Castrating a Classic: "Wuthering Heights" and the Death of Complexity

In 2025, British actor Simon Pegg was interviewed in the Criterion Closet, a renowned series where notable people from the filmmaking industry are invited to browse and discuss their favourite movies. One of Pegg’s ‘closet picks’ was David Lynch’s seminal thriller Blue Velvet, a dark and unnerving mystery set in the heart of middle America. Pegg says that his daughter hated the movie when he showed it to her, but then spoke about how he was delighted that she didn’t like it. In Pegg’s words: 

‘Sometimes, entertainment is an overrated function of art. Sometimes, being made uncomfortable is the point. Sometimes, being repulsed by something is the point. And I think David Lynch knew that better than most.’

Emily Brontë’s only novel, Wuthering Heights, is perhaps the most popular classic that embodies this sentiment more than any other. Its themes of racism, obsession, abuse, violence, cruelty and generational trauma were less than popular with critics when the book was first published in 1847, with one critic famously stating:

‘How a human being could have attempted such a book… without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.’ 

This is the crux of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights - it is a vicious and uncompromising novel about social constraints and class violence, written to produce a reaction of disgust from the restrained upper echelons of Victorian society. 

Emerald Fennell’s 2026 “Wuthering Heights”, starring Margot Robbie as Catherine ‘Cathy’ Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, disregards this premise entirely. Now, whilst art has no obligation to be faithful to its source material, any reinterpretation must at least respect it in a unique and meaningful way. Fennell’s adaptation does not. 

Fennell does not adapt Wuthering Heights, she guts it to an extent that you can barely call the movie an adaptation. It is an overstylised and underwritten erotic melodrama with an iconic book’s name attached to it to grant it some semblance of cultural capital at the box office. 

One of the most significant and particularly egregious changes that Fennell made to Brontë’s masterpiece is to cast Heathcliff as a white man, despite the various descriptions of the character by Brontë implying that he has a racially ambiguous background. Even if one cannot put a finger on Heathcliff’s race, it is a fairly certain fact from Brontë’s descriptions of him as ‘dark-skinned’ and not a ‘regular black’ that he is anything but white. 

This ambiguity ‘others’ Heathcliff in the book - he is treated as an interloper as soon as Mr. Earnshaw brings him to the Yorkshire moors on which the book is set. Heathcliff is culturally displaced and degraded to servitude, imbuing him with a simmering resentment that eventually metastasises into a violent obsession with Cathy. His sworn mission of revenge is endemic of the institutionalised cruelty that is levelled against him, denying him belonging, dignity, and inheritance.

By race-swapping Heathcliff, Fennell drains this crucial aspect of the story’s force. In the novel, Heathcliff’s outsider status is the true engine of the plot, shaping his psychology, ruthless accumulation of property, entitlement and generational vendetta. In the film however, Elordi’s Heathcliff is reduced to an ornamental heartthrob who serves only to tease and titillate the sexual desires of Cathy with an atrocious Yorkshire accent and an undeclinable ‘face card’. Heathcliff is not a model, he is a monster, albeit one that readers may sympathise with.

This is the true issue with Fennell’s interpretation - it doesn’t trust the audience to be uncomfortable with the uglier and more demanding architecture of Brontë’s story. Without the rigidly racialised class stratification and hierarchies of rural society that Brontë describes so grittily, Fennell’s story collapses in on itself, becoming nothing more than a single, overheated romance.

What is more frustrating is that Fennell has proven multiple times in the past that she is more than capable of exploring the intersectional implications of class, yet in her “Wuthering Heights”, these complex narratives are diluted in order to be made palatable for an audience in the throes of a modern literacy crisis. 

Humanity stands on the cusp of a new epoch of increasing desensitisation to the ugliest realities of society - from a widening class divide to the terrifying spectacle of modern warfare and genocide delivered via social media algorithms. In the face of this dystopia, art has a duty not to anaesthetise.

When Fennell took on the task of adapting Wuthering Heights, she inherited a responsibility to uphold the core themes of a work that lays bare the socially corrosive effects of exclusion, obsession and inherited suffering. To whittle these themes down into what is essentially just moderate erotica is not, as Fennell claims, keeping the interpretation of her 14-year old self alive. It is, instead, another symptom of modern society’s broader cultural drift towards comfort over confrontation. 

Abandoning the moral seriousness and gravitas of Wuthering Heights in exchange for a blandly swooning facsimile, punctuated by the occasional shot of Jacob Elordi’s fingers going in Margot Robbie’s mouth, is a deeply irresponsible choice in 2026. 

When a story that once unsettled critics to threaten suicide is being reshaped into a predictably by-the-book romance, audiences risk losing not only the ability to engage with the complexity of the source material, but the capacity to remain alert to the sinister forces that destroy lives in the real world. 

Image: Flickr/Beth Dunn

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