Emerald Fennell seems to have approached Wuthering Heights in a similarly improving spirit. I must say I haven’t read Emily Brontë’s novel myself — though I was assured that wouldn’t be a problem when it came to following the film, and may even confer an advantage when it came to enjoying it — but I’m guessing the stable-room bondage scene, depictions of public masturbation, and corpses with erections were all Fennell’s tasteful additions.

In fact, a little research suggests that whole epochs within the novel hit the cutting-room floor in the journey from bookstore to screen, with characters ruthlessly conflated or excised altogether, so as to accommodate all the steamy sex scenes that Brontë thoughtlessly forgot to arrange for her protagonists.

On the promotional circuit, Fennell has repeatedly emphasized the deep impression the novel made on her as a teenager, and her film contains touches overwrought enough to bear that out. As has been noticed, the film unfolds more like a fan-fictionalization of its source than an adaptation: the surrounding structural architecture of plot and character developed only to the degree that they can be taken for granted as a stable context for erotic wish-fulfillment. Even the title, which comes wrapped in coy little scare quotes — “Wuthering Heights” — seems an attempt early on to manage expectations. Though, of course, it’s not as if simply pleading guilty at pre-trial is a way of absolving yourself of a crime.

There is a peculiar cultural assumption that plumbing the detail of one’s sexual fantasies inevitably yields stark or revealing information about the self. To “explore” — like Sally Rooney and swathes of prestige TV — the dark allure of BDSM, and the supposedly psychologically complex interplay between affection and violence, is taken as a surefire way of advertising one’s artistic sophistication.

If Wuthering Heights achieves nothing else, it should be to put that particular misconception to bed, as it were. The inclusion of a BDSM scene seems a gratuitous, and slightly feeble, provocation. And if conceived as a quick-fix way of infusing Cathy and Heathcliff’s melodramatic love story with a sense of psychological depth — well, it fails.

Long stretches of the film consist of exactly the sort of breathless, derivative, fleeting encounters you might expect it to on the assumption that you were not watching Wuthering Heights, but something operating at a somewhat hazier degree of removal: an attempt to depict the erotic shadow cast by the book in the mind of a half-remembered adolescent reader.

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We watch while, as if on an endless reel, Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie chase each other pointlessly across windswept moors. There they grapple with each other. Kiss. Lick each other’s faces. Breathe meaningfully. Look searchingly into one another’s eyes. The weather being what it is, they are forever getting caught in the most torrential downpours, and neither of them ever thinks to bring an umbrella or to wear clothes that don’t quickly go transparent.

They cry and mewl and pout at each other, break for a costume change, and then do it all again, striking postures of indignance and hurt as they growl about their feelings and heave their respective bosoms. They stand stoically by Cathy’s father’s grave, the wind tearing camply at her black veil, then, practically within sight of the funeral party, reunite with animal intensity. Occasionally in fits of love-stricken anger Robbie will beat her girly fists on Elordi’s manly chest. When all other ways of communicating their profound bond have been exhausted, they stick their fingers in each other’s mouths.

Throughout, there is virtually no suggestion of the existence of a wider social world, the whole film instead an unrooted universe of total mutual self-absorption. The effect is a flattening realization of the montage of imaginative sexual fantasy. Sitting there, watching it, was like re-enacting the closing scene of Cinema Paradiso, except that instead of the touching variety of rescued black-and-white embraces, it’s just Elordi and Robbie sniffing and licking each other’s faces again and again.

Fennell’s attempt to not merely adapt a book for the screen, but somehow conjure up the imaginative impact it had on a teenage reader, faces considerable challenges. Polemicists of a cultural-declinist bent may be tempted to say this is because of the greater imaginative richness of the reading experience. But actually, some of the obstacles are to do with its comparative impoverishment.

There is something deceptively shallow about the contents of imaginative simulation: the kind of activity one gives might give way to in reading a novel or idly embellishing the romance of its protagonists. The internal spotlight of wandering imaginative attention makes fantasy feel rich from the inside, but it is a richness that relies on an illusion: a mistaken impression that one’s mind’s eye “sees” in more detail than it really does.

Many people are surprised to learn that vision itself relies on a similar cognitive trick: while the brain generates the illusion that the entire visual field is in focus, in reality the fovea, the central one or two degrees of the visual field, is tiny, equivalent in area to a thumbnail held out at arm’s length, the rest of the visual field implicitly filled in by a process akin to a simplifying inference.

Whether because of their inherent shallowness or otherwise, many of us come to realize it is a naive mistake to expect others to be as attached to our fantasies as we are. It is notoriously boring to hear others describe their dreams. In the same way, attempting to depict an object of fantasy can destroy its deceptive, impressionistic power. Most people are familiar with the dissatisfied feeling that a character played on screen is not at all how they imagined them — even if it is not always easy to put your finger on just how they depart from the under-specified but perfectly cast original.

Imaginative fantasy, then, has a propensity to crash-land when realized in the flesh. That propensity may only be greater when it comes to the kind of romantic escapism Fennell has tried to make flesh in Wuthering Heights. Writhing with Heathcliff on the moors, licking and gasping and striking a pose: from the inside of the teenage mind, these may grip one as the very heights of erotic profundity. Flattened onto the screen, they can seem like withering lows.

Of course, it’s not as if film, the standout expressive art form of the 20th century,  is too limited a medium to evoke romantic fantasy in a viewer. But to do such material justice probably requires something other than Fennell’s trademark style of campy overstatement, of which the lavish aesthetic and anachronistic latex costumes are only the most obvious manifestations of a general inability to exercise creative restraint.

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Some films can be almost novelistic in their tendency to invite an imaginative contribution from the viewer. Writing in 1972, the screenwriter Paul Schrader coined the term “transcendental style” for the peculiar effectiveness — the near-meditative quality — that was sometimes achieved in films of Ozu, Bresson and others, many only then being screened in LA for the first time. Schrader’s theory was that these filmmakers had learned to direct in such a way as to trigger introspection. The characteristic technique was to withhold — something akin to the intelligent use of empty time and space.

Into that space the engaged viewer is forced to contribute something of his own. Made to “add their own egg”. Of course, Fennell might argue she was trying to make a very different kind of film to those Schrader was watching; nevertheless, her Wuthering Heights stifles imaginative engagement in the very act of attempting to control it. Hers is a film in which all of the eggs are added on the viewer’s behalf — not least when Cathy is made to crack half a dozen of them into Heathcliff’s bed as an early provocation, and Elordi kneels there, plunging his fingers gormlessly into the gooey mess. (As ever no prizes are on offer for guessing subtext; there wouldn’t be enough to go round!).

The idea that information might be strategically withheld to creative effect is not a distinctively cinematic insight, of course. At the sentence level, Hemingway’s theory of prose seems to have been that there was imaginative danger in over-specificity — that it is in general an illusion that, as one modifier is piled on after another, resolution increases. Better to take advantage of an intelligent reader’s tendency to make an imaginative contribution of his own. Emerald Fennell, on the other hand, prefers to make films where all the adjectives are left in — italicized, underlined and in scare quotes too.

No doubt, in the contemporary attention economy, the natural tendency is to favor Fennell’s lurid approach over more hands-off alternatives. As Matt Damon and Ben Affleck recently recounted in a widely publicized interview, it is now de rigueur for Netflix to helpfully suggest that a film’s characters verbally reiterate the plot at least three of four times, and that large set-piece action scenes should be used to “grab” the viewer’s attention in the first few minutes.

Perhaps naturally suited to the cultural moment, Fennell has never shown any temptation to act on the maxim that less is sometimes more. “I will not stand for this grotesque performance a moment longer”, shouts Nelly at a bed-ridden Margot Robbie towards the end of the film, and it is difficult for the audience not to share the sentiment. The risk, in the end, in simply “grabbing” your viewer’s attention, and training it on the banal contents of an adolescent fantasy, is that you unwittingly reveal how shaky and under-developed those materials can be.

Whether she has or hasn’t, you can’t pluck the tormented love story of Heathcliff and Catherine out of its complex context without inflicting some serious damage on Emily Brontë’s fiction. The novel is about a lot more than love. In its intensely materialist way, it also concerns the conflict between nature and culture, labour and gentility, power and rebellion, struggles over property and inheritance, the relations between the English landowning class and the small farmers or yeomanry, and a good deal more besides. 

How do you put these issues on screen? You can’t. You can tell a story entitled “Cathy and Heathcliff”, but it isn’t what Emily Brontë wrote. Our own civilization is obsessed by sex but bored by yeomen and landowners. The background to the Brontës is the world of poverty, political repression and smouldering social rebellion known as the Hungry Forties. The sisters would have seen a good deal of destitution on their own doorstep, and were alive to the turbulent times in which they lived. They were shrewd, hard-headed, lower-middle-class Yorkshire women, not three weird sisters lost in erotic fantasy in the moorland mists.

Nor is Wuthering Heights what you might call a romance. In fact, you might even call it an anti-romance. The relationship between the two lovers, if you can call it that, is implacably impersonal. There’s a relentless, elemental, even brutal quality to it, which lies much deeper than mere feeling. We are no longer in the mannered world of Jane Austen. Heathcliff is no Hugh Grant but a pitiless exploiter. Beneath his flinty exterior beats a heart of stone. If some readers have been seduced by him, it is because everyone likes a rogue. In his dealings with Catherine, what Freud calls eros and thanatos, sexuality and the drive for extinction, are impossible to disentangle. Like Jane Eyre, the best-known work of Emily’s sister, Charlotte, the novel is shot through with sado-masochism. If this is love, then there’s nothing in the least pleasant or affable about it. One can’t even speak of it as sexual. It’s more like a fight to the death — an absolute, remorseless, inhuman need for each other with a fierce undertow of violence, one which has little to do with tenderness or affection and perhaps refuses to be placated even in the grave. Almost uniquely, we have a Victorian novel which doesn’t end on a genially upbeat note with that magical solution to all human heartache: marriage.

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This is an important milestone in the evolution of the English novel. With the exception of Samuel Richardson’s great 18th-century work Clarissa, which few have read because it’s a million words long, hardly any English novel before Wuthering Heights ends on a tragic note. Even Wuthering Heights is ambiguous in this respect: do Catherine and Heathcliff find fulfilment beyond the grave or not? Then, from the fiction of Thomas Hardy to our own time, the norm becomes a tragic (or at least non-comic) ending. There are a number of reasons for this seismic literary shift, among which is the fact that the Victorians (who lived in perpetual fear of revolution) saw a link between gloom and political disaffection. Part of the purpose of art was to edify its audience, and edified audiences were less likely to tear up the paving stones to build barricades. Charlotte Brontë conforms to this demand in Jane Eyre, blinding and disfiguring Rochester in order to punish his bigamy and bring him, chastened and repentant, to a marriage in which Jane is definitely the boss. Emily bravely refuses this conventional strategy.

Wuthering Heights may tacitly suggest a reason for the strangely asexual nature of the bond between its protagonists. Heathcliff is brought home one night by Cathy’s father and dumped unceremoniously on the family, but he might be “family” even so. He may be old Earnshaw’s bastard child, in which case he and Catherine are half-siblings, and their non-sexual relation springs from an unconscious incest taboo. It’s hard otherwise to see why this gruff yeoman farmer, who doesn’t seem given to spontaneous acts of charity, should give house-room to such an unprepossessing little brat. We shall, alas, never know. Anyway, the intense unity of selves which Catherine and Heathcliff feel, which is hard to speak of as a relationship since relationship implies otherness, works even without this incestuous subtext.

Heathcliffe’s ethnic origins are hard to pin down — hence the pearl-clutching at the news of Fennell casting a white actor in the role. Variously labelled as a gypsy, a Lascar or Indian sailor, a Creole, and a Spanish castaway, it’s hard to know how dark he is, or how much of it is pigmentation and how much the fact that he needs a bath. The fact is, his origins are deliberately made obscure, to highlight his status as an outsider in the tight-knit patriarchal community of the Heights. What kind of outsider doesn’t really matter. Whether he comes from Bournemouth or Borneo is less important than the fact that he is cruelly treated, and thus turned into a monster who seeks to wreak vengeance on those who have abused him. As W.H. Auden writes, “Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.” 

Even so, there are a number of clues buried in the story to Heathcliff’s actual identity. One can make a strong case that he is Irish, as Emerald Fennell is to judge by her surname; and whether the Irish are black or white, as well as orange or green, wasn’t clear to the Victorian middle-class mind. They are of course formally “white” — whatever that means — but they were consistently portrayed at the time (in Punch cartoons, for example) as dark, dangerous and chronically rebellious. They were perceived, so to speak, as spiritually dark-skinned, the Blacks of the British isles. 

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Why might Heathcliff hail from John Bull’s other island? Well Wuthering Heights was written as the Great Famine was beginning to grip Ireland, resulting in a million dead and a further million driven into exile. As John Lennon and Paul McCartney illustrate, a lot of the latter group ended up in Liverpool, a city to which the Brontës’ ill-starred alcoholic brother Branwell took a trip in 1845 and perhaps reported to his sisters what he had witnessed there. A few months later, Emily began writing her novel. By 1847, 300,000 destitute Irish immigrants had landed in the port. Images of them as starving scarecrows dressed in rags and with an animal-like growth of black hair appeared in various English magazines. Earnshaw picks up off the Liverpool streets “a dirty, ragged, black-haired child” who speaks a kind of “gibberish”. Many of the children who washed up in Liverpool would have been Irish speakers. In fact, the Famine almost dealt the language the coup de grace, since it was spoken mainly by the poor, and the poor were mostly the ones who died or emigrated. The Irish language didn’t in fact die, but nor did it ever fully recover. Most Irish people speak some Irish in the way that most educated English people speak French, i.e. very badly.

Consider, too, the fact that the name “Brontë” was originally “Brunty”, which like most surnames ending in y (aigh in Irish) is an Irish name. The sisters’ Right-wing clerical father Frenchified it in his quest for respectability in England. Brontë country in Ireland isn’t the Yorkshire moors around Haworth but the region of County Down from which Patrick came. When the gin-soaked, stage-Irish Branwell displeased the local people, they burnt an effigy of him with a herring in one hand and a potato in the other. Branwell was a loyal supporter of the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell, leader of the greatest reform movement of 19th-century Europe.

So assuming, therefore, that Heathcliff really is Irish, perhaps it’s fine for a white actor to represent him. But why are we even thinking in these terms? Why cling to such a naive view of dramatic representation? For to think that every aspect of an actor must accurately represent every aspect of the character he or she plays is absurd. Margot Robbie, who will play Catherine, represents her accurately in so far as she’s a woman, but not in so far as she’s quite a bit older than Catherine is in the book. She may also have a differently shaped nose. Nobody imagines that every feature of an actor’s performance is in this sense representational. If an actor trips and falls over, is it an accident? Or is it required by the script?

On this view, then, a black actor can play a white figure because his or her ethnicity need not be representational, any more than their height or weight need be. And white actors can play black individuals because we, the audience, provisionally bracket off their ethnicity and don’t take it as representational. But obviously this means that white actors muscle in on most of the parts. 

Surely, though, ethnicity is too important an issue to be bracketed off. And actors from minorities have been cut a rough deal for far too long. So we should aim for a situation in which ethnic minority actors can play white individuals, which means having their actual skin colour temporarily disregarded by the audience without this constituting a put-down. And, indeed, without the audience thinking they are being told that, say, Julius Caesar or Elizabeth I really were black. It also means white actors being able to play black or brown individuals without the audience seeing imperial overtones. 

For all this to happen, though, we will need change not just in the theatre or film industry but in society at large. And the signs, as the far-Right continues to rise throughout the Western world, are not propitious.