Some like it hot

Hot ??. I saw those words under a post showing the poster for the latest adaptation of Wuthering Heights, directed by Emerald Fennell, which opens on February 14. A lot of the discussion online has been focused on casting choices, anachronistic costume design and adaptational changes (like many other Wuthering Heights films, this version seems to only cover half of the book). There is enough material in this novel and its adaptations to write hundreds of papers about race, culture and feminism. What’s Heathcliff’s ethnicity? Are he and Cathy secretly brother and sister? Does Heathcliff allow an outlet for the emotions that Cathy should normally repress, and thus functions as a literal double?

 We could talk a lot about all that, but I want to go back to that single word, hot, and the little icon of a pepper next to it. Because Wuthering Heights is many things, but it’s not explicitly sexual. It is however incredibly sadistic, and I have to admit it’s been amusing to see more than one person panicked at the discovery that this is very much a Gothic novel with capital G.

Anyway, Heights is rather cool on the erotic meter. And it’s not because it’s a classic and people would not include mentions of sex in older books. In Madame Bovary, we are privy to two affairs. In Far from the Madding Crowd Bathsheba essentially tumbles into a pit of lust when she falls for Sargeant Troy. Thérèse Raquin decides to murder her husband with the assistance of her lover, but only after much secret sex.

Here’s a quote from that novel: “Suddenly, the painter turned and found himself face to face with Thérèse. They gazed at each other for a few seconds. Then, with a violent movement, Laurent bent down and took the young woman against his chest. He forced her head back, crushing her lips under her own. She had a wild, impetuous, rebellious movement and, all of a sudden, she gave in, sliding on the ground, on the tile. They didn’t exchange a single word. The act was silent and brutal.”

No such scene takes place in Wuthering Heights. Elizabeth Hardwick says it “is a virgin’s story. The peculiarity of it lies in the harshness of the characters. Cathy is as hard, careless, and destructive as Heathcliff. She too has a sadistic nature. The love the two feel for each other is a longing for an impossible completion. Consolations do not appear; nothing in the domestic or even in the sexual life seems to the point in this book.”

I agree with Hardwick. Wuthering Heights is a harsh, unyielding novel and its yearning remains unfulfilled. Not so in the 2026 film. “It’s, like, primal, sexual,” said Fennell, discussing her adaptation.

It struck me, looking at the words ‘hot’ and the poster for this film and the interviews with its cast and director, that what they have done is not rare. Movies have long strived to bring what remains abstract, or simmers under the surface, to the forefront, making it explicit. When it comes to yearning, the obvious answer is to have a sex scene on screen.

Yet the books that I consider to be the most devastating, yearning narratives you’ll ever read lack this element. Take The Age of Innocence where Newland longs for the Countess Olenska. “Each time you happen to me all over again,” he says. Despite his great passion Newland and the Countess never consummate their relationship. In Ethan Frome, the titular character longs to run away with the woman he loves but does not have the guts to act on this impulse. As Victoria Patterson points out, “Ethan and Mattie’s fatefully doomed sled ride resembles passionate, reckless sex — the kind they had denied themselves previously. ‘Her breath in his neck sent him shuddering,’ and he ‘leaned back and drew her mouth to his…’ Then ‘her blood seemed to be in his veins.’”

Although Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, released in 1993, stays faithful to the novel leaving things at a kiss and unfulfilled longing, the film adaptation of Ethan Frome released the same year includes a sex scene.

Thinking back on these adaptations made me wonder what can and cannot be expressed on screen these days. The addition of a sex scene in Ethan Frome is likely practical: it is difficult to describe an obliterating passion without nudity on the screen. It’s a shortcut, an easier understanding of passion.

At the same time, I remembered the times I’ve stumbled upon online discussions where readers ask for books that have “yearning,” often requesting older books, as if yearning has evaporated in recent year. Note: I don’t think it has, though things ebb and change and certain modes of storytelling fall in and out of fashion.

Hot and not. Explicit and implicit. I do not think there is a formula to tell a story, to adapt a book. But I do think it’s interesting to see how directors can struggle to bring the abstracted desires in certain works into film and the present day.

In The Age of Innocence, the lush colors and epic cinematography, layered with a voice over narration, serve to embroider emotion on screen. Meanwhile, the 2011 Wuthering Heights film adaptation, directed by Andrea Arnold, strips it all back. Its stark, grim, and conjures intimacy by moving at a slow pace, showing us Catherine and Heathcliff as children, clambering upon the moors.

One of the Criterion Channel’s themed selections for this month is titled ‘Yearning’ and features, yes, The Age of Innocence. “The exquisite ache of longing suffuses these at once melancholy and intoxicatingly romantic visions of heartbreak, unrequited love, and forbidden passion that luxuriate in the overwhelming pull toward a connection that feels all but impossible,” says the description for the showcase.

So, if you’re one of those persons who wants some yearning may I direct you to the Criterion Channel? Aside from screening two versions of Wuthering Heights this month, including the 2011 one, you can also watch Maurice, a sumptuous Edwardian drama about two men who fall desperately in love with each other, and the delicious 1993 adaptation of The Age of Innocence.