Our modern literacy crisis has found a new figurehead in Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”. It’s Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic for a culture that’s denigrated literature to the point where it’s no longer intended to expand the mind but to distract it.
With its title stylised in quotation marks, and a director’s statement that it’s intended to capture her experience of reading the book aged 14, it uses the guise of interpretation to gut one of the most impassioned, emotionally violent novels ever written, and then toss its flayed skin over whatever romance tropes seem most marketable. Adaptation or not, it’s an astonishingly hollow work.
