Adaptation is everywhere! In the spring of 2026, MTC is running a new series called Adaptation Anxiety, where new and returning writers consider literary adaptations from the last few years. We ask not whether these adaptations are good or bad, faithful or unfaithful to the source, but bigger questions about the logic underlying contemporary works of adaptation and why audiences have such big feelings about seeing precious characters on screen. Why, in other words, are we so anxious about the move from book to screen, and what does all this angst about the adaptation as a form tell us about our present relationships to these mediums?
Tell me if you’ve heard this before: an auteur director is adapting a classic of Gothic literature, where the update hinges on the transformation of the original’s latent eroticism into an unfettered and explicit expression of desire. Jacob Elordi is cast as one half of the film’s central pair, and in a bewildering move by the director, the character he portrays – a figure defined by an unrelenting drive towards revenge, made monstrous by the cruelty of a cruel world – is absented of the crimes he commits on the page. Instead, he is the wounded, devoted, lumbering beloved, his naked chest the subject of the camera’s lingering gaze and his transgressions wiped clean. The film ends as Elordi cradles his deceased counterpart, finally accepting that his (relatively benign) campaign of vengeance was fruitless. We are left with the promise of his enduring heartbreak and the assurance that he will live on diminished without his love. If you guessed “Wuthering Heights,” congratulations, and if you guessed Frankenstein, isn’t it fucking weird that this happened twice in one year?
Hindsight is 20/20, but in retrospect, I’ve realized that what made me hopeful for Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 adaptation of Frankenstein is the very thing that made me dread Emerald Fennell’s 2026 “Wuthering Heights.” On their face, both films promised to realize the transgressive, even taboo possibility unpinning their source texts: the oedipal and necrophilic drive of Frankenstein articulated through Mia Goth’s dual casting as Frankenstein’s mother and the Creature’s romantic (and erotic) partner and the juvenile passions of Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights recast as an adult affair in Fennell’s film. Where each film fails to shock, however, is in their inability to recognize the transgressive form of the original text – both Shelley and Brontë wrote novels that refuse to satisfy, plots and characters that do not adhere to the tidy resolution of romance or the pleasures of forgiveness. Readers chafe against these novels (perhaps even pleasurably) because they spurn the facile resolution that both del Toro and Fennell produce, the ultimate re-entrenchment of both forgiveness and romantic love.
For all the promise of viscous, goopy sex, the actual passions of Elordi’s Heathcliff and Margot Robbie’s Cathy onscreen are dry, fully-clothed, and straightforward. While Elordi is presented as the rough, unfettered alternative to Shazad Latif’s Linton (whose laughably contrived montage of missionary sex casts Cathy more as a bored wife than a star-crossed lover), his Heathcliff does nothing more shocking than engage (consensually, as is underscored roughly ten times) in submissive kink with Isabella, who is more the subject of his bemusement than his abuse. Many of the uncountable takes on this “Wuthering Heights” point to its flatness, but what has surprised me is what critics do credit Fennell with – the capacity to shock. In the year of our lord 2026, when Tampopo is a mainstay in every Letterboxd account, why are we so taken with eggs crushed in bedsheets? I have seen the way, Emerald, and I’m going to need you to pop that yolk in your mouth before you get a gasp out of me.
By way of example: I saw “Wuthering Heights,” somewhat nervously, with my 64-year-old dad. Based on what I can only describe as fish-fingering in the trailers, I worried that this would be a deeply uncomfortable experience. Reader, I worried in vain.
Members of the crowd in my theater had clearly arrived with the promise of *Wuthering Heights that fucks,* as Robbie’s account of early audiences (her friends) descending into “rabid dogs,” “frothing at the mouth” promised. Every time Elordi was pictured shirtless the crowd whooped, but it just went…nowhere. The audience was, in fact, so primed for titillation that when Nelly (played heroically by Hong Chau, who was not given a single good thing to do!) visited a dying Cathy for the last time, the two women leaning towards one another to whisper their goodbyes elicited a shout from someone in the first two rows – as if, I assume, this audience member imagined the two might kiss? So desperate was the crowd for something to finally boil over that Cathy’s dying moments landed as yet another anti-climax. Even for those prepared for a “smooth-brained Wuthering Heights,” there was no satisfaction to be found.
I find myself frustrated with both of these adaptations, and with Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” in particular, because they refuse the transgression of the original text in favor of this flat, facile vision of desire. That Elordi is the object of affection in both is fascinating – that both directors efface the violence committed by his character on the page more so. Fennell and del Toro love Heathcliff and the Creature, clearly, but seem unable to square the erotic potential of these figures with their cruelty. In dispensing with the latter, however, the transgression of this eroticism is similarly lost. There is nothing strange about desiring Elordi’s Creature, or his Heathcliff, as the films seem to hinge entirely around that certainty. Of course, Mia Goth would visit the Creature in her sheer nightgown, the camera sighs, who wouldn’t? If, however, attraction is thus assured, where does the transgression live? We are not challenged to love the monster, as is so often the case in del Toro’s oeuvre, or presented Heathcliff as the wretched, aging tormenter who Lockwood meets in Brontë’s frame narrative. We cannot transgress, in other words, if loving the monster – no longer monstrous in action or in form – is already a given.
Martha Henzy is a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale University Art Gallery, where she researches violence, visual culture, and performance. While she is not sold on Elordi’s vision of the Byronic hero, she is thrilled to have recently discovered that she shares her perfume of choice, Serviette’s Byronic Hero, with Bad Bunny.
Series banner illustration by Carolyn Jao
Article thumbnail photo: Warner Bros. Pictures