"Wuthering Heights" · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Andrea Arnold's 2011 Wuthering Heights kept getting rain on the lens. Mud, hair, wind, a camera close enough to the bodies to be inconvenienced by them. You came out of that film with dirt under your fingernails.

Emerald Fennell's camera does not get dirty. It gets hungry. Her method across three films now is to make an image so lush that enjoying it becomes a kind of confession: the candy palette of Promising Young Woman, the licked gleam of Saltburn, beauty offered as bait and then held against you. That is her actual invention, and it's narrow and real. Most directors use style to make you feel what a character feels. Fennell uses it to make you want what a character wants, and then hands you the bill.

One note of honesty first. This film's craft detail is still settling as I write, so what follows reads Brontë's engine through a method Fennell has already built twice. And it needs one French philosopher, briefly, because he named the exact machine this novel runs on.

Deleuze separated the ordinary cinema of action — see a problem, act, change it — from a stranger thing he called naturalism, driven by what he named the impulse-image. In naturalism there are two worlds inside the same shot. There's the derived milieu: a real place with furniture, manners, weather, property lines. And underneath it the originary world: formless, appetitive, without history, made of nothing but drives. No scene is ever set in the originary world. It shows through the other one, the way damp comes through plaster. Brontë built that structure a century before anyone filmed it. Two houses with names and deeds and servants, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, wildness against cultivation, which every screen version has organised its imagery around. And the moor, which has no deeds and no manners and wants only to have you out on it.

Deleuze built the concept largely out of Buñuel. Buñuel filmed this novel in 1954, as Abismos de Pasión, wrenched into surrealist Mexican melodrama. So the concept and the property have already met, and that meeting is also Fennell's licence: the book has survived being dragged into a director's private idiom before.

Here's why the lens earns its keep. The argument everyone keeps having about Brontë is whether this is a love story or a horror story about two people annihilating each other. Naturalism refuses the terms. A drive is not a feeling. It doesn't want a person; it just wants, and the person is what it happens to seize. Catherine's I am Heathcliff stops sounding like romantic hyperbole and starts sounding like an accurate report from inside an appetite that has stopped telling bodies apart. Which is also why the frank erotic register the marketing promised is not a cheapening of the novel. Explicit physical charge is the correct instrument for a story where sex isn't love's reward but the medium the compulsion travels in.

Deleuze noticed that such drives work by tearing a piece out of the world — a fetish, a part-object, an item loaded with the whole force of the thing. Fennell has been manufacturing these for six years: costume, interior décor, bodies arranged inside pointedly composed rooms, desire routed entirely through surfaces. Her editing does the rest. She holds a beautiful composition, then punctures it: a needle-drop, a tonal break, and the scene tips out of romance into transgression. That puncture is the impulse-image's basic move. Crust, then what's under the crust coming up through it.

The anachronistic pop cue does something further, and Marie Antoinette showed how. When the music is two centuries younger than the costume, neither track can ratify the other. Nothing gets to be simply "the past." The image stops working as a window onto 1801 and becomes present-tense hunger you have to read rather than merely watch. For a novel taught half to death in schools, that isn't a gimmick. It's a de-fossilising device.

Naturalism has no arc. It has a slope: entropy, degradation, exhaustion, death, and no way back up. Brontë's slope runs two full generations through property and revenge. Most adaptations amputate the second half and end at Catherine's death, which converts a slope into a peak. Whether Fennell keeps the descent is not settled in the record I have, and it's the difference between a tragedy and an ecology.

There's a second engine, and she's already run it. Deleuze had a name for an ordered, aristocratic world rotting from the inside while its manners stay intact: crystal-decomposition. That's the Grange. That's also Saltburn — a great house quietly coming apart around an appetite it invited indoors.

Back down the line: in 1939, Wyler and Gregg Toland gave this property its screen grammar, deep-focus tableaux that made the moors a compositional actor and Nelly Dean's narration a frame around the whole. In Deleuze's vocabulary that moor is an encompasser — a situation that presses on people until someone acts. Arnold broke that in 2011 with handheld weather and a Black Heathcliff, making his otherness structural rather than atmospheric. Fennell takes neither road, and her jump from Saltburn's boxy Academy frame to large-format scale is the moor reclaimed for spectacle.

Which leaves the fight the film has been having since casting. Brontë codes Heathcliff as unplaceable, a dark-skinned foundling from nowhere, and serious scholarship treats that unplaceability as the book's motor. Casting a white star closes that door. In the terms above the cost is structural, not merely political: the originary world enters this story inside Heathcliff's body, and if he is only déclassé rather than unclassifiable, the savagery has to be sourced from somewhere else — the moor, the music, appetite as such. Whether the film pays that bill is the live question to walk in with.

It's too new to have descendants. What it has is a wager: that a canonical text can be handled as an object of appetite instead of an object of custody, at studio scale, on Valentine's weekend, in a format built for awe.

So: watch for the puncture, the cut that breaks a held composition. Watch where the moor sits in the frame when everyone is indoors. Listen for which century the music comes from. And when the film turns ugly, notice that you were enjoying it a second earlier. That flinch is Fennell's whole argument, and it was Brontë's first.