for what kind of cultural consumer I am: I would so much rather see some insane-concept Shakespeare than the classical-dress one. Which leads me to put a clarifying question to you, dear reader: what are you looking for in an adaptation? Are you looking for a one-to-one analogue? By that metric, The Shining is inarguably a terrible adaptation—but as I’ve said elsewhere and as I’m sure many would agree, Kubrick’s film is a great adaptation because it does a spectacular job adapting its source material, which is to say taking the original and transmuting it into something new, something different, and yet something that nevertheless feels of-a-piece. So it is with Fennell’s film! (Although, to be clear: I’m not here to tell you Wuthering Heights is an equivalent piece of film-making—it isn’t.)

There was a lot of flack being flung at this Heights for being all vibes, but honestly, why not do that with an adaptation? Adapting a classic novel is always going to be a risk, because generations of people have read it and culturally it has become something everyone has a vague opinion about—so you’re always going to have people who are mad that it didn’t include X thing that they really cared deeply about.

And Emily Brontë has always been the coolest (slash “weirdest“) of the Brontë sisters, the one onto whom you can project the most—and whose single book was resolutely cooler, sexier, stranger than the combined works of either of her sisters. So why not make a sumptuous Gothic feast of a film lensed through a Millennial’s memories of the covers of supermarket-checkout-line bodice-rippers they maybe wanted to be reading instead when they were first assigned the Brontës?

Give me this kind of weirdo interpretation over yet-another-stuffy-period-piece any day! I’m going to remember some of the images from this film forever (the leeches! the houses, both of them! the very-Millay-esque piles of gin bottles!) while other aspects fade entirely—which is, funnily enough, exactly what has happened to me with the actual novel.