Ohh A Garamond Option Aren’t I Smart

I have no qualms with general erotic imagery. Even when superfluous, even when detrimental - sexuality and the stories that explore it are important to the canon of humanity and film. Unfortunately, much in the same way jump-scares cheapen horror, gratuitous shots of yonic and phallic imagery cheapen attempts at both titillation and disgust when it comes to erotica.

Calling this film erotica is generous, and false; it’s incorrect, even, the film is not an erotica, but fundamentally offensive in the way an earnest exploration of these things, even when poorly-done, could never be.

It’s an attempt at shock, it’s an adolescent yelling the word “PENIS!” In a crowded room. It’s 2hrs 7min of typing 80085 on a calculator and hiding it from your local authority figure.

Fennell has, for instance, seen enough porn to understand that fingers going into things that are tight and wet symbolize, well. Literally exactly that.

Congratulations, with that knowledge you too can successfully shoot half of this film. You might think that this is because sex is a central theme in Emily Brontë’s source material, that perhaps this is Fennell’s Faulkner’s Caddy Compson’s soiled knickers, and that Brontë’s work was heavily concerned with Cathy and Heathcliff’s sexuality, or, even, hoped this to be a tangential theme, a plausible reading, a deep pull from the text.

It isn’t. And you shouldn’t give Fennell credit.

When adapting a property, certain respects should be paid. You should probably ask yourself what made you want to adapt said property in the first place. Unfortunately for you and I, understanding the source material isn’t a pre-requisite for making a movie-film, only having a name and enough clout and/or capital.

And truth be told, the imagery isn’t quite the issue. I mean, I genuinely find it annoying when a film is so blatantly trying to bait me into a reaction, it genuinely offends me if the mechanics are so obvious, but that’s a me thing. From a storytelling perspective, you could make it work, even for Wuthering Heights. The imagery could serve as surrogacy for Heathcliff and Cathy’s unconsummated lust, highlighting the intrusive nature of their relationship to one another and the inability to escape the thought of it. On that note - the visuals in general are perhaps the only part of the film I enjoyed, being a fan of hyperrealism, but even these felt vapid and heavy-handed. Heathcliff is barely a character and costuming treats him as such; why is he not always dressed in the same colours as Cathy? Wouldn’t that be a good way to symbolize their co-dependence, the fact that in some ways they see each other as part of one another, we cut from one to another and they feel like one and the same? Well, no, because men can’t wear colour and everything surrounding Heathcliff must fade into Prestige Fantasy Grey and Brown, likely to symbolize his continued outsider status from the gentry of the moor. This fails, though, because the bright reds that identify Cathy exist before her near-Idyllic marriage to Edgar. It fails, too, because Edgar and Cathy’s father are also victims of Generic Drab Fantasy Colours.