The folly of fanservice

Hollywood really wants women to watch smut. Or, more precisely, film executives have caught up to the fact that steamy fanfiction is a fast-growing slice of the publishing industry, and they’re going to do what they do best: capitalise on it. 

Emerald Fennell and Margot Robbie have followed the fashion in giving Wuthering Heights the full fanfiction treatment in their new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Victorian classic. They are the latest in a list of market-savvy directors and producers to do so, but they do boast a significant distinction: they have made the worst film I have ever seen. Had it not been for the moral support of a few drinks and my much-forbearing husband, who watched it with me, I couldn’t have made it through the two hours of non-stop stomach-turning moorland humping which my eyes and ears had to endure. Fully sober, Wuthering Heights would have been near unwatchable. 

Charli xcx’s house soundtrack may have been the best thing about this cursed project. Let me give you the greatest hits in this marathon of grossness, in no particular order: Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff fingering raw egg yolks, horse-rein-themed BDSM, dog-collar-themed BDSM, Margot Robbie sticking her index finger into the mouth of a whole jellied fish, most characters sticking their fingers into most other characters’ mouths for most of the film. Oh, and gratuitous close-up shots of snails. How could I forget?  

If it was Fennell’s grand marketing idea to shock-value Wuthering Heights into box office success, then sure, job well done — I am talking about it, after all, as is everyone else. But if the intent was to provoke the audience into any actual reflections about sin, passion and our mortality, as the original novel does, then Fennell failed abysmally. Half an hour in, the pattern became entirely predictable: gruesome deaths, weird food scenes, outdoor sex. I was too bored and too desensitised to care about the characters’ fate. By the time the story came to its tragic end, I’d had more than enough of this self-indulgent spectacle

Wuthering Heights is a glorified Pinterest board of a film

Wuthering Heights looks striking; I will grant it that. Fennell has an eye for detail, colour and texture. But that’s as much as I can praise it. Out of all the highly stylised literary adaptations that have been released in the last few years, I can only think of one — Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma — which marries idiosyncratic aesthetic choices with a solid understanding of the source story. The rest — for example Guillermo del Toro’s recent Frankenstein — feel like projects that had too much money and not enough talent thrown at them. 

Wuthering Heights is a glorified Pinterest board of a film: curated, aesthetically pleasing and bearing no relevance to reality. You could pause the film at any given point and get a beautiful still image, from the otherworldly shot of Robbie’s Cathy enveloped by fog in her wedding dress, to the Gone-with-the-Wind-esque scene of Elordi’s Heathcliff riding off at sunset. No doubt such scenes are technically challenging to get just right. But they also make absolutely no sense. Why would Cathy be walking through the moors to get to church on her wedding day? I get that it’s old-timey Yorkshire, but, contrary to Fennell’s impression, the concept of footpaths was not alien to the local population. And why was there a nun present at a public hanging, at a time when nuns would have been a rare sight? But hey, why not? It’s giving gothic. 

Fanfiction is at its core unintentional parody

Fennell’s film ultimately proves two things: firstly, that fanfiction can never be “good” storytelling; and more broadly, that we’re in a literacy drought. 

Fanfiction is at its core unintentional parody. While proper parody takes the tropes of the source material and exaggerates them to reveal or critique an aspect of the original story, fanfiction takes those genre conventions to be the story in and of themselves. A concrete example: a number of Jane Austen retellings, from my personal favourite Austenland (2013) to the more recent, brilliantly titled French film Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (2025), take the aesthetic sign posts of what makes an “Austen story” (bonnets, dancing, Regency breeches…) and insert them in a contemporary context to examine what has and hasn’t changed in our culture since Austen’s times. They’re entertaining and well-executed parodies. 

On the other hand, a show like Bridgerton capitalises on our familiarity with the Regency setting but fails to say anything interesting about either Austen’s society or our own. What makes it “Austenesque” is not the meat of the story but the visuals. It’s a form of fanfiction because it has nothing new or interesting to say about the material which inspires it. And unlike parody, which tends to be highly self-aware, it has the fatal flaw or taking itself painfully seriously. Wuthering Heights is basically dark academia Bridgerton: minus the pastel petticoats, plus Margot Robbie’s busty milkmaid ren faire dresses. 

Of course, fanfiction has been around for a long time (search for “Harry Potter fanfic” on AO3 at your own peril). Even smart, well-adjusted adults occasionally indulge in what can be considered “bad” or “trashy” art and escape from the experience largely unscathed. Yet Wuthering Heights seems to lend itself particularly easily to particularly disturbing forms of fanfiction. It famously inspired the Twilight saga (which is about horny vampires), which in turn inspired Fifty Shades of Grey (which is about a horny businessman). And now it has inspired Fennell’s adaptation (which is led by two actors in their late 20s to mid 30s cosplaying as horny, 18th-century Yorkshire teenagers). 

Perhaps it is the fact that Brontë’s novel is both overly dramatic and very undidactic in its moral messaging that makes it still ripe for fanfictionalisation almost two centuries since its publication. But I also think it has something to do with how much reading comprehension has declined in the past few decades. Fennell, despite her venerable age of near forty-one years, stands for the average teenage girl who has developed neither the reading skills nor the emotional intelligence to interpret complex storytelling (she herself admits that she channelled her 14-year-old self in the creative process for Wuthering Heights). Brontë’s story is not about bonking the hunky farmhand; it’s a dark and subtle tale about two families’ struggle for redemption after decades of generational trauma. But how do you market that for a Valentine’s Day release?