Emerald Fennell Now Going Moor-To-Moor Trying To Shock People

"My sister Emily loved the moors," wrote Charlotte Brontë, in the introduction to a selection of Emily's poems published in 1850. Emily had died in 1848, and had not lived to see the publication of the second edition of Wuthering Heights, carefully revised by her older sister. "Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of sullen hollow in livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights and not the least and best loved was—liberty."

The hills and moors that were Emily's Eden, says Charlotte, offered very little beyond liberty. "The scenery of these hills is not grand—it is not romantic; it is scarcely striking. Long low moors, dark with heath, shut in little valleys, where a stream waters, here and there, a fringe of stunted copse. Mills and scattered cottages chase romance from these valleys; it is only higher up, deep in amongst the ridges of the moors, that Imagination can find rest for the sole of her foot: and even if she finds it there, she must be a solitude-loving raven—no gentle dove. If she demand beauty to inspire her, she must bring it inborn; these moors are too stern to yield any product so delicate."

Emerald Fennell, whose Wuthering Heights adaptation is presently in theaters, clearly did not find anything worth examining in the stark, scoured emptiness of Emily's Eden, the liberty and solitude. Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" is drowned in visual excess. Scenes are made to revolve around matters of costuming, with skirts, corsets, and bustiers used as flamboyant and ham-handed markers of luxury or poverty, or internal torment, or social surrender, or romantic desperation. More confounding is the focus on rooms and interior spaces. Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" is trapped indoors by the director's evident infatuation with photogenic living spaces. There are grand rooms washed in garish hues and suffocating rooms arranged in arresting squalor; there's at least one room wallpapered with what appears to be fragments of dyed glass; another room where hundreds of plastered hand-shapes form a bizarre mantle; another room explicitly upholstered and colored to evoke the complexion and texture of a character's skin. Because whole big movements of the film are told in the format of soundtracked montages, I guess it should not be surprising that they are also decorated like a mid-career Hype Williams joint.