**I Couldn’t Press Play**

On Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, and why a trailer was all it took to break me

The trailer was two minutes and twelve seconds long. I watched forty-seven seconds of it before I closed the tab, put my laptop down, and stared at the ceiling like a woman who had just witnessed a car accident she’d been warned about for months.

I want to be clear: I didn’t close the tab because Emerald Fennell is a bad director. I closed it because she isn’t. And somehow, that made it so much worse.

I have read Wuthering Heights the way some people practice religion — repeatedly, obsessively, with marginalia creeping into every margin and a simmering low-grade fury toward anyone who calls it a love story. I have watched the 1992 film with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche enough times to have opinions about specific lighting choices in specific scenes. I own the book in three editions. I am, by any reasonable metric, exactly the kind of person this new adaptation was not made for. And I think that’s the problem.

The Saltburn problem

Emerald Fennell makes films about obsession beautifully. Saltburn is proof of that. It is stylised, seductive, and deeply interested in the aesthetics of wanting something you cannot have. It is also entirely Fennell’s own — she built those characters, that world, that particular brand of poisonous glamour from scratch. She could make it do whatever she needed it to do.

But Wuthering Heights is not a canvas. It is a specific, philosophically loaded object that resists aestheticisation by design. The moors are not mood — they are the externalisation of interior states Brontë couldn’t otherwise render in 1847. The ugliness of the love story is not a feature to be softened in post-production. It is the entire point. When you aestheticise it — when you cast Jacob Elordi, who is objectively built like a Romantic hero, and release it on Valentine’s Day — you are not making a new interpretation. You are making a different book.

What the 1992 film understood, for all its departures from the novel, was that you cannot apologise for these people. Fiennes plays Heathcliff without the softening wink that says he’s redeemable, really. He is terrifying. Binoche’s Catherine isn’t luminous and longing — she is feral, selfish, trapped in a way that makes her complicit in her own tragedy. The film doesn’t ask you to enjoy them. It asks you to understand them, which is a completely different, and considerably more uncomfortable, request. Fennell’s instinct — her gift, even — is to make the uncomfortable seductive. And that instinct, applied to this particular novel, is precisely the wrong tool for the job.

The casting

And then there is the matter of who plays Heathcliff.

Brontë’s Heathcliff is explicitly described as dark, racially ambiguous, likely brought from Liverpool’s docks — a city saturated, in 1847, with the remnants of the slave trade. His outsider status is not incidental to the story. It is the engine of it. The way every character in the novel reads him as other — the specific texture of his degradation under Hindley, the particular savagery with which polite society dismisses him — cannot be fully explained by class alone. There is something else being named, carefully and obliquely, by a woman writing in 1847 who understood exactly what she was doing.

To cast a white actor in that role is not a neutral creative decision. It removes the most quietly radical thing about the novel and replaces it with cheekbones. The racial dimension of Heathcliff’s outsider status is not a detail. It is structural. It changes what his revenge means, what his degradation means, what it means that the world that destroyed him also created him. Strip that out and you have a story about a moody man who didn’t get the girl. Which is, apparently, what we’re getting.

What the book actually is

Let’s start with what Wuthering Heights is not. It is not a love story. It is not a romance. It is not, despite what every film poster and Valentine’s Day release date would have you believe, a story about two people who wanted each other and couldn’t have each other and isn’t that sad. It is a story about abuse. About obsession. About two people whose fixation on each other functions less like love and more like a slow-acting poison that kills or damages virtually everyone in their orbit — and whose damage echoes across a second generation that did nothing to deserve it.

Heathcliff is not misunderstood. He is not redeemable. He is a man who, upon returning wealthy and powerful to the place that humiliated him, systematically destroys the children of his enemies — deliberately keeping Hareton Earnshaw ignorant and brutalised, manipulating young Cathy into a loveless marriage, dismantling everything and everyone connected to the people who wronged him. He is compelling the way a natural disaster is compelling. You cannot look away. You are not rooting for it.

And Catherine is not a tragic heroine longing for her soulmate across the social divide. She is a woman who tells Nelly Dean, with Heathcliff in the next room, that he is too degraded to marry — and means it. She chooses Edgar Linton because she wants his money and his status, and she is just self-aware enough to know this about herself without being self-aware enough to stop. She loves Heathcliff, yes, in whatever way Catherine Earnshaw is capable of loving anything. But she also abandons him. And the consequences of that abandonment spiral outward for decades.

This is not a love story. It is a reckoning.

But here is what makes Wuthering Heights genuinely extraordinary: we are not actually there. We don’t witness any of this directly. What we get is a story told by Nelly Dean to Lockwood — a man who arrives at Wuthering Heights understanding nothing, misreads everything he sees, and whose framing signals immediately that we are in unreliable territory. Lockwood is our entry point. Lockwood is, to put it plainly, an idiot. And Nelly is his source.

Nelly Dean is one of the most underexamined narrators in Victorian fiction. She is consistently presented as sensible, loyal, the moral centre of a story with very few moral centres. Readers trust her. Adaptations trust her. Films cast warm-faced actresses in the role and let her shepherd the audience through the story with quiet authority.

But Nelly had an agenda. She had several.

Consider: Nelly grew up alongside Hindley Earnshaw. They were childhood companions until old Mr. Earnshaw died and the social distance between servant and master reasserted itself. What Nelly felt for Hindley is never stated outright — Brontë is far too controlled a writer for that — but it is legible in the texture of her narration. Her sympathy for Hindley’s degradation. Her particular cold fury toward Heathcliff, who displaced Hindley in Earnshaw’s affections before he ever did anything to earn her contempt. Her consistent framing of Catherine as the source of Hindley’s destruction.

And then there is Edgar Linton — blonde, wealthy, gentle Edgar, whom Catherine chose over Heathcliff and whom Nelly serves with what seems like genuine devotion. But there are moments where Nelly’s feelings toward Edgar read less like loyalty and more like the particular feeling of a woman who understood exactly why Catherine chose him, and quietly resented Catherine for getting to make that choice. The dialogue has an edge to it in these passages. A small, cold jealousy that Nelly would never name and probably never consciously acknowledged.

All of which means that everything we know about Catherine — her selfishness, her manipulation, her cruelty to Edgar in the final months of her life — comes filtered through a woman who had accumulated decades of quiet grievance against her. Nelly didn’t lie to Lockwood. She just told the story the way you tell a story when you have spent thirty years resenting the protagonist and have never once been asked to account for it.

The most damning exhibit is the “I am Heathcliff” scene — one of the most famous speeches in English literature, almost universally read as proof of the grand passion at the novel’s heart. Catherine chose him, and quietly resented Catherine for getting to make that choice. The dialogue has an edge to it in these passages. A small, cold jealousy that Nelly would never name and probably never consciously acknowledged.

All of which means that everything we know about Catherine — her selfishness, her manipulation, her cruelty to Edgar in the final months of her life — comes filtered through a woman who had accumulated decades of quiet grievance against her. Nelly didn’t lie to Lockwood. She just told the story the way you tell a story when you have spent thirty years resenting the protagonist and have never once been asked to account for it.

The most damning exhibit is the “I am Heathcliff” scene — one of the most famous speeches in English literature, almost universally read as proof of the grand passion at the novel’s heart. Catherine tells Nelly that Heathcliff is more herself than she is. That her love for Edgar is like the foliage of the woods, and her love for Heathcliff is the eternal rocks beneath. It is extraordinary.

It is also a confession made while Nelly knew — and Catherine did not — that Heathcliff was in the room.

Nelly could have said, before Catherine began, that Heathcliff was there. She could have called him out. She did neither. She sat and let Catherine say the thing out loud — let her voice the full hierarchy of her feelings without knowing she had an audience, let her say plainly that Heathcliff was too degraded to marry — and only afterward revealed he had heard every word. And then described her own failure to intervene as an oversight.

That is not an oversight. That is a woman who needed Catherine to say the thing. Who needed it confirmed — that Catherine was exactly as vain and status-hungry as Nelly had always believed. It is one of the most quietly devastating acts of narrative sabotage in Victorian fiction. And Heathcliff’s entire trajectory — his disappearance, his return, the decades of systematic destruction — pivots on that one scene. The scene Nelly engineered by saying nothing.

“Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad — only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you.” The line reads as romantic. In context, it is the cry of a man already unravelling. Brontë knew the difference. Do we?

Now. I am aware there is a counter-argument, because there always is. In the novel’s second half — the half, incidentally, that Fennell’s film apparently saw fit to largely ignore — Nelly is warmer toward Heathcliff. More willing to see him clearly. There are moments where she seems to feel something approaching guilt, or the kind of retrospective sympathy that comes when you’ve watched someone suffer long enough that even your own grievances start to feel shabby.

But I don’t think that warmth redeems her account of the first half. I think it complicates it. And there is something else worth noting: by the time Heathcliff returns in the second half, he has bought Wuthering Heights. The power dynamic has completely inverted. The boy she watched get degraded has come back and now owns the building she lives in. Nelly’s apparent warmth arrives at precisely the moment she has no power and he has all of it. Make of that what you will.

Which brings me to what is, for my money, the most unforgivable thing about an adaptation that ignores the second half entirely: it misses the point so completely it isn’t even in the right vicinity of the point.

The second half is where Brontë’s actual argument lives. The first half is the passion and the obsession, the gothic machinery of desire and class and cruelty. The second half is the bill coming due. Hareton Earnshaw — deliberately kept ignorant, brutalised, stripped of everything — is Heathcliff’s masterwork of revenge and his undoing simultaneously, because Hareton is also exactly what Heathcliff was. Before Hindley degraded him. Before Catherine chose Edgar. Before everything. Heathcliff looks at this boy he has ruined and sees the original version of himself — the one that existed before the world got to him — and it destroys his appetite for vengeance more completely than any external force could have.

That is not a romantic ending. That is a Greek tragedy ending. That is a man undone not by love or death but by the unbearable irony of his own cruelty mirroring back at him something he thought was lost forever. You cannot earn that ending by spending your entire film on the passionate first half and calling it done.

What adaptations are for

I’ve thought about this a lot, in the way that English teachers think about things — which is to say, probably too much, and with an unwillingness to let anyone leave the room until we’ve worked it out. An adaptation owes its source material something, but not everything. It is allowed to interpret. It is allowed to find something new in the text, to bring a contemporary lens, to ask a question the original didn’t ask.

What it is not allowed to do — what I would argue no adaptation is allowed to do — is flatten the source material’s central argument. You can change the setting, the structure, even the characters. But if the film about a morally annihilating story makes you feel warm and vaguely stirred, it has failed. Not commercially. Artistically, philosophically, in the ways that matter to people who care about literature.

Maybe the reviews calling it “surface level” and “cliff notes” confirm what forty-seven seconds of trailer already told me: that a film made to be consumed is fundamentally incompatible with a novel that demands to be wrestled with.

I respect Emerald Fennell enormously. I’ll probably watch this eventually, out of the same compulsion that makes me read bad adaptations of books I love — because I need to know exactly how wrong I was, or exactly how right. But I suspect that when I do, I’ll feel what I always feel when something beautiful is handed to someone talented who nonetheless missed the point: not anger, exactly. Just that particular, very literary sadness of a story that deserved better.

If you do that, you haven’t adapted Wuthering Heights. You’ve adapted the Kate Bush song.