Wuthering Heights dog collar BDSM scene sparks controversy after book change
Wuthering Heights topped the box office over the weekend, raking in a massive $82 million worldwide as it became one of the most successful films of the year so far.
The Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi romantic film has made headlines for some of its racy scenes, particularly one involving the pair which was being talked about as potentially being ‘even more shocking’ than Saltburn’s viral bathtub.
Surprisingly though this isn’t the scene that’s been the most talked about since the film came out, but one involving Elordi’s Heathcliff and Allison Oliver’s Isabella.
The movie follows the book in having Heathcliff retaliate to Robbie’s Catherine marrying someone else as he marries the impressionable Isabella.
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The pair’s relationship is bizarre and toxic, with Nelly finding her wearing a dog collar and sat on all fours as Heathcliff insists she ‘likes it’ as he tells her to ‘stay’ and she gives a manic smile.
Wuthering Heights completely changes the source material here, showing their relationship to be one of shared depravity as opposed to the book’s focus on her trauma and abuse from Heathcliff.
This BDSM-heavy scene has sparked furious online criticism, leading some to go as far as to call it ‘misogynstic’ in the major changes it makes from the book.
Wuthering Heights' BDSM dog collar scene is going viral for all the wrong reasons
One post which praised Oliver’s performance in the film sparked the debate, with a viral quote tweet saying: “Turning an abused wife into some sort of BSDM sub has to be next level in terms of misogyny.”
Another post said: “Tore to shreds what the character was supposed to be. A survivor of abuse and single mother reduced to an s&m roleplay enjoyer barking on command for her husband... we're not giving Emerald Fennell enough lashings for this.”
In Emily Brontë’s novel Heathcliff is far more complicated and outright abusive, with her being a victim in his revenge plot against Catherine for spurning him.
Add to this the fact that he hangs her dog in the book and you’re left with a pretty massive departure in this scene.
Not everyone has been critical of this change however, with one tweet from film critic Erik Anderson saying that Allison Oliver is ‘fantastic’ in the film adding: “As a character, gets full agency of her choices at pretty much every turn, one of the best changes from book to screen.
“The negative responses to this tweet are fully mental.”
How else does the film change what happened in the book?
One of the major changes from book to screen, which hugely effects the framing of both Heathcliff and Isabella, is the removal of essentially the second half of the book.
In the second half of the book Heathcliff continues to torture Catherine’s daughter, who survives as opposed to dying as she does in the movie, and his own son who many read as being the product of Isabella being raped or co-erced by him.
Emerald Fennell however has defended her decision to make some pretty major changes from the book.
Quotes from the director stating it had quotation marks, making the title “Wuthering Heights”, because it was how she ‘remembered reading the book’ previously went viral, but is not all she has said on the subject.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the controversial writer-director said of the changes: “I think, really, I would do a mini series and encompass the whole thing over 10 hours, and it would be beautiful.
“But if you're making a movie, and you've got to be fairly tight, you've got to make those kinds of hard decisions.”
Other major changes from the book saw the exclusion of the book’s narrator, Heathcliff and Catherine’s older brother, and controversially casting white Australian Jacob Elordi as what many read to be a non-white character.
Speaking about the scene in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Allison Oliver stated that she had worked with movement director Polly Bennett to work on her canine performance in the scene. She also recalled a conversation with Fennell in which she explained it, saying: "I remember her saying something really interesting about like, 'Because [Isabella's] actually quite a repressed person, and because she's been so infantilized, anything that is repressed, when it comes out, it's messy and unorganized.' She's in a very unknown, strange, different place. A lot of that was just playing out the mess of the new place that she's in."
Wuthering Heights is available to watch in cinemas now.
Topics: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Film, TV and Film, Sex and Relationships
Michael Slavin