I’m familiar with Fennell’s work and her background as a former actor from an upper-middle-class family (her family used to holiday with Andrew Lloyd Webber), who has successfully moved into filmmaking. I took this context into account when watching her interpretation of Emily Brontë’s novel. Despite its box office success on release earlier this year, it has been widely panned by critics for various reasons, including the apparent whitewashing of Heathcliff, which distorts a core tension of what has made the book endure for so long. One Letterboxd reviewer put it bluntly: “Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis 177 years ago yet this adaptation is still the worst thing that has ever happened to her.” This film is simply erotica dressed up as a love story.
In 1975, Susan Sontag wrote “Fascinating Fascism”, an essay in which she took aim at silent-film-actor-turned-filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, arguing that, in the making of Nazi propaganda films such as Triumph of the Will, she exploited the tools of cinema to seduce the viewer. “Fascinating Fascism” covers other Riefenstahl works, including the photography book The Last of the Nuba, which clearly wasn’t state-sponsored propaganda, but was, Sontag argued, “continuous with her Nazi work”. What I’m drawn to is the argument about fascist aesthetics that Sontag made in relation to Riefenstahl’s films, which she describes as “epics of achieved community, in which everyday reality is transcended through ecstatic self-control and submission”.
I kept thinking about ecstasy and submission after watching Wuthering Heights, and how captivating it is to the viewer. Sontag wrote that fascist iconography carries a seductive visual power that operates independently of ideology:
In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a “spiritual” force, for the benefit of the community. The erotic (that is, women) is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse.
The aesthetics of power, hierarchy and the erasure of the individual, Sontag argued, can produce erotic as well as political responses, and those two responses share a common structure: beauty and domination are entangled in fascist art.
Fascist aesthetics are also obsessed with race. As Sontag wrote, Riefenstahl’s Nuba portraits evoke “some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and mental, the joyful and the critical”.
In Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, this choice is illustrated by the decision to change the brown ringlets of Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw to Robbie’s very blonde version on screen. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has argued that “blonde” has come to signify whiteness without being explicit: “We use ‘blonde’ (and if to a lesser extent ‘brunette’) to signal that someone is white without using a racialized term like ‘white’. It may also be more: a signifier of a type of white person.” [...]
Nostalgia is another signifier of these politics. The choice to yet again adapt a 19th century novel that has had at least eight adaptations is a curious one. Brontë wrote the book at the end of the Industrial Revolution, a period of significant social and economic transformation. That context sits at the heart of the novel, and defanging it is telling. In 2011, another Englishwoman remade Wuthering Heights, in a film that captures the brutality of that period and the tension at the heart of the novel. In Andrea Arnold’s rendering, Catherine is a brunette, Heathcliff is Black and the Yorkshire moors are anything but sentimental.
Robbie, who is also a producer on the latest incarnation, dismissed the criticism the film received, arguing at a panel event at the Sydney Opera House: “I consider audience always. I’ve never, ever been on set and thought, What are the critics going to think of this? I’m like, what’s an audience going to feel right now? What’s their emotional response going to be? I just believe you should make movies for the people who are buying the tickets to see the movies.”
While I respect her honesty, I do wonder if seduction is what audiences need at this moment in history. Because what the audience is asking for, and what Fennell’s Wuthering Heights delivers with incredible visual precision, is exactly what Sontag identified half a century ago: the eroticisation of domination. The pleasure of surrender to a force larger and more overwhelming than oneself. The landscapes are cinematically breathtaking, Elordi is shirtless, Robbie gorgeous in the costumes. This is a film that is concerned with vibes and wants to seduce its audience with this imagery.
Again, Sontag wrote that fascist aesthetics “flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behaviour, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude … Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.”
While people watching films and clips on social media may not be thinking about these things, those creating them understand the power that images have in myth-making, and that they are not neutral. [...]
In Fennell’s adaptation, audiences are given a visually stunning film layered with nostalgia and a sense of collective identity, all centred on a work of major cultural significance. Rather than encourage people to question the very structures Brontë was seeking to analyse in her novel, the movie brings people together to engage in the spectacle of a romance stripped of its politics. Love is an enduring narrative that many can relate to. For the film’s duration, moviegoers are seduced and don’t feel powerless at a time when the world outside is so overwhelming.
Those who enjoy films such as Fennell’s (much like those readers who have made the “romantasy” genre a billion-dollar publishing industry) are not fascists, nor are they passive or unsophisticated. They are largely online, politically aware and living through a moment of profound institutional decline. The old structures of economic security, political legitimacy and faith in the future have all but failed. What capitalism is offering them is what Benjamin diagnosed: aesthetic expression in place of structural change and maintaining the status quo.
Neither Fennell’s Wuthering Heights nor romantasy novels will dismantle racism or classism, or lower the price of petrol. If anything, they reinforce heteronormative gender roles and hierarchies. But they do offer audiences something politicians are incapable of: a temporary reprieve from the madness of the world for two hours or so.
The fantasy of submission, whether to a lover, a racial identity, a landscape, the algorithm or even a political force, is essentially the fantasy of being relieved of one’s responsibility to the world. The audience does not want to be in control; it wants to surrender it completely. And exponents of fascist aesthetics, as Sontag argued, have always understood this with uncomfortable precision.
Viewers whose algorithms are tuned to “tradwife content”, “glow up” trends and “soft life” escapism, or reading romantasy books and watching Wuthering Heights, aren’t being recruited or radicalised. They are being distracted and comforted as they live through these tumultuous times.
This is what art can tell us about something it pretends to be unaware of. It is for future historians to give language to the aesthetics that will come to define the art that speaks to the politics and ideology of these times. But right now, it is worth remembering that good art reflects back our humanity, and shows us the world in its truth. (Santilla Chingaipe)
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