2026-02-24 08:33:20
I was a big fan of SimCity 20001 and even more into SimCity 3000. I think the latter was the first time I ever spent literally an entire day playing a video game. I’m still not sure whether the video game I’ve put the most time into is The Sims 2 or SimCity 3000, but they’re certainly the two top contenders. And whatever the actual number is, it’s an unhealthy amount.
So I came into SimCity 4 as a huge fan of the series. And I’ve always thought of my relationship to that project being as an “embedded fan:” I’m proud of the game and my work on it, while being completely comfortable saying that my part in it wasn’t what makes the game great.2
Which I mention just to make it absolutely clear that I’m not at all claiming to be one of the creative or technical leads on the project; there were some straight-up geniuses on that team, which is evident in the later work they did on Spore and the 2013 SimCity. And that I’m not a fan-level expert, either, since there are tons of people still making fantastic stuff with the game, 20+ years later, that I wouldn’t be able to replicate.
I haven’t even been able to really play the game since the expansion was released. Every time I’ve tried, I would find my muscle memory taking over, repeating the same first steps I did over and over, creating countless starter cities and building them up to test the game. Plus, there’s always been the anxiety of catching a bug I’d missed3, and even though it’s far too late to matter, I would know it was there. It’s that case of getting the rare opportunity to work on exactly the game you’d most want to play, but never getting to play it.
But recently, I got the urge to dive back in. I started a couple of cities in SimCity 3000 Unlimited, and a new region in SimCity 4, figuring that enough time had passed that I could go in kind of fresh. Now that I’ve forgotten all the cheat codes and hot keys and even basic controls, much less the best strategies or weird quirks of the simulation.
And I was immediately hit with a shockwave of nostalgia. The first thing you notice is the thing that has always made these games exceptional: the music, and the art direction.
Both of these games have music that has become such a part of the soundtrack running constantly through my brain, that I’d stopped even associating them with SimCity or video games at all. There’s a track called “Epicenter” (which I can’t find a “legit” copy of, presumably because of licensing or rights issues with the vocals?) that seems to go way too hard for a game like this. But then, it’s always been an implicit part of the gestalt of this series that there’s something magical about seeing a living, breathing city come to life. You can’t hear the track “Rush Hour” without thinking F yeah I am laying infrastructure and zoning the ever-loving hell out of this metropolis!
And especially with SimCity 3000, you get such a dopamine hit from seeing huge plots develop with vibrant green, perfectly-manicured lawns that you happily ignore how much you’re being rewarded for gentrification. It’s so satisfying seeing these huge, glistening skyscrapers pop up in your downtown area that you don’t concentrate on how much the abstraction favors Reagan-era economics.4
The other day, I saw a conversation on Bluesky where a friend was wishing that EA would do another installment of SimCity. I’m still of the opinion that a successor won’t come from Electronic Arts ever again; it’s simply not the same company anymore. Specifically, I don’t get any sense that the company even has the same philosophy or agenda as it did when it acquired Maxis.
It may sound overly precious or high-minded, but it’s easy to forget that Maxis didn’t approach their series with the simple idea of “making simulations fun.” They were more like this holistic blend of science, art, philosophy, and culture, all abstracted into a simulation, and then turned into a game. That’s why the SimCity 2000 manual had lengthy sections about urban planning, with a bibliography of academic research on the topic. For that matter, that’s why The Sims mashed up ideas about the hierarchy of needs and a satire of consumerism into a game that was essentially an interactive dollhouse.
And it’s why really excellent games like Cities: Skylines can get so much right about the mechanics, and even have flashes of charm, but still leave SimCity fans with the sense that “the vibes are off.” I don’t believe that the game is shallow, just that its highest priority is making a city simulator game.
That’s also probably why the 2013 SimCity was so frustrating. Visually amazing, with the clear sense that not only the buildings but the entire presentation had a coherent vision. Musically exceptional, more orchestral than the jazzy soundtracks of earlier games, but still giving that feeling of the magic of watching an entire city come to life, neighborhood by neighborhood. And excellent in terms of designing a from-the-ground-up reimagining of the series. Getting away from the cell-based simulation and rethinking everything in terms of agents making connections — pulling in that philosophical abstraction of cities as living organisms.
There are various reasons it didn’t really work, most of them extremely well-documented already. But I don’t think it’s any one thing, like the always-online requirement (which was a bad call), or the limited city size (which, as I understand it, was primarily a technical restriction based on personal computer power at the time, required to reach the size of audience EA needed for the game to justify the cost).
From what I played of it, my personal opinion is just that it would’ve worked better if they’d leaned into a smaller scale, making it more like a SimTown or even SimNeighborhood. It had this obligation to appeal to players who always saw the end goal of the series as being a city with millions of residents and a downtown full of skyscrapers. Even though the series had a long history of emphasizing how there’s such a wide variety in even successful cities: sprawl vs density, types of transportation, balance of residence and industry and culture, all of the things that give a city a distinct personality.
Playing SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 together, after such a long hiatus, I was surprised how quickly my starter cities started to feel completely distinct.
SimCity 4 just has more stuff, including a ton of “quality of life” things that I’d misremembered as always having been part of the series. I almost immediately started thinking of it in terms of specialized cities: this one would be where all the power infrastructure goes, this would become my industrial town, this would be my residential suburb, here would be where the waterfront resorts develop, and so on. I quickly zoned out big blocks of RCI zones, hooked everything up with power and water, plopped down city services and parks, and let it all cook for a bit.
Meanwhile, SimCity 3000 felt surprisingly finicky. I knew you had to stick to the grid, but had forgotten how much it prevented you from zoning on certain types of terrain. My randomly-generated hills were splitting up my residential zones, giving me pockets of unreachable land on slopes the roads refused to drive up.
But even in a short time, a kind of personality to the city started to develop. And it helped explain why I often had an uncanny sense of deja vu while driving through the Bay Area. This part feels like Piedmont, with a high-income, low-density main street at the foot of the hills. Houses on individual plots are popping up all over the higher elevations, with winding, narrow streets working upwards to reach them. This is a flat, industrial area, like the east and south of Oakland. Over here are bigger blocks of tiny residential homes, kind of like Berkeley and Richmond. There’s a circle of high-income housing around the university, with rings of service commercial and industry around it.
And I could finally see how a sequence of decisions while making SimCity 4, more than just the most obvious ones, led to the two games having such a different vibe. (And again I want to stress that the decisions were all made by people much smarter than me; I just had the somewhat unique position of being able to see the game as it was being made):
Every one of those decisions makes perfect sense, either as an immediately-recognizable upgrade to the fidelity of the game, or as a quality-of-life improvement. And they all feed into and interact with each other, along with a thousand other decisions about the simulation layers, how buildings have areas of effect, and so on.
The end result is that SimCity 4 makes it easy to build sprawling grids across the landscape, paying as little attention to the underlying terrain as you care to. And that has a subtle but significant effect on how the city “feels” as you’re building it. In my experience, it’s less about neighborhoods with unique character, and more about individual cities that eventually develop an overall character, as part of a larger region. And of course, I don’t want to make it sound as if that’s accidental, since region play was one of the main ideas of this version of the game.
But it does change the vibe in a way that I’ve never before been able to articulate while playing it.
(And no doubt that I’ve got a built-in bias while playing it, since it was always in my best interest to get the densest city possible going as quickly as possible, because I needed enough cars on the road to find bugs).
So I guess in addition to being a short love letter to the SimCity series, and being happy that I can actually play them for fun again, my main point is that video games are complicated.
Especially when you’ve got a multi-layered complex simulation that’s being designed and implemented by dozens of different people, but just in general. Every single decision can have an effect that ripples out to affect everything else, completely changing the entire feel of the game.
I’m still skeptical that another SimCity will ever come from EA, at least in anything but name. But there are still plenty of city simulators being made. I’ve been watching a lot of the City Planner Plays channel on YouTube, which has been interesting not just for the kinds of ideas about urban planning that used to go into SimCity manuals, but about how different people play these games. His approach, for instance, has a lot of self-imposed limitations; part of his merch is a T-shirt that reads “respect the topography.”
Not to mention calling attention to how many different types of simulator games there are, and how varied the games are in what they prioritize. There are a lot of promising ones; one that I’m most interested in is Citystate Metropolis, simply because of its flexibility.
But none of them are ever going to be “the next SimCity” because that’s pretty much impossible. You could even nail the mechanics and the simulation, and it wouldn’t be the same, because it was never just about the mechanics or the simulation. It required not just a bunch of uniquely talented and smart people, but a philosophy about the union of science, games, culture, and art that you simply don’t see much of anymore.
So instead of trying to replicate the mechanics of SimCity, or even the vibes of it, I’d be a lot more interested in seeing what comes from people trying to replicate the vibes that went into the making of a SimCity game.
2026-02-23 07:00:35
I’m still a firm believer in my rule of “celebrate the stuff you like, ignore the stuff you don’t.”1 So there’s not a lot worth saying about how much I disliked Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die2 as a movie. Like how it was so tedious, a two-plus hour movie that felt like four or five. Or how it had lots of truly exceptional talent, but kept putting them in scenes with seemingly no direction, making the whole thing feel like an amateurish YouTube comedy video.3
I will say that the plot is about a man played by Sam Rockwell coming back from a post-apocalyptic future, to stop the creation of an AI singularity that will bring about the downfall of society. And it’s ironic that AI is the villain, because there’s barely a single image in the entire movie that feels original or memorable; everything feels like the least inspired and most obvious choice, taken from other media.
The only image that comes close to feeling new and original is that of a giant centaur cat made from smaller cats, walking through a residential neighborhood eating people. That, combined with the audacity of an earlier sequence with Juno Temple as the single mother of a child killed in a school shooting, were just enough to keep me from writing off the movie as a completely unoriginal waste of time. But then I thought about it for a few seconds, and I realized that the giant cat is just the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Not that it feels similar, but it’s used exactly the same way as in a movie from 1984.
My initial take on all of it was that it felt like some crusty old relic, a movie dug up from a time capsule from the early 2000s, and it had been derivative even then. It’s like if the phrase “ok, boomer” had been turned into a motion picture. I would’ve been content to just roll my eyes and make a wanking gesture, and then let it be quickly forgotten.4
But I realized that it had somehow crossed the line from tasteless and irrelevant to genuinely offensive. And offensive in a way that’s depressingly relevant. I can’t imagine a coherent read of this movie that’s anything other than conservative propaganda.
The bulk of it just feels like “Old Man Yells At Cloud” ranting. It starts with what’s essentially an extended monologue from Rockwell, chastising people in a diner for staring at their damn phones while the world is falling apart around them. Shortly afterwards there’s a flashback that’s only remarkable for having Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz and making them annoying and uninteresting, something I’d never imagined possible. The gist of this whole sequence is just how hard teachers have it nowadays, with the scary, surly teens and their smart phones, scrolling numbly through Tik Tok all day.
Later, there’s another sequence that’s all about Haley Lu Richardson as a woman who’s literally allergic to phones and WiFi, finding her soulmate in a guy who has also made a pledge to reject modern online technology, and then losing him to the temptation of virtual reality.
It’s all lazy, hopelessly dated, and completely devoid of insight, feeling like someone who read an article about emerging tech in Wired 20 years ago and has been fuming about it ever since. Now they’ve appointed themselves a modern-day Cassandra, screaming about the dangers of The Screens to a society that refuses to listen. It feels like 2025 tech commentary from someone who still refers to everything they do on a computer as “that program.” It feels like a movie that had to halt production periodically to get help, since now all the icons were in a different place and they can’t find the one they always use.
The only exception is that sequence about the aftermath of a school shooting. The idea is seeded in the earlier flashback, as the school day stops for a shooting incident, and it’s treated as something as common and mundane as a fire drill. The point there is just to underscore that idea of how scary and downright insolent The Teens are. But I’ll be super-extra generous to the movie, and assume that it was supposed to feel more light-hearted here so that it’d feel like a shocking gut-punch later, when we see it from the perspective of someone who as actually affected by it.
That sequence with Temple is the closest the movie gets to actually working. It’s shockingly tasteless, but that’s the point — it’s about how one of the most horrific things that can possibly happen has become so common now that people are numb to it, and an entire sub-industry has developed around it. The mom finds a shadow network of support groups and an organization that will clone murdered kids, replacing them with a copy that is almost as good as the real thing. Temple’s character then is connected to an even more shadowy group that will give her a device that lets her communicate with the real version of her murdered son.
Honestly, if that whole sequence had been removed from the rest of the context of the movie, it would’ve worked okay. It would’ve been like a C-tier Black Mirror episode. The tastelessness, the refusal to suggest a solution, and again the audacity of it, might’ve worked as black satire. An angry wake-up call demanding that people take it seriously.
But instead, it’s in this movie. Which undermines any potential impact by making it feel irrelevant, since it just makes a lazy hand-waving gesture at the problem, insisting that it’s all this dang technology that we’ve gotten so dependent on! And worse, it feels dated and toothless, since it’s either unaware or unwilling to admit that we have all figured out who and what are causing the problems.
As soon as I heard the stated premise of Rockwell’s character’s plan, I thought “well that’s a load of bullshit.” It’s stated that the world-destroying AI is being developed right now by some genius ninth-grade kid in a bedroom in a residential area of Los Angeles. Their mission is to get in there and plug in a USB drive that will override the AI’s programming and put the necessary safety protocols in place.
The problem isn’t that this all sounds like hand-waving nonsense from someone who’s never used a computer apart from Outlook before. It’s actually fine that the mechanism is just a MacGuffin, in a deliberately ludicrous story that’s not about technology so much as its impact on humans. The problem is that it perpetuates the bullshit mythos about “AI” that has already been incorporated into the hype bubble and scam that’s actually impacting humans.
Even Terminator and Terminator 2 had the foresight to implicate corporations in the fall of humanity. Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die refuses to acknowledge the existence of anyone outside of its characters (and by extension, its audience). It passes itself off as a satire of gun violence that never once shows the police, and has multiple scenes using gun violence as a “black comedy” punchline, responding with a shrug. It passes itself off as a warning about the dangers of technology without ever mentioning tech companies. It’s all created by this one genius kid working away in his bedroom.
This is like making a movie about climate change without once mentioning oil companies or auto manufacturers, and instead spending over two hours chastising the audience for using plastic straws. It’s an indictment of out-of-control technology and AI that could have been executive produced by Sam Altman.
But wait! The end of the movie has a huge twist!5 The AI wasn’t actually created by a kid in his bedroom! That kid was a clone, and it was actually just a case of the sentient, omnipotent AI creating itself! It presented you with this false happy ending to keep you comfortable, complacent, and compliant!
Don’t you feel silly now, dismissing this movie as nothing more than an edgy-for-the-sake-of-edgy screed against the threat of technology? Weren’t you spending the whole time focused on tech as the obvious villain, while ignoring the deeply humanist message at its core?
Well no, actually. The ending is the final push that transforms this noxious fart of a movie into a wet, steaming, turd.
Just for the sake of showing some grace to the movie, assuming incompetence instead of actual malice, I won’t concentrate on how it turns Temple’s story from “tasteless” to deeply offensive. Because it refuses to implicate anyone outside the movie in the problem of gun violence, it only points a finger at her and her handling of it. The real, actionable problem, see, is that she was looking to be placated and comforted by a cloned or AI-generated replacement for her son, instead of the irreplaceable, real person. “Maybe if you’d set some limits on screen time and spent more quality time with your child, he wouldn’t have been murdered.”
After all, the final scene has Rockwell realizing he was wrong to leave his mom behind so many times, and they’re going to solve this problem together!6 That solution: give everybody in the world the same allergy she has, to physically force everyone to avoid technology!
In other words: don’t worry, big tech (and especially tech companies who’ll invest in funding movies like this), this is just a silly fantasy! We’re not going to offer any real solutions to relevant social problems. We’re going to “carbon offset” it, reminding people that the most beautiful world is the one that exists off your screen, and we can make that world happen together. Somehow. Maybe you can start by putting down your TikToks and reading a damn book for once!
Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s total bullshit to claim that your movie has a humanist message, when you treat its characters as disposable.7 I think it’s bullshit to even approach the topic of school shootings if you not only have gun violence played for comedic effect, but you flat-out refuse to acknowledge that we are all fully aware of the network of politicians, lobbyists, manufacturers, and special-interest groups that perpetuate it. Instead, this bullshit movie treats it as if it were just something that happens, like earthquakes.
And by presenting an omnipotent AI that, as it turns out, somehow went back in time and set up the sequence of events to create itself, it makes this movie contain pretty much every single part of the bullshit AI hype bubble scam:
Again, this is a movie that is so adamant about not assigning blame to anyone but the people who are least responsible, that it feels regressive even compared to Terminator 2, which came out 35 years ago.
When I left Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, I was left with the impression that it was gross but harmless, ultimately yelling at nothing. Just a few minutes thinking about it makes me realize it’s even worse. It’s deeply ironic that it has a takeaway message about technology lulling people into a sense of complacency, since it’s a movie that’s designed to do exactly that.
2026-02-20 02:00:00
I spent way too much time writing about “Wuthering Heights”, and I don’t think that because I think any of it was wrong, or because the movie doesn’t warrant it, but because it’s a waste of time to respond to all of the wrong things.
I spent so much time rejecting the most facile and close-minded takes on the movie, that by the time I started to hit on exactly why it had such a surprising impact on me, I was already tired of talking about it. Usually my rule of “respond to the thing, not to what people are saying about the thing” is so that my impressions of it are my own, instead of just being influenced by other people’s takes.
But I’d forgotten the most important corollary of that: the easier it is to explain why something is wrong or not useful, the less value there is in doing so. The Discourse is designed to feed on itself. Throwing more fuel into it is just a waste of energy.
As if on cue, YouTube offered me two videos today, side by side: One was this fun interview with Emerald Fennell on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, talking about all of the influences that went into making “Wuthering Heights”, and wanting to make something additive to a book that was so transformative for her, and which has already been adapted, read, and analyzed so many times over so many years. The other was a video from an essayist that was titled “Heathcliff Isn’t White.”12
I chose to listen to what the filmmaker actually had to say, and especially how her take on influences was so expansive and inclusive. She talks about how much she loved Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Titanic, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and even Dracula: Dead And Loving It, four movies that I’ve always been indifferent to at best, if not outright disliked.
It gave me the impression of someone most interested in engaging with art in terms of what it has to offer. Not in order to categorize it, to provide a definitive interpretation of it, or even to put much of a value judgment on it. Camp, gothic romance, horror, parody, open sentimentality, melodrama, all mixing together into this near-infinite well of stuff to draw from.
With that in mind, going back to engaging with YouTube videos or Letterboxd comments feels like even more of a waste of time. What are we even doing here?
It’s apt that this was sparked by Wuthering Heights, a book that I so closely associate with assigned reading. It helps explain why my gut reaction to so many of the reviews or video essays I’ve seen has been, “Shut up, nerd!” It takes me back to being in school again, and learning how to engage with literature and other art.
It feels like so many people are pointing and shouting “this is making a mockery of the sacred texts!” and declaring that the filmmaker clearly didn’t “understand” the book, because our most formative years were spent having this mindset drilled into us. There’s a pre-defined list of key ideas to take away from this book, and it’s your job to be able to find them. For probably 100 years, students have been writing papers that say roughly the same things about the novel Wuthering Heights, and teachers have been grading them according to how well they understood the ideas they were supposed to find.
A lot of the people making video essays now3 probably did well in school, and were rewarded for reading books and watching movies in the correct way.
That fits pretty naturally into the internet and social media, which is designed not to reward insight, but engagement and consensus. You’re still rewarded for having the correct take on everything, even if it’s just with views and likes instead of a letter grade. That’s why you keep seeing the same things repeated over and over again.
It’s never really about “what is your take?” But “did you figure out the correct answer?”
It extends into the areas of nerd-dom that I’m more familiar with than gothic romances4 with all of the fixation on “canon.” Every time a new MCU project comes out, there’s a host of “explainers” comparing it to the comics, listing all the references, explaining all the back story. Even though source material was often intended to be either ephemeral or self-contained, and even though the MCU rarely engages with the source material in any interesting way, there’s still this notion that you need all of the additional info to fully get it.
And for me, it’s kind of funny to read back over my own take on “Wuthering Heights” and see myself fall back into that. Early on, I seemed to get that a lot of the appeal of the movie for me was that it seemed to be so many contradictory things simultaneously. But the more I tried to explain it, and especially the more I tried to react to other people’s takes on it, the more reductive I got.
I thought that I’d found the key — a-ha! It’s subverting a teenage girl’s first impression of a classic novel! — and that explained everything. The movie was showing you that, but it was actually saying this. I said that one of my biggest complaints was that the ending seemed to want to have it both ways, presenting a subversion of a grand romance but still ending with a moment of romantic sentimentality.
The thing that I hadn’t considered: that shouldn’t have been a complaint. It does want to have it both ways, and probably a couple more ways that haven’t occurred to me yet. It’s not showing you something but subverting it; it’s showing you something and subverting it. It wants all of it. That’s probably a big part of why I was able to enjoy it, despite my complete lack of interest in period pieces and romantic novels, and despite its glaring lack of spaceships and ghosts.
It’s a movie devoted to maximalism, not just in its images and performances, but in everything. There’s a scene where Catherine is first seeing the dead body of her father, an abusive alcoholic who’d wasted the family’s entire fortune on booze and gambling. It’s framed with him lying on the floor, in between two mountains of empty glass bottles in the corners, piled up to the ceiling.
It’s an absurd enough image to get a laugh out of me, and Heathcliff has a line of dialogue that’s the closest he ever gets to being funny. But the scene isn’t camp, or black comedy. It’s that, plus grief, and anger, and tragedy, and poetic justice, and character development, and just the simple appreciation of such a distinctive visual image. Like so many of the scenes in the movie, it seems like its primary purpose isn’t to tell you something, but to make you feel something. Whatever that something is, is up to you.
It doesn’t seem particularly interested in hiding ideas below layers of meaning — I’m showing you this but I actually mean that — but instead letting them all float on the surface and mix together. “I know authors who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.”
And I’d said that it was never intended to be an adaptation of the book, but Fennell herself describes it as an adaptation. What I’d been assuming was wry subversion, was in fact completely earnest. The scare quotes around the title aren’t indicating some kind of ironic take on the source material. They’re an acknowledgment that her cinematic version would never be able to contain everything that makes the book so special to her. It’s an extremely personal take on the source material.5
In Rain’s review of the movie, she describes it as Emerald Fennell wanting to make Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi into “her own personal Barbie and Ken, acting out her teenage fantasy of Wuthering Heights,” and I thought that was a really good way of putting it. But I’d been thinking of it merely in terms of style and visuals. In other words: if it can have even me enraptured, as someone with no attachment to the novel and no interest in movies like this, then that’s reason enough.
But hearing Fennell talk even in brief about her thinking behind the movie, I’m realizing that it goes deeper than that. There are a lot of things that I had noticed, but considered them all distinct ideas and images, without thinking about how they’re all inter-related in an idea that carries across the movie.
Specifically: the character of Isabella as Fennell’s surrogate.
Again, none of it is particularly subtle; it’s all there on the surface. Maybe it’s just more difficult to put it all together if you’ve never been a teenage girl yourself. But Isabella’s introduction feels like a young girl reading a classic story and being swept up by all the adventure and romance in it. She recounts the story of Romeo and Juliet, in vivid detail, highlighting all the most shocking and tragic moments.6 She is, literally, trying to explain to an older man, who couldn’t be less interested, why she was so enraptured by this story.
And she dotes on Catherine, with charmingly creepy details like the flesh-colored walls of her bedroom. And the doll, which she emphasizes was made with Catherine’s real hair! In a fit of jealousy, she sets up a scene culminating with a bloody Catherine, much like the director is going to have play out in the final act.
And the title screen to the whole movie, which I’d taken to be just a whimsical flourish: a seemingly hand-made stop-motion title screen made from blonde hair.
I love it, but I’d been reading it as little more than a wry wink at the camera. What’s really most remarkable to me is that the movie has such a strong feeling of affection towards Isabella. She’s the source of almost all of the movie’s humor, but even at her extremes, you’re never really mocking her. She’s charmingly awkward, and naive, and spoiled, but even when she’s talking about having a room dedicated solely to her ribbons, it doesn’t come across as careless excess, so much as simply having no other frame of reference. (And she gives up her ribbon room, gladly, for Catherine).
The shorthand version of her story is “an innocent defiled,” but it’s never quite that, either. I still say that the most uncomfortably ambiguous scene in the movie is the one in which Heathcliff is repeatedly asking for — or demanding? — her consent, because it would be vile in the real world, but feels a little different in a movie that spends so much time in surreal fantasy. It’s a bit like the difference between imagining being kidnapped by a dashing and hyper-sexual pirate in a romance novel, vs how horrific that would be in reality.
Here, it feels as if Isabella is exerting some kind of agency in the kind of grand, tragic romance she’d always dreamed of. Almost as if it’s a lucid dream, and she’s now aware that she’s been elevated from quirky side character to major player. Because it’s not just that she wants Heathcliff; she wants to be part of Catherine and Heathcliff’s story. Even if it’s as the obstacle.
And Catherine and Heathcliff do feel like characters in a story, even though we follow them through their entire lifetimes, and we see them go through every single possible emotion. There’s always a feeling of distance from them, even when we’re seeing them at their most intimate. The movie is more sympathetic to them than I am, but even with that, it always seemed to be looking at them, instead of being present with them. They’re both too big, and too much. Even if you can relate to individual moments with them — gasp! he put his hand around her ankle! — they’re larger than life. Unlike Isabella, and Nelly, and even Linton.
So even though I liked the movie, I think my initial take was a little too reductive. I was describing it as being arch: it’s presenting this novel as she experienced it as a teenager reading it for the first time, and then subverting that, to comment on it now that she’s an adult. This is how she read it as a child, but now she’s put aside childish things.
But it’s too sincere for that. I’m not even sure if I’d stick with the claim that it “invites interpretation,” since that sounds too preoccupied with some kind of intellectual response instead of an emotional one. I called it deliberately provocative, but I’m not sure that it’s trying to provoke an argument so much as to provoke a feeling. To get swept up in all the excess and heartbreak and horniness — to experience it like that teenage girl and like that more experienced adult, at the same time.
It’s not intended to be a completely “faithful” and literal adaptation, but it is still an adaptation. It’s intended to contain as much as possible of what the filmmaker loves about the book. So it’s more like a personal, impressionistic interpretation.
Which goes back to my lengthy preamble about avoiding The Discourse, and un-learning everything that school and social media have taught us about how to engage with art and literature. The idea that there’s a correct answer that just needs to be understood, or that there are pre-determined and pre-approved lanes of discussion, and you’re rewarded for saying the right thing more than saying something insightful.
There are tons of adaptations of Wuthering Heights out there. At least one gets the ethnicity of Heathcliff “right,” and several are closer to the novel. One of them gets the ethnicity of Heathcliff shockingly wrong; how blasphemous! One of them inspired an iconic song.7
But it’s hard to get enthused by accuracy alone. I have little doubt that each of them has some aspect that’s additive, to keep it from being nothing more than adding visuals and slimming things down, for people who don’t have time or patience to read. But also… so what?
I can pretty much guarantee that none of them are as personal as this version, because it’s rare to find any movie that feels as personal as this version. I compared it to Adaptation because it feels just as much like a personal account of an artist trying to express what they got out of a book, but without that movie’s distance or explicit self-awareness. “Wuthering Heights” is saying both “I want you to understand what’s in this book” and “I want you to understand just how much I love this book, for my entire life, ever since I was a teenager.”8
And that means this version is the one that actually connected with me, a 54-year-old man, who has little frame of reference for being a boy or girl in England in the 1800s, or even being a teenage girl in England in the late 1990s. Because while I can relate intellectually to the universal ideas contained in a piece of classic literature, I can relate emotionally — profoundly emotionally — to the ideas that this specific book unlocked for this specific filmmaker.
I can look back on all the times I went batshit crazy nerding out over something (or someone), as well as the times I was either too eager or too afraid to grow up, and the bad decisions that sometimes resulted. For that matter, I can look back on times that I was carelessly selfish or unintentionally cruel, and extend myself some grace. And instead of my usual reaction of being embarrassed or ashamed, I can have genuine affection for those old versions of me. Instead of regretting my awkward naiveté, celebrating it. Or at least being charmed by it.
Every time I sit down to write something about a movie, I’m usually most concerned with picking it apart to make sure that I “got it,” meaning making sure that I fully understood what it had to say. This was one of the rare movies where “getting it” means I understand how it makes me feel.
2026-02-18 07:03:10
Last night we got a YouTube recommendation for a wonderful video called “Bend Your Knees” by Henry Mansfield and Digital Velvet. It’s a joyful song about falling in love at a roller rink, with a joyful video filmed at a roller rink, all of the horns and percussion and singers weaving in and out of each other as they circle the camera (and include the keyboardist, because they’re not rude).
It’s the kind of thing that made me instantly nostalgic for the days when it was more common to just randomly stumble onto people on the internet making something delightful. I really hope it becomes a big hit.
Looking more into Mansfield’s music, he describes himself1 as a queer musician living in Seattle. I’ve only heard five or six songs at this point, but I’m liking what seems to be a mash-up of contemporary musical theater sensibilities with pop and rock. His clear and heartfelt voice is what makes me think of musical theater, and his experimentation with finding just the right style and the right hook is what makes me think of genreless pop and rock.
And his lyrics add on to that sense of modern theater — romantic and contemporary, using something topical and occasionally mundane to spin off into a metaphor about new love, ended relationships, or just being with people you love. Using learning to skate as an analogy for not over-thinking or stressing about falling in love, and instead just relaxing and allowing yourself to enjoy the moment, is ingenious.
It’s a similar sentiment to his song “Now vs. Forever” from 2021. It’s about waking up with someone after a good night together early in a relationship, and your mind spinning off into all the possibilities of your future together.
I think it’s wonderful because that’s something I always associated with embarrassment and anxiety. Isn’t the early part of a relationship supposed to be nerve-wracking? Don’t get too attached so quickly! Slow down! Stop being weird! You’re setting yourself up for heartbreak! What I like so much about this song — and I wish I’d learned when I was closer to Mansfield’s age — is that it’s all ephemeral.
It’s not just that infatuation is fleeting, but the heartbreak (if it happens) is as well. How many times have we stifled that euphoria for ourselves, in a vain attempt to soften the heartbreak later. (Which never works; it always sucks). Wouldn’t it be better to let ourselves be fully in the moment, enjoying the excitement of everything that could happen, instead of the fear of what might? Why not let ourselves enjoy that elation to the fullest?
2026-02-17 10:19:03
There’s a scene in “Wuthering Heights” where Catherine is making an unannounced visit to the home of her neighbor, Edgar Linton, and his ward Isabella.
She’s been hoofing it across the moors and is now in an almost cartoonishly wild and overgrown wooded area just outside the estate’s walls. Inside those walls, the garden is equally cartoonishly well-manicured, sterile, and sunlit. The Lintons are having tea, and Isabella is describing the plot of Romeo and Juliet in great detail, while Edgar is feigning interest. When Catherine peeks her head above the wall to take a look, Isabella spots her and screams, causing Catherine to fall.
Isabella describes what made her scream: she saw a ghost! We see Cathy on the ground on the other side of the wall, rubbing her sprained ankle in embarrassment. Then Isabella goes on to say that the ghost had a terrible, hideous face, and we cut back to see Cathy — played by Margot Robbie, who famously has the least terrible and hideous face — with a “what the hell?!” expression.
The reason I like that moment so much is because it was, to me, the first real indication of just how much is packed into this movie. It’s simultaneously old-fashioned and contemporary, melodramatic and naturalistic, corny and clever, self-aware and shamelessly earnest, and it invites the audience to interpret it on as many layers as they care to.
When Isabella describes Catherine as a ghost, is that just a gag, or is it a reference to her appearing at the window in the book? Or can she in that glimpse of Cathy see her true nature — when Cathy is taken by surprise and not carefully maintaining her composure — and unwittingly foresee the doom she’s about to bring onto everyone?
The visual design of this scene, like so much of the rest of the movie, is so heightened and over-saturated as to be almost surreal. There are shots of the Linton estate throughout that make the set design in Guillermo del Toro’s movies seem restrained and too devoted to realism. “Wuthering Heights” is overwhelmingly a sensual movie, in every sense, so in addition to the often over-the-top (and occasionally anachronistic) costume design, we get lots of shots of raw eggs; kneading dough; a pig being slaughtered; and naked, sweaty, scarred backs.
The estate1 takes that to the extreme, immediately reading as extreme wealth and comfort, but also as cold, empty, and deeply repressed. This is made all but explicit in a montage, showing Catherine in lavish costumes in bizarre, primary-colored, largely empty rooms, wanting for nothing but yearning to feel anything. There are multiple shots of her and Linton consummating their marriage (in multiple positions), and Catherine distractedly sticking her finger into the mouth of a fish in aspic.
In addition to the never-explained fireplace mantle made up entirely of white sculpted hands, the weirdest and most memorable is Catherine’s own room: conceived by Isabella, with walls the color of Cathy’s skin, including the veins, freckles, and moles. We get a great shot of Cathy first seeing the wall and feeling suddenly self-conscious about how many moles she has. It’s another great example of a realistic, relatable moment in a surreal setting. Later on, during one of Heathcliff and Cathy’s many, many sex scenes, we see him in silhouette taking a moment to lick the wall.
That idea of the natural and the sensual invading the cold, upper-class sterility of the Lintons’ mansion keeps coming up again and again, almost always in visuals. In addition to the enormous doll house where Isabella dotes on Catherine in doll form2, there’s the hilarious friendship book she gives Cathy as a Christmas gift. It’s filled with increasingly feminine imagery, seemingly unwittingly on Isabella’s part.
She has all of this pent-up sexual energy she has no idea what to do with, because she’s been so sheltered and pampered, and Catherine’s mere presence is enough to rock the Victorian repression that Edgar and Isabella have been living under. It makes it easier to understand why Isabella would consent to be so degraded and manipulated later on. (With a pretty fantastic and uncomfortable scene in which Heathcliff is repeatedly asking for her consent, with a queasy ambiguity as to whether she’s actually exercising her autonomy, or has so little frame of reference for what she’s feeling that she’s powerless to resist).
And again, it’s all seeded in their introductory scene, with Cathy all but literally invading the sanctum that Linton and his money have carved out of the wily, windy moors.
Runner-up for my favorite scene in the movie is the opening. It doesn’t open with Cathy’s ghost visiting Heathcliff’s window — much to my disappointment, since that’s the only thing I knew from the book, from Kate Bush’s song — but instead with credits, over which we hear creaking and groaning sounds. Since none of us came into the movie from a vacuum, we know that this is being sold as a very sexy and passionate romance, and we can be pretty sure that this is the sound of people doin’ it.
So it’s a surprise to see that it’s actually a public hanging, the condemned man straining against the rope as he’s suffocating. As he dies, we get the briefest glimpse of an erection under his trousers, and the crowd watching goes wild — save for one nun, who apparently came to the display specifically to be shocked and offended.
I saw a review that claimed the scene was unnecessary, which is baffling, as it sets the tone for the whole movie. It most obviously shows the fixation on class and propriety, which eventually forms the story’s main complication, to be just a thin veneer over people’s cruel, beastly, and vulgar nature. It also sets off an extremely horny movie with an image that’s adamantly un-erotic, hinting that there’s little that’s actually romantic about the story that’s to follow, no matter how sexy it may be. It’s just people giving in to their base, natural impulses.
The casting throughout was excellent, but Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi were perfect in particular. Starting with the most obvious fact, which is that they’re both astoundingly, preternaturally, inconceivably hot. I read that Fennell first decided to make this movie when she saw Elordi with sideburns on the set of Saltburn, and he immediately reminded her of Heathcliff. I can believe this story entirely, since Elordi with sideburns and an earring talking with Christian Bale’s real accent was enough to make me want to run off to the moors and have some alone time behind a rock, if you get my meaning.
Just wanting to have two of the most beautiful people on Earth being horny for each other in gorgeously surreal sets, or romantically foggy or rainy, rocky vistas, is more than reason enough to make a movie. I never would’ve expected to be at all interested in a version of Wuthering Heights, but I was immediately captivated by the teaser trailers. Seeing the poster, with the perfect romance novel image of Elordi and Robbie together — not to mention the fantastic typography, which deserves some credit for even being noticeable when you’ve got a poster with those two on it — just made me even more convinced that I had to see it, no matter how far away from the target audience I assumed myself to be. Even if this movie had been nothing more than style over substance, that’d be plenty, in my opinion.
But the thing that makes these two actors in particular so perfect is that they both seem to be almost bored by how hot they are. Elordi I only know from Frankenstein, where the role did demand a lot of physicality and a kind of beauty underneath all the prosthetics, but mostly seemed like an opportunity for him to be expressive without his looks being such a distraction. And Robbie has repeatedly taken roles where she can use her looks as a tool to create an interesting character. She’s the level of beautiful where the movie often can’t help but comment on how beautiful she is — as with Barbie — but she seems insistent that it’s just a part of the character, and not the only thing that makes the character compelling.
And it’s crucial in “Wuthering Heights”, since their characters are both awful people. Reprehensibly self-obsessed and manipulative, showing no sign of compassion or kindness to literally anyone except for, occasionally, each other. They have to be that beautiful to even be tolerable, to keep you from wondering why it took Nelly and Linton so long to flat-out tell them to get over themselves and cut out the bullshit. You have to immediately be able to see why people would be so instantaneously drawn to them and so forgiving of their selfishness.
The movie calls attention to this a few times, in particular with the scene where the groomsman and maid are having kinky sex in the stable while Catherine and Heathcliff watch. They’re also a mismatched, doomed couple giving into their passions, but they’re not the leads of the story. How much of that is because of class, how much is because the story chose not to focus on them, and how much is because they’re simply not Robbie and Elordi levels of hot? What exactly makes audiences read these two people as “rutting,” but Heathcliff and Catherine sticking their fingers and other parts into each other read as “passionate romance?”
I’ve never read Wuthering Heights, so all I knew about it was from suggestions of story here and there, from the song and elsewhere, all taken out of context. It was always nothing more than a very old and well-known book that other people had to read in school. My impression was that it was a ghost story framing a tragic love story, combining the doomed lovers of Romeo and Juliet with the “strong-willed woman and the only man who can control her” dynamic of The Taming of the Shrew.
It was a vague sense of cultural memory, whether accurate or not, hinting at a story about class and wealth and Victorian propriety wrapped around a tragic romance story powerful enough to transcend death. In other words: not entirely unlike a surface read of “Wuthering Heights”, and a lot like Emerald Fennell’s explicit mission statement for the movie.
I’ve never seen her original quote, but everything I’ve read or seen about the movie says that it was never intended to be a faithful adaptation of the book, but more “inspired” by her memories of reading it as a teenage girl. And that is completely what “Wuthering Heights” is. (As long as the teenage girl grew up to be an accomplished and provocative filmmaker who built working relationships with a lot of really solid actors).
But it’d be insultingly simple and reductive to suggest that that’s all that it is. I would’ve still enjoyed it if it had been nothing more than surreal, beautiful spectacle — just the brief shot of Catherine in a wedding dress walking across the moors, her impossibly huge, semi-transparent gown rippling in the fog, would be an iconic image in any other movie. What makes it really interesting is how much it challenges the ideas that we either assume or half-remember from classic stories.
What happens to a “literary classic” when it gets read, re-read, adapted, re-interpreted, re-imagined, over and over in different contexts over 180 years? How much is timeless, and how much loses relevance? How much is retained, and how much is mis-remembered? It’s not accidental that Isabella is introduced while describing Romeo and Juliet, which itself had already become a “timeless classic” by the time the movie had been set. And we see that Isabella, a young, sheltered woman, had been swept up by the shocking and tragic romance of it all. Exactly as a young, sheltered woman seeing a story of doomed, tragic romance would be.
For that matter: why did I keep seeing meme versions of the “to me you are perfect” scene from Love Actually for years before ever hearing the context — that this was a guy professing his love for a woman while her partner was sitting in the next room? Why was that being presented as romantic? Why are so many of the romantic comedies I grew up with filled with stalker-ish behavior? Why do so many ostensibly “romantic” stories demean the value of stability and devotion, insisting that true love means passion, even for people who are bad for each other? Why is so much of what our culture considers romantic actually deeply unhealthy, if not outright creepy?
My biggest criticism of the movie is that it’s too long, and the last 30 minutes or so just feel like they’re playing the same note over and over again, and it feels tedious. I realize that a lot of stories from the 1800s loved to focus on people writing letters and waiting for letters to arrive3, but I feel like we’ve all moved on and those parts can be safely excised from now on.
And I admit that my being mostly unfamiliar with the book meant that I spent the whole movie in anticipation of a ghost at the window in a climax that never came. Instead, the ending initially felt like a bit of a cop-out, like it was trying to have it both ways. The bulk of the movie had been subverting the grand love story promised by the trailers, showing us doomed, star-crossed lovers while never letting you forget that they were both pretty awful people, but then ended on what seemed to be a note of melodramatic sentimentality.
I choose to interpret it as sinister: we can remember just how manipulative and selfish Catherine was, even as a child, so seeing her smile suggests that she had completely and eternally made Heathcliff her pet. Even though he’s still a young man, he’s ruined. He’ll be forever obsessed with and haunted by her.
I went in expecting “Wuthering Heights” to be provocative — again, mostly from vague cultural awareness of the reaction to Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn and Promising Young Female — but I wasn’t expecting it to feel as subversive as it does. Letting a gorgeous, sexy, passionate gothic romance play out on its surface, while at the same time challenging us to reconsider how we understand, remember, and even misremember the classics.
There are (at least) two guidelines I try to stick to while writing about movies on here:
For the first one, I was initially rolling my eyes when I heard that the studio was insisting on the scare quotes around “Wuthering Heights”.5 But after seeing the movie and knowing more about the thought process behind it, I think it’s perfect, and I’ll happily use them.
It’s an ever-present reminder of Fennell’s mission statement, which people seem to be purposefully ignoring. It’s not just that it’s not a faithful adaptation of the book, or a story “inspired” by the book, but it’s something else entirely: a movie inspired by her years old memory of reading the book.
That also should’ve headed off the question of “if she were going to take such liberties with the novel, why didn’t she just call it something else?” It’s specifically about this 180-year-old famous book, and her reactions to it. Not just adapting it as an adult, or re-imagining it as an adult. But working off of her impressions of it from years ago, with those impressions now being re-contextualized and re-imagined as an adult.
People are fine with the idea when it’s kept simple and harmless, like “draw Garfield completely from memory.” And they’re happy to treat it as an art project curiosity, like when Dirty Projectors made Rise Above. And we saw Charlie Kaufman brilliantly turn an adaptation of The Orchid Thief into a surreal movie about the process of trying to do the adaptation itself, in a movie that ended up carrying through the themes of obsessive fixation and the pursuit of perfection that were at the core of that book.
And “Wuthering Heights” is a bit similar, even though it’s not explicitly meta-textual, and it presents itself on the surface as if it were a faithful adaptation. I think part of the reason I connected with it so strongly is that it implicitly suggests a lot of the ideas that I’ve been thinking about lately, about how much of what we retain from art isn’t fully-intact narratives, but fragments of ideas and images, which themselves get mashed up, subverted, re-contextualized, and re-imagined over time.
And because it’s so provocative, and so subjective, and so demanding of interpretation, it’s already been divisive. Which I think is key to appreciating how deep it goes beyond “gorgeous movie about two really hot people.”
From what I’ve seen, complaints about the movie focus on three things:
The first one seems like the thorniest and most controversial, and also the one I’m least qualified to say anything about, as a white guy. But it’s also the one that I’ve been most surprised by.
I was initially sympathetic to it, since I had no idea that the character wasn’t white, and I’m a pretty strong believer in diversity in casting. And especially a believer in the idea that diversity doesn’t have to be defended or justified.
There’s a long-running argument — very often in bad faith, but not always, and my naiveté made me guilty of it in the past — that unless a character’s ethnicity, gender, orientation, etc was significant to the plot or themes of a story, then it was irrelevant. Which leads to “white straight male by default” and ends up with bland, homogenous casting that doesn’t reflect the real world.
But even in my own experience, I probably would have had a less-angsty teens and 20s, and an easier time coming out, if there had been more “unremarkably gay” characters in the media when I was growing up. Characters that don’t conform to one of a couple narrow stereotypes, whose tragic deviation from the norm doesn’t form the crux of the drama, who aren’t the sassy best friend. Just people who I could relate to.
So I was initially surprised to learn that Heathcliff was explicitly described in the book as being not white — it’s never said outright what his ethnicity is, but there’s the suggestion that he’s Romani — and disappointed that this movie ignored that. In favor of casting someone who is, again, unspeakably, unfathomably, hot.
I saw one video clip where the reviewer claimed casting Elordi was “stealing” a role from a non-white actor, and then went on to say that “this is Rue from The Hunger Games all over again.” Calling out Emerald Fennell personally6, for reading a book as a teenager and imagining one of the main characters as being white.
So I read more about the book, and watched more reviewers talking about their objections to the casting, and my impression — again, with the huge caveat that I haven’t actually read the book itself — is that Heathcliff’s ethnicity is actually used in a very 1847 way: to establish him as other.
The most charitable explanation I saw of why it was integral to the book is that it was important to establish how he was abused, degraded, and looked down upon by the white characters. Essentially, that there was an inescapable, vicious, cycle created and perpetuated by racism and classism: characters treated him as lowly and brutish even as a child, and those years of abuse made him brutish and uncultured as an adult.
This idea is in the movie — which, again, is a melodramatic story from the 1800s told with a modern sensibility, often anachronistically so — in a couple of ways. With Heathcliff himself, the idea is there, but it’s driven by class, not race. We see the bloody scars on his back, and the images of him as a long-haired, bearded wild man cleaning out stables. We can see how the physical abuse from Catherine’s father, the emotional abuse from Catherine herself, and the manipulative treatment from the both of them, decided what he was from the moment he entered the household, and drove him to become that, because he’d never known anything different. He was a beast, and a pet.
(Incidentally, I thought the movie did a particularly good job of showing how abusive cycles work. Both Catherine and her father would swing from abuse and degradation, to asking for sympathy or making empty, insincere requests for forgiveness, or simply forgetting or pretending that it never happened).
Significantly, the movie doesn’t ignore the question of race and ethnicity entirely, treating it as nothing more than a class issue. I haven’t seen a description of the character of Nelly that describes her as non white, but here she’s played by Hong Chau, an actor who I believe is Thai of Vietnamese descent. And her ethnicity is made significant early on, to show the parallel castes of both class and race. There’s the implication that she’s the illegitimate child of a nobleman, since she describes herself as a lady but is told that she’ll never be one.
In a crucial scene, she’s mocked by one of the white servants for being non-white, and in response she silently knocks a glass off the table, forcing the servant to have to clean it up.
And throughout, she’s casually dismissed, ignored, or othered by all of the white characters. They insist, explicitly or implicitly, that there’s a limit to what she can be and what she can hope for, and it’s perpetuated from childhood through adulthood.
Which is all to say that I can see both sides. If the movie had simply said, “In this version, everybody’s white, because race is irrelevant to the story. Deal with it,” then I would be a lot more critical. But I don’t love the alternative, either: insisting on preserving the idea that a character of unspecified ethnicity is some exotic play-thing for a (formerly) wealthy white woman, as the basis for a story about primal, toxic, inescapable passion. I like the notion that people will always find a way to be shitty to each other, even if race isn’t involved. And I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the idea of casting a character with the insistence that he be “hot and brown. Doesn’t have to be any particular kind of brown, but it’s still very important.”
And on the “diversity doesn’t have to be justified” front, there’s also a case of color-blind casting in the movie, too, by having the role of wealthy landowner Edgar Linton played by Shazad Latif, an English actor of Pakistani descent. I’m familiar with him from Star Trek: Discovery and as Clem Fandango in Toast of London. I thought it was especially interesting to see him here, since he’s another impossibly hot guy who’s just a little too old to play Heathcliff. But in this movie, he’s the genteel, posh, cuckold.
And, significantly, there are so many shots of him and Catherine having sex, to eliminate the idea that he’s neutered or asexual. I kept thinking of the image of him in Penny Dreadful, or playing Captain Nemo, and wondering “what the hell are you complaining about, Cathy?” You keep seeing the images of Catherine in the estate, being adored by Edgar and Isabella, and remembering her earlier line to Nelly that she’d be bored with heaven. The imagery is suggesting the romantic story of choosing true love over comfort and stability, but you’re never allowed to forget that for Cathy, it’s just as much about danger and about control. So much of why she wants Heathcliff is simply because she can’t have him.
Which leads to how the last two common criticisms I keep seeing about “Wuthering Heights” are basically the same thing: insisting that the most shallow and simple read of the movie is the “correct” one, that it clearly has to be taken completely at face value, and then criticizing the movie for being shallow because of that.
I don’t believe that there’s a “wrong” interpretation of a work of art, even if it’s the opposite of what the artist intended. Especially in something as subjective as this movie. But I do believe that it’s wrong, or at least arrogant, to ignore stuff that’s clearly in the movie if it doesn’t fit with your interpretation of it.
And there are signs throughout “Wuthering Heights” that it’s not to be taken at face value, and that it’s subverting the idea that it’s “one of the greatest love stories ever told,” no matter what the trailers say. In my experience, it was constantly showing me images that were sweeping me up and getting me really into it, and then demanding that I question why I was so into it. Kind of like asking why “civilized” people are cheering and celebrating at a man’s execution. Or for that matter, why we get turned on by boners, even though everybody gets them, even dead men.
One of the extended negative reviews I watched — in which the reviewer emphasized that she didn’t require an adaptation to be completely faithful to the book, and then spent the bulk of the review complaining about how it deviated from the book — faulted it for being boring, by losing everything that made the book deep and thought-provoking and choosing instead to focus on people “shagging.” (She’s an Irish reviewer).
And of course that opinion isn’t “wrong,” if that was her takeaway. And I said myself that I thought the last stretch of the movie was a drag, even though I was more bored by the burning-letters-in-a-fireplace than by all the sex. But it is disappointing not to even consider whether there was a purpose behind it, beyond having two of the most beautiful people in the world in the same movie and DTF.
I thought it was actually poignant that all the sex got boring and un-erotic after a while. You start to feel like Catherine in the mansion, having everything you want and it still not being enough. You can’t watch the scenes without thinking about how selfish they’re being, and how many people they’re hurting. I thought of being a teenager, getting swept up in the passion and danger and, yes, horniness; and then thinking back on that as an adult, and how unsatisfyingly reckless and ultimately boring it seemed. Kind of like a filmmaker fondly but critically re-imagining her own teenaged reaction to a story.
I’ll acknowledge that it’s entirely possible I’m missing out by not reading the book. I’ll never know, because I can barely make it through a synopsis before nodding off. The story that so many reviewers insist that Fennell should have adapted — even though several film adaptations already exist, enough to inspire an iconic, near-50-year-old pop song — sure seems to have a lot about wills, and estates, and inheritances, and children with the same names as the main characters, and the tedious Victorian story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure, and stuff that just doesn’t interest me as much as two very hot and toxic people being obsessed with each other, and possibly a ghost. It very much has the vibe of obligatory school reading.
One of the reviews I watched — from a reviewer that definitely has read the book, thank you very much — said that “Wuthering Heights” is “rage bait.” And that’s not entirely wrong; again, it seems clearly intended to be provocative. But it also implies a kind of crass manipulation that I’m just not seeing. I don’t feel that it was provocative simply to get attention, but to provoke audiences to think deeper about what they’re seeing.
Which isn’t to say it’s completely artistic and not at all crass. We’re in the age of viral marketing, and controversy has always helped drive attention to a movie. Not to mention that we’re in the age of “ENDING EXPLAINED!” videos7, and media criticism that has to be fast and attention-grabbing to ride on the back of a wave of popularity. Calling the movie “rage bait” is itself — partly at least, if not entirely — a kind of rage bait.
But the aspect of that particular review that stood out to me was when the reviewer was trying to justify her criticism. At its most simplistic level, it was another case of “Obviously I don’t believe an adaptation has to be faithful to the source material, but why wasn’t this adaptation faithful to the source material?!” (Even while repeating Fennell’s comment that it wasn’t even intended to be an adaptation, much less a faithful one). And the reviewer said, essentially, that ignoring or subverting the themes of the book, in favor of a style-over-substance version that turns a toxic relationship into a romantic one, was furthering media illiteracy.
That phrase “media illiteracy” was the part that stood out as depressingly ironic. For years we’ve been hearing that movies are getting increasingly tedious and commercial, with even promising (young female) artists getting roped into making franchise superhero movies, everything is feeding on its own nostalgia, and nothing is original or insightful anymore.
Then we get a screenwriter and director making something that engages with art in a way that I’ve never seen before, and the response is, “No, not like that.”
It’s disappointing to see such an insistence that there’s a predefined way to engage with art, there’s a limited set of things that movies can do, and there are well-established and predefined lanes to talk about class, race, and feminism, and deviation from those is at best problematic.
Or that everything of value in a classic book is contained inside the book itself, it was established in 1847, and we have to just keep mining it for deeper understanding. The best any movie can aspire to is expressing everything that’s already in the book, but in a different way. Excuse me, but I actually read this book, and I got an A for my book report, so I believe I understand it just a little better than you seem to.
And most bizarrely, people seem to find it easy to believe that Emerald Fennell wrote an entire screenplay, got it financed and produced, directed the entire thing, and did extensive marketing for it, all without sufficiently understanding a book that is assigned to teenagers in high school. But impossible to believe that they might not be understanding what the movie is doing on anything other than the most surface level.
Not content to simply say, “I didn’t like the movie, and here’s why,” it’s always the accusation that the movie fails to do something that the artist explicitly says she was wasn’t trying to do in the first place.
I’m not even particularly interested in defending a filmmaker or defending her work; it’s just that it’s so disappointing to see such a level of willful incuriousness. Leaving “Wuthering Heights”, after I got past swooning over Jacob Elordi, I was really excited by how the movie not only worked as spectacle — and spectacle of the kind I usually don’t go for at all — but also got my mind spinning in all kinds of directions.
It invites us to think about what we consider romantic, all the aspects of romantic stories that we take for granted. It raises questions about what makes a work “a classic,” why it so often gets assigned to students that have so little context for it, and how much we retain. It makes us consider how much of a work of art is locked inside the original work, and how much of it changes over time, each time we re-visit it, but even when we remember it in a new context.
And I think most interesting of all: it makes us think about how our interpretation of a piece of art can be so different between our formative years and adulthood. How we can reconsider the things we knew to be definitively true, and still love and show grace to that younger version of us, but appreciate how much our understanding has changed as we’ve gotten older.
2026-02-13 09:30:43
Last night we went to Appleseed Avenue, a puppet-themed escape room in Santa Clarita, California, and it was an absolute blast. I knew coming out of it that it was easily one of the best I’ve ever done, but the more I think about how well-designed and -executed it is, the more impressed I am with it.
It takes groups of four or more humans, traveling from the human world to the puppet world via the Puppet and Human Association of Recreation and Transportation. (Pronounced “pea-heart,” just as you’d expect). It’s one of the last chances to do so, because Lee DePuppet, the current mayor of Puppet Town, plans to shut down the connection as soon as he’s re-elected, and break ties between humans and puppets.
You’re split into two teams, visiting the office of either the chief detective or medical examiner, to learn how they solve crimes in Puppet Town. (Before you enter, you’re warned that you’ll also have to take over in the event of a real murder, but the odds of that happening are so low, it’s hardly worth mentioning).
Obviously, Appleseed Avenue is inspired by the Muppets, but it isn’t an official Muppets production; it’s by a very small independent team. So I was really impressed by just how much they got the tone exactly right for an escape room aimed at adults.
I’ve never seen Avenue Q, or any of the Brian Henson takes on “adult Muppets,” because no matter how much funny material might be hiding inside, they’ve already lost me as soon as I hear the pitch. The gag is always they’re puppets, but they swear and talk about sex and violence and shit! Can you even believe it?! I supposed it’s possible that all the edgelord stuff is just in the marketing, or on the surface, but it seems so lazy that I can’t be bothered.
So I immediately appreciated that Appleseed Avenue doesn’t try so hard. They know that you’re already on board with the concept when you come in, and that puppets are inherently funny and charming. They don’t need to blow your mind with how shocking and outrageous they can be.
And as a result, everything feels like it’s nailing the vibe in the best Muppets stuff — constantly dancing across the line between corny and clever. Taking the concept “what would a murder mystery in the puppet world be like?” and running from there, instead of, “how edgy can we make these things?”
You do get to interact directly with a few of the puppets (along with several seen in video or on posters), and it all is a ton of fun and relentlessly clever. The experience is never, ever, above making the corniest pun possible, usually in the names, but it’s always in service of a really fun and engaging story.
It felt1 to me like they took the opposite route of the “edgy Muppets” stuff I’ve seen, not trying to shock you with how far they can take these cute characters, but using the cute characters to take the edge off of a Law & Order/CSI-style murder mystery and add some humor to it.
Every bit as impressive is how the experience design solved a lot of my biggest problems with escape rooms.
One of the most persistent problems that can dull one of these experiences is quarterbacking. It’s rarely the fault of the person doing it; it’s just a side effect of throwing a bunch of disparate personalities into a space with time pressure and an agenda. Some people are just more outgoing than others.
But by physically dividing up the spaces, they made it so that everyone gets to play according to their own style, but nobody gets entirely left out. The teams are initially put in separate rooms with no communication with each other besides an intercom, and you’re immediately given a task to compete against the other team. (We got the recommendation to split up couples across the teams, which I think was definitely a good call).
And the space you’re exploring is divided up, so that individuals can — and likely, have to — go off and look for clues on their own. It seemed that everybody in the group got to have the a-ha! moment where they found an essential clue.
There were also plenty of world-building details scattered throughout, along with several red herrings in the puzzles themselves. They had the effect of making the entire experience feel bigger than it actually was. It was a satisfying story that had a few moments that required actual deduction, but it wasn’t so complicated that we ever got stuck or ran out of time. Instead, there was always the suggestion that there’s a ton more out there than the small part you’re seeing.
I was really surprised to see the entire experience credited to just two people, since nothing about it felt small or amateurish.2 It feels like a city street crammed into a small space, and the rooms you spend the most time in have the most details.
I’ve done several escape rooms where you can tell that the designers were particularly pleased with a certain gimmick or a certain effect, and it draws attention to itself. Here, there are pieces of tech and show design scattered throughout, and they were done exactly right. Computer screens that drive everything, “scanners” that feel fun and silly but still sell the effect, sound and music played through speakers mounted throughout. And little touches and details that didn’t need to be automated, but the effort was well spent, like the dial that shows you transitioning from the human world to the puppet world.
The only reason I say Appleseed Avenue might be the best escape room I’ve ever done is because the Palace Games in San Francisco are so impressive. They have some that transform the entire space, with a genuine wow moment in every one that I’ve done.
But I can say definitively that Appleseed Avenue is the most fun I’ve ever had doing an escape room. Charming, funny, and clever throughout, with some fantastic story moments that were played for laughs but genuinely tense at the same time. Exactly my sense of humor, with exactly the right kind of puzzles that feel funny, clever, and perfectly integrated into the story.
I recommend it without hesitation to anyone even slightly interested in escape rooms or immersive entertainment. Even if it takes a drive to southern California to do it! The only people I’d not recommend it to are those who’ve never done an escape room before; I honestly do think it’ll set your expectations too high for any one you did afterwards.