Luis Buñuel’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Abismos de pasión (1954) opens with a declaration of fidelity: ‘Above all, this picture tries to remain true to the spirit of Emily Brontë’s novel.’ By contrast,“Wuthering Heights”, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, refuses such constraints. Referring to those quotation marks in the title, and the detachment and looseness they imply, Fennell has said in an interview that ‘you can’t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this’. Considering the issue further, she doubles down: ‘Really, I’d say that any adaptation of a novel… should have quotation marks around it.’ This defensiveness is in service of a radical rewrite, which reconfigures Brontë’s 1847 tale of passionate love, class struggle, and revenge as a hyper-sexual (but not particularly sexy) romance between Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Cathy (Margot Robbie).

Film adaptations of Wuthering Heights are myriad, from Peter Kominsky’s creaking Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1992),which even Sinéad O’Connor in full costume as Emily Brontë cannot enliven, to Bollywood and Japanese jidaigeki interpretations. The book’s readers are legion, and include Gordon Brown who, on his return from the G8 summit in 2008, declared himself ‘an older Heathcliff, a wiser Heathcliff’. The popularity of the novel makes it both an attractive and perilous choice for adaptation. But while Fennell’s scare quotes wink to her film’s inaccuracies, they also reveal the short-circuiting of an imaginative loop from literature to cinema, and a reluctance to face the text head-on. What might result from a refusal to confront a novel that pursues, unfalteringly, the conflicting impulses of obsessional love: a novel structured by and centred on the theme of confrontation? Proceeding from the notion that a novel cannot be filmed, Fennell strikes out boldly under the banner of defeat. Preferring simple audacity to the intensity of contradiction, she is reluctant to look back to the text while struggling to look forward to the screen, missing the chance to consider how cinema might make anew the letter, spirit and spark of the original.

My Oxford World Classics copy of Wuthering Heights includes a genealogical table to help the reader track the complex interweaving generations of the book’s two central families. Virginia Woolf was obliged to draw her own on the book’s flyleaf in order to keep track of these family entanglements. In the book, two families – the Earnshaws, who inhabit Wuthering Heights, a farmhouse high up on the Yorkshire moors, and the Lintons,who reside below in the manor house of Thrushcross Grange –are drawn into multigenerational conflict through marriage, acts of betrayal and the acquisition of property. At the centre of this is an obsessive bond between Cathy and Heathcliff. When Mr Earnshaw brings the latter home to his daughter one day, the children become an unbreakable pair: ‘whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same’. Kominsky is one of few filmmakers who has attempted to realise the second part of the book, which focuses on Young Cathy (Catherine’s child), and Hareton (the son of Hindley, Catherine’s brother). Ill-advisedly, he navigates this extended timeline by having Juliette Binoche play both Cathy and Young Cathy, switching her in and out of blonde and brunette wigs.

But if it is common to disregard the lower branches of this family tree in order to centre the childhood affinity and fatal adult separation of Cathy and Heathcliff, Fennell hews away at the canopy too, condensing its unruly structure. On the Linton side, Isabella (Alison Oliver) is no longer Edgar Linton’s (Shazad Latif) sister but his ward. On the Earnshaw side, Hindley, who is made jealous by his father’s affection for the foundling Heathcliff, is merged into the figure of a drunken father (Martin Clunes, whose casting seems to rely on a knowing affection for British television, and who appears in too many scenes). The first substitution defangs some of Emily Brontë’s disregard for the Lintons, spoiled siblings that the reader first encounters ‘yelling and sobbing and rolling on the ground’ over the ownership of their little dog. The second undercuts the great struggle for inheritance that drives the novel’s cruelties and machinations of revenge. Fennell’s rewrite relocates Heathcliff’s origins firmly beyond the Earnshaw family, removing the novel’s hints at Cathy and Heathcliff’s shared paternity. Swingeing cuts soften the hardest edges of the novel’s conflicts, fashioning more familiar archetypes from its complexities.

It is a truism that no film can be fully faithful to the letter of a novel; betraying its spirit, however, is generally considered less acceptable.Jacques Rivette’s Hurlevent (1985) transposes the action to the hilly Cévennes in 1931, adopting a spare style that resists the lyrical draw of its golden-hued location, restructuring the narrative around the dream sequences of its central characters to excavate the novel’s unconscious. Rivette wrote that he ‘had a very strong memory’ of the Wyler adaptation (1939) – because, he said, ‘I hate it’. It may have been faithful to the novel’s period trappings, but it made‘no sense whatsoever with all those ball scenes sprinkled everywhere’. It had been transformed into an ‘Emily Brontë and Jane Austen production.’ How then to capture the novel’s singular essence? For Terry Eagleton, its power is drawn from a ‘coherence of vision’ that stems, paradoxically, ‘from an exhausting confrontation of contending forces’: nature and artifice, freedom and constraint, the conflict between a Romantic idea of selfhood and the crushing march of industrialisation. In each instance, Brontë refuses to fall decisively on either side, preferring these contradictions to grate against any smooth incorporation into ideology.Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (Macmillan Press: 1975), 97. Caught between these forces, Cathy and Heathcliff’s love can find no foothold. While the novel is born from the contemporary conflict between landed capital and a rising industrial bourgeoisie, it describes a love that ‘remains an unhistorical essence’, as the pair, in vain, attempt to escape historical circumstance. As Cathy trades in love for rank and Heathcliff transforms himself from a quasi-servant to an insatiable capitalist, each shift is entailed by staggering loss.Eagleton, 8, 109, 111.

It is these contradictions that “Wuthering Heights” struggles to integrate. In the novel, nature comprises the material conditions of the Heights’ existence and the source of Thrushcross Grange’s wealth. It is both a metaphor of affinity – ‘my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary’ – and the stage of their childhood escape. But Fennell uses this setting more superficially, amplifying the landscape with tall black plastic rocks cast from huge foam moulds and painted in black glitter, so as to better function as an ornate frame to the unfolding romance. The exteriors were shot on VistaVision in the Yorkshire Dales (the book’s ‘real’ location), but are dressed like studio sets, with dry ice and rivers that have been dyed red. Wide though the lens may be, the camera is inert and struggles for direction. Moving inside the Grange, however, this approach feels more appropriate: the viewer is made to pause in order to admire its grand interiors. Here, Fennell comes closest to an interpretation of the text. Scarlet gloss floors refigure the Grange’s drawing room: that ‘splendid place carpeted with crimson’. Walls draped with pearl necklaces recast the novel’s decorative ‘shower of glass-drops hanging in silver chains’. There is a room filled just with dresses. These interior scenes are composed as intricate metaphors of confinement: Cathy’s bedroom is wallpapered to resemble her own skin, matched to her skin tone and marked with freckles; Isabella plays with a doll she has made in Cathy’s image, confining her to a doll’s house that resembles the Grange; taxidermied lambs stare out from glass cases, and dead fish are suspended in jelly. But this atmosphere of constraint is undermined by the sense of Fennell’s relief to be indoors, as the film narrows in on this palatial location. The domestic room is at the centre of bourgeois life, Fennell's film requires four walls to function. If the natural world both sustains and threatens the novel’s social hierarchy, here it is superfluous and kept outside

Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011) suffers from the opposite problem. Unlike Fennell, Arnold is attuned to the moors’ broad vistas and minute ecosystems. Dogs – Wolf, Gnasher, Skulker and Throttler – are central to the novel and Arnold’s camera moves like one through the gorse and grass, closing in on moss and crawling beetles. What intensity there is in the natural world is diminished, however, by a pared-down script that saps the life from its characters; reduced by a grinding social-realist style that flattens nature in the service of its gloomy mood. As Arnold said in an interview, while she planned to film on ‘a misty moor on a day when the earth and sky are merging’ she was shocked to find ‘bright sunshine and blue sky’, and a few bounding rabbits. ‘What can you do at that point?’ Indeed, what to do when nature itself resists your miserabilist vision?If these films proceed from opposing sides of a scale, they both grasp at a conflict beyond their scope. For while Fennell’s Heights are obscured by the gleam of the gentry, Arnold’s rain-soaked yeoman class is engulfed not by the Grange’s voracious agrarian capitalism, but by a surfeit of mud.

Many who have taken on Wuthering Heights have struggled. Rivette ‘experienced difficulties at every level’. Looking back, Arnold finds her version ‘hard to look at’. For Kominsky, making the film was ‘the biggest mistake of my life’. One central difficulty is that of reckoning with the novel’s interfering, wilful narrator, Nelly Dean; the novel is structured around her subjective, meandering telling. Working to avoid, perhaps, the crutch of voice-over commentary, Wyler transforms Nelly – a servant to both the Earnshaws and Lintons – into a dour and reliable narrator, Rivette returns Nelly to a compelling presence, revealing her own complexity of character. But only Buñuel transfigures something of her spirit into the formal construction of his film. While the production of Abismos de pasión was ‘horrible’ – he’d had to make do with a cast and crew that were left over from an aborted musical – the film’s restless way of seeing, marked by the camera’s manic, obtrusive interventions, capture this unreliable and over-invested narrative style more beautifully than any other. While Buñuel rides roughshod over key plot points, culminating with an entirely new conclusion in which Heathcliff is shot to death by Hindley in Cathy’s tomb as the dying man hallucinates her ghost, his commitment to melodrama as a form justifies his impassioned re-envisioning. For Fennell, however, Nelly is just one more character, more straightforwardly re-written as the neglected ward of Cathy’s father. A new backstory justifies a new arc; she thwarts Cathy and Heathcliff’s love with increased vengeance.

Fennell describes her film as ‘primal and sexual’. But what should feel enlivening and bold is too much the product of its smoothed-over world. Fennell seems uncertain about what to show and squeamish about sex scenes which rarely move below the mouth. Fennell has cited Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999) as an influence in probing the ‘texture of desire’. But where Breillat is coolly committed to exploring the antagonisms of sexuality, Fennell creates tension through frenzied cross-cutting. Wuthering Heights was judged to be amoral on first release, and in her editor’s preface to the second edition Charlotte Brontë chastised the nervous cast of reader who ‘will hardly know what to make of the rough strong utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the unbridled aversions’ of the book. These readers, she thought, might prefer a style of writing ‘without all its letters’: a redacted version of the text in which blank lines would fill the intervals in each imprecation.

While Fennell’s approach might suggest a film of fierce passions, what emerges is in fact a visual language ‘without all its letters’, smooth at the centre where the clashing heart of the image should be. And, again, the film retreats to metaphor. Early on, Cathy leaves raw eggs under Heathcliff’s bedsheets to be crushed into his blankets; later, he surprises her with the same gesture. It appears to be their secret language. As Fennell has argued, somewhat elliptically, ‘we all know what the whites of eggs feel like and what that might remind us of.’ But if a metaphor seeks to invest an object with new meaning, a reliance on objects whose sexual connotations are understood risks obviousness, and her chosen signifiers – the translucent smears left by a slug and the kneading of bread, both captured in close-up – are overtaxed. Pushing beyond the constraints of the novel without a cinematic language of desire powerful enough to take its place, the film struggles to articulate its one central gambit. Having rejected the literature, the failure of metaphor prompts a crisis of literalness, so that sex appears as little more than the slapping of dough.

In his 1954 essay ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’, Francois Truffaut attacked a post-war French cinema addicted to adaptation, describing films that were hypnotised by the prestige of their source material but incurious about the ways that cinema might interpret literature. He had in his crosshairs a group of screenwriters who in thrall to the logic of equivalence – the idea that a text must be re-written for the screen but as close to the letter as possible – seemed to deem parts of novels ‘unfilmable’. Instead of re-writing a novel according to the constraints of a script, Truffaut advocated for filmmakers who could write with images. Until a new language of cinema could re-make the text, adaptations would continue to drag cinema down with them: ‘Under the cover of literature… they give the public its habitual dose of smut, non-conformity and facile audacity’. “Wuthering Heights” reveals an inverted truth. Under the cover of smut, a dose of literature. Under the sign of non-conformity, a facile reinvention of the norm.