This is not Wuthering Heights'

"Emerald Fennell put the title of her film in quotation marks Wuthering Heights, not Wuthering Heights and she's right. The film is a reflection of what Fennell felt reading the novel at 14: her private memory. Fennell thus protects herself, in advance, against accusations of infidelity. But in doing so, she says something more unsettling: that the original text is not accessible as a shared experience, that each reader has their own version, and that none is truer than another."

"The Valentine's Day premiere tells us this is a love story, not about the violence of attachment, nor about hatred, nor about what the social order does to a woman who doesn't fit into it. The $80 million Warner Bros. budgeted for the film also speaks volumes. It suggests this is a spectacle that must be quickly recouped, not a difficult text that has resisted interpretation for 180 years."

"Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, drenched by the rain, suggest that the intensity between these two characters is sexual, and beautiful, but not that nameless thing Bronte describes, that fusion prior to sex and greater than it, projected in Catherine's monstrous declaration, when she states, I am Heathcliff. Catherine's I am you is the dissolution of the boundary between two beings, not a love story. And perhaps that's why there's something worth knowing before entering the theater: in Wuthering Heights, there is no sex."

Emerald Fennell intentionally frames her film as a personal memory of the novel and shields the adaptation from fidelity accusations. The production recasts the narrative as a conventional romantic spectacle, signaled by a Valentine's Day premiere and an $80 million studio budget that prioritize marketable sexual chemistry over the novel's violent attachments and social critique. The casting emphasizes erotic intensity while bypassing the novel's metaphysical dissolution of self—Catherine's declaration I am Heathcliff—and overlooks the fact that the original work contains no explicit sex yet sustains an intense, pre-sexual union.

Read at english.elpais.com