Wuthering Vibes

By Sammi Gale

We need to talk about — whisper it to the salt-cured roe on your curlicue, slobber it on halves of a Ginsters pork pie you bloodeagled for a bit of fun — class.

(We also need to talk about BDSM, dark woke, the price of milk, and how to finger an egg yolk.)

Let’s begin.

In 2011, Andrea Arnold, who grew up on a council estate in Dartford, released her adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

In 2026, Emerald Fennell, raised between a London townhouse, a country house and boarding at Marlborough College, released “Wuthering Heights”.

The latter title has scare quotes.

Emily Brontë’s novel uses a complex, nested frame narrative, filtering the Gothic love story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw through housekeeper Nelly Dean and tenant Mr. Lockwood – structural scare quotes.

Nelly is widely believed to be based on the Brontës’ own housekeeper Tabby.

This goes to show you can portray a class without belonging to it in principle.

Fennell’s “WH” has been called ‘all vibes, no substance’, but by giving Cathy a Received Pronunciation accent and making her her father’s only legitimate heir, class is prominent.

The word vibes had a sharp uptick in usage in 2021.

The world outside the titular property, howling Yorkshire, takes centre stage in Andrea Arnold’s version, captured in natural light by handheld cameras on shoots that sound like brutal endurance challenges.

Leaves, loose strands of hair and long grass twitch in the wind.

The film is stripped back, raw, brutal.

Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is marked by its maximalist ‘dolls house’ style sets, including a room that looks like Cathy’s – Margot Robbie’s – skin.

Arnold made a landmark decision to cast a Black actor, James Howson, as Heathcliff, leaning into the novel’s repeated references to his darkness and the anxiety his otherness provokes.

Even during a recent turn as the Creature in Frankenstein, Fennell’s Heathcliff Jacob Elordi conformed pretty squarely to Western Hollywood beauty ideals.

Robbie played actual Barbie.

In Brontë, Arnold, bodies, particularly Heathcliff’s, are brutalised.

In Fennell, they are stylised.

Around the time Arnold released her film, British politics was punctured by gaffes about the price of milk and other commodities.

Labour MP Ed Balls famously stumbled over a Greggs order during a visit to Redditch, asking for eight sausage rolls.

The price of milk was a litmus test, a shorthand which journalists used to test how in touch the ruling elites were with the texture of normal life.

Now, this test and the very concept of a gaffe feel quaint, parochial, irrelevant, as the dripfeed of the news cycle suggests that a vast global conspiracy – one seemingly tailored for tinfoil hat wearing Pizzagaters – actually exists.

Arnold’s WH was released on a royal wedding year, Will and Kate’s.

Fennell’s appeared a few weeks before a royal was actually arrested, the first since Charles I in 1647.

It is a tough moment for a spectacle about turbulent master-servant dynamics to compete with reality.

As Janan Ganesh has written recently, the ruling elite is really two elites.

There are the ones with the money – the ruling classes, the technocratic, business elite – and those with cultural capital, vibes, but barely enough in the bank for a matcha latte.

These elites are mutually infatuated with one another.

It’s the same spectrum of class tourism featured in Pulp’s 1995 song Common People but on a grander scale.

He took her to a supermarket.

He had to start it somewhere.

Milk is a high-demand, staple item and supermarket layout designers often place it at the back of the store, forcing customers to walk past prospective impulsive purchases to reach it.

Fennell’s Cathy is ‘an exuberant blonde living it up in German milkmaid-esque corsets, high-shine showstoppers and Elton John sunglasses’, according to Radhika Seth.

The costume is one example of Fennell’s vaguely sexual vibes-based approach.

Milkmaid says servant, the corsetry says dominatrix.

The power dynamics are muddled, but they look good.

‘This is Brontë for the permanently online generation, and it’s designed to be clipped, shared and debated,’ one critic wrote.

It doesn’t really matter if “Wuthering Heights” is ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

Vibes are king.

Nelly/Tabby was a housemaid whose duties extended beyond dairy.

The art world is not a narrative device, but like Nelly, it is good at holding together lots of different classes.

Once, Emerald Fennell was at an opening I was also at.

She seemed nice.

In the art world, fewer than one in ten have working class roots.

More than one third think the arts are for the posh.

The art world is more elite than 60 years ago.

The art world’s middle class is disappearing.

Bronte’s novel is sexually subversive and includes sadomasochism, violence and abuse.

Heathcliff digs up Cathy’s grave to ‘possess’ her once more and have their decaying bodies intermingle in death.

Given the inexplicable humping of the freshly dug grave in Saltburn, Fennell is quite measured with themes of necrophilia in her adaptation.

Key subversive sex scenes in “WH” involve suggestive finger licking, prodding of egg yolks and a jellied fish mouth.

According to Robbie, 'Emerald tested roughly 50 different fish before choosing one, because she 'wanted the exact right sound and consistency.'

Fifty fish is a lot.

Some people are dubbing Fennell’s film ‘Fifty shades of Brontë’.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a book that came out the same year as Arnold’s adaptation.

Its success brought ‘kink’ into the ‘mainstream’.

Scare quotes.

The phrase Fifty Shades of Brontë suggests both the kinkification of the source material and the vanillafication of kink.

Certainly, people aren’t buying the kink in Fennell’s “WH”.

‘Margot Robbie’s Catherine Earnshaw is meant to be a “recreational sadist”, according to the director, but she’s got as much dom top energy as a parsnip’, wrote one critic.

Fennell ‘recuperates’ the aesthetics of BDSM, but the power play doesn’t ring true.

In IRL BDSM, power dynamics in the bedroom confront, mirror, or subvert the non-consensual power hierarchies of the wider society.

In “WH”, Isabella wears a dog collar, but the power dynamics are only vibes-deep.

Kink is arranged like cut flowers, sexual freedom like interior design.

When aristocratic characters play with degradation, it risks reading as: even this is available to me.

The Fifty Shades argument mirrors a broader social drift that has played out between Arnold’s and Fennell’s films, wherein counter-cultural ideas are cosplayed for political and/or cultural gain.

So long as it’s vibes-based, you can subvert the norm, the status quo, shock and appal us, across both sides of the political spectrum.

E.g. Dimes Square in New York, where rich people courted clout for being right wing and reading books

E.g. Dark Woke, that is, left wing adherents performing elitism or extremism, in order to avoid being tarnished with the bleeding-heart brush

E.g. greenwashing

Sometimes I think about a room full of people who do not know the price of milk talking to each other about how to depict milk, in order to sell milk to people who have to think about it all the time.

In Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, class conflict and sexual power get smushed into something glossy and shareable that looks edgy and fun in the trailer – but when you watch the film there is nothing at stake.

That’s basically where politics is too.

Only there, people are using vibes to wield real power.

Across the spectrum, everyone gestures at being anti-elite, but the actual structures don’t move.

Brian Wilson originally wanted to call Good Vibrations Good Vibes, but his lyricist, Tony Asher, said it was a 'lightweight use of the language.'

‘Vibes’ is too lightweight to appear in Brontë’s original text.

The closest is the word ‘vibrates’.

Nelly describes Heathcliff’s’ ‘frame shivering, not as one shivers with chill or weakness, but as a tight-stretched cord vibrates — a strong thrilling, rather than trembling.’

He is a body stretched tight like a wire, about to snap.

In 1847, the moors howled.

In 2026, they are landscaped.