Fennel’s Wuthering Heights carries on that old imperial habit of touching a wonderful thing it does not understand and salivating with animal larceny impulse. This is the part that feels rancid to me: not merely that the adaptation fundamentally, egregiously misunderstands the novel, but that it misunderstands it in the precise shape of empire.
Take the outsider. Whiten the outsider. Take the violence. Aestheticize the violence. Corsets. Flower crowns. Latex. Softcore pornography in ribbons. Plunging necklines. Take the mud the dirt the miremuck of disgraced colonial history. Make it editorial. Make it swing flaccidly towards camp, yes mama boots the house down. Take the class rage. Sell it as background atmosphere, thoughtful addendum, glorious footnote of gold. Take the gaping racial wound. Disappear it. Call its absence “modern.” Then stand there, powdered and well-funded, asking why everyone is being so dramatic about the missing body.