Wuthering Heights is getting the Saltburn treatment

The sad literary girls are in uproar. The focus of our outrage? The one-and-a-half-minute trailer for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights movie, which arrived online on Wednesday with all the subtlety of, well, a trailer for an Emerald Fennell movie. It’s the moment many Emily Brontë fans had been dreading ever since set photos emerged featuring Margot Robbie as Catherine, wearing a flouncy puffball of a wedding dress that looked more Eighties Sloane Ranger than 18th century, and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, grinning with a gold tooth.

And somehow, this brief teaser manages to be even worse than we’d imagined. I haven’t felt so personally attacked by a literary adaptation since Dakota Johnson started Fleabagging to the camera in Netflix’s assault on Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

Elordi’s Heathcliff seems to have been reimagined as one of the hulking male models who appeared on the cover of pulpy romance novels back in the day, all long hair, abs and brooding glances. There’s music from Charli xcx (Brontë meets Brat? It’s a no from me). The colour grading has been amped up so that many of the settings resemble hyper-stylised music video backdrops.

There are a lot of fingers being stuck into mouths, or into dead fish (Fennell is not one to shy away from turning subtext into screamingly obvious text). Wuthering Heights is getting the Saltburn treatment — with shock tactics and more-is-more aesthetics replacing any real substance. Frankly, the trailer is every devotee’s worst fears come to life, soundtracked by “Everything is romantic”.

Why does it feel like such an affront? After all, bad film adaptations of literary works aren’t exactly rare. And, in theory, Wuthering Heights is “just a book”, as the film’s casting director Kharmel Cochrane put it when defending her choice of lead actors earlier this year; the decision to cast Elordi as Heathcliff, who is described in the book as “dark-skinned”, has proved to be another major point of contention, one that some reckon will flatten the nuances and complex dynamics of the original.

Dakota Johnson

But calling Wuthering Heights “just a book” underestimates just how strong a grip Brontë’s story still has on readers almost two centuries on from its publication. It’s a novel that inspires a rare kind of devotion, especially among female fans. There’s a cult around Emily’s one and only book that vastly exceeds the fervour inspired by her sister Charlotte’s most famous novel, Jane Eyre, and certainly outstrips the fandom for the underrated Anne. And with that adoration comes a protectiveness over this bleak marvel.

Perhaps it’s down to the fact that many of us were introduced to the story of Cathy, Heathcliff and their appalling families when we were in our teens. It’s a text that often crops up on the GCSE and A-level syllabus, sure, but it’s also the perfect literary accompaniment to the sort of big, messy feelings that come with adolescence. When you tune into the book’s emotional frequency at that impressionable age, it’s impossible to resist. Once you’ve aged out of those heightened moods and melodramas, though, it’s subtle and rich enough that you can still find more in the story; the “A” plot of the tormented lovers becomes just one part of an often harrowing tapestry of generational trauma.

But what also makes us Wuthering Heights lovers just so defensive about our sacred text is the fact that it’s so frequently misunderstood. Fennell’s odd cocktail of anachronisms and BDSM overtones isn’t the first time that the book has been misconstrued. It’s often referred to (usually by people who’ve only really listened to the Kate Bush song) as a sweeping love story, but the reality is much more complicated. It’s a book about class, family, and what happens when you’re brought up on the very edge of civilisation.