In Awe of Love: Wuthering Heights

Maybe I liked this movie too much. Or maybe it revealed too much

I’m writing this on my own fainting couch, listening to the Charlie XCX Wuthering Heights soundtrack humming, like the movie never actually ended and is still moving under my skin. Less background music, more my new emotional weather. This movie might never end for me. I’ll watch this again and again ! I couldn’t sleep. I’m shocked and rocked.

This is my first review. I’m not writing it to defend the film or even spoil the film, it’s a classic book babe with a modern remake, you get it. I’m writing it because I am in awe of it. I’m also pretty mad. Before I even sat down in the theater, I saw the review in Vulture. Film critic Alison Willmore described it as “Emerald Fennell’s dumbest movie, and I say that with all admiration, because it also happens to be her best to date.” Having now seen the movie, that word still riles me.

DUMBEST!!!!

Having now seen the movie, that word still riles me. Not because it was meant cruelly. It wasn’t. It was meant casually. But because nothing about what I experienced felt dumb or casually in this movie. We need to remove being casual about cinema or even about art. It felt ancient. Elemental. The only accusation I will allow is that it felt like a music video, guess what I fucking love music videos! My first internship was music videos, and so were some of your favorite directors first jobs. That’s not a diss, thats discovery!

I also virtually watched the marketing propaganda of Margot Robbie and her girlies going to see it and screaming and gagging for hottie Jacob. That it was for the ladies. That it was a vibe. A corset campaign. So naturally I gathered my own party. I invited ladies along with me, starting a new Galentine’s tradition. I went in expecting spectacle or sexy silliness.

Also, I am not a style critic. I will leave that to the experts. I was, however, seated among extremely well-dressed women who were audibly impressed, which feels like a reliable metric. It was stunning.

I did not expect to feel undone. Within minutes, the air in the theater changed. The laughter thinned. The posture shifted. Whatever we thought we were getting quietly dissolved.

The weather is the cinematography here. The rain is doing as much acting as anyone on screen. And I’m not even focused on the performances, but we do have to give Margot and Jacob credit for working overtime to hide those Aussie accents.

I also just learned what moors are — open, uncultivated, windswept land. Maybe my new favorite kind of scenery. That is the landscape of the soul.

And then there’s Isabella Linton, played by Alison Oliver , she’s kooky, kinky, aching. Her friendship with Catherine feels real and tortured like how friendships can feel too. Love is disgusting here. It’s clingy and comedic . It’s humiliating. It’s obsessive. . I loved her.

My friend Alissa texted on the way home, “I feel like I held my breath for two hours.”

Exactly.

It wasn’t the sex that undid me — though twenty rain-soaked declarations of “I love you” between the two most beautiful people alive will absolutely lift the levers of your heart whether you’re prepared for it or not.

And still, that wasn’t what wrecked me.

It was the devotion. The way Heathcliff and Catherine love like oxygen and then resent each other for needing it. The way pride sits between them like a third character. The way neither of them will bend first. Two people raised in cruelty choose each other as salvation and then spend a lifetime punishing each other and everyone in their orbit for it.

That’s what lingered for me. Not the corsets. The choices.

On screen, you can see it clearly. You can see where they could have turned. You can see the moment pride wins. You can see where love hardens instead of humbles. In life, it never feels that obvious.

We see our own choices in hindsight. In film, we see them clearly. Which is why we return to stories like this. Stories that show us the ugliness of love before we call it destiny. Stories that let us witness the fork in the road before the damage is done. We return to the classics because they rumble and wreck our parts unprocessed. Thank you to those Bronte sisters (what a family right?) Withering Heights and Jane Eyre. The moods of those moors !

But watching their choices unfold illuminated something I had been thinking about all week.

Earlier this week I returned to Tanya class. Tanya, written in 1797 by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, is basically mystical Jewish self-help before self-help was a genre. A psychology of the soul. A manual not to be run by your instincts but to stay with them and form them.

My teacher said, “Imagine the world as if only you have free will. Imagine the entire moral weight resting on your choices.” It shifted me. To see the world as my responsibility. To stop waiting for other people to be better first. To understand that everyone is in their own storm, choosing in real time.

Fifty years later, in 1847, Wuthering Heights entered the world.

Two different centuries. Same human problem.

In Tanya we learn that we are inherently good. We have a divine soul and an animal soul. We do not erase the animal soul. We refine it. Free will lives in that tension.

Watching Heathcliff and Catherine, I did not see monsters. (Her father, yes. An actual monster or sad gambling drunk? or both.) But them? I saw what happens when instinct is indulged instead of elevated. They are not evil. They are unrefined. And yet it was her father who took in Heathcliff, which means he also gave us the very destiny he later resented. He set the story in motion. No one chooses in isolation.

Catherine is often accused of weeping. Of being dramatic. Of feeling too much. I have often been accused of that too. And sitting there in the dark, looking at the credits, sobbing, I realized I wasn’t just afraid to cry. I was afraid to say, out loud, that I loved this movie. That I love, love. And sometimes I love viciously. And sometimes I love revengefully. And sometimes I love lustfully. And sometimes I love clinging.

See? I can make anything about me. I’m connected to the classics, what can I say? I read Anna Karenina like a beach read — not to brag, just to establish context and to also brag.

But the reason these stories last is because they tell the truth. Love is not polished. It is hungry and ugly. It is humiliating. It is savage. Even if I have free will I also have ugliness. Compulsions.. All of that can either be refined or left raw.

The lights went up.

To my right, my friend Keri was crying.

To my left, my friend Katy said she hated it. LOL.

And that’s allowed too. I guess. People will hate the things I love. And I will still love the thing. That is also free will. Earlier this week I said the highest form of art is to love first. This film allowed for both.

Happy Valentine’s Day. Cupid’s arrow hurts for a reason. Love wounds. Love refines.

Please go see it. Let yourself cry. Let yourself feel your own ugliness.

I am in awe of love.

Free will is what makes it holy & hot

Shabbat shalom.

reminder listen to this soundtrack