'Pop culture was in art / now art's in pop culture / in me'
- Lady Gaga, Applause
'When it comes to character in general, I don't think any of us are nice. I just don't know anyone nice. Not anyone I know well. I don't think I'm nice.'
- Emerald Fennell, Vanity Fair
Emerald Fennell is trying to kill you. She is coming to your home to wrench all that you love from your quivering hands, to mash it amongst her sick, perfect teeth. She is unsuitable, lacks tact, stood astride the Yorkshire moors with a lighter in one hand and petrol in another, here to burn everything around her, melting culture into nothing. The classics will never be the same again. Emerald Fennell is a mean director who has come to ruin everything.
Film criticism has never been more personalised and more reliant on the sway of internet discourse than it is right now. At the same time, there is a real struggle to place modern cinema within an artistic context. Our grasp of genre and style becomes a series of comparative lists - 'here are the films that inspired Celine Song's Materialists', 'here is a (now deleted) list of films Margot Robbie used when working on Barbie'. Tropes are not implemented in service of plot, but rather whole scenes and iconography are lifted from elsewhere and placed into a different movie. Every modern genre piece becomes an exercise in proving your knowledge of the genre, flaunting the expectations of the audience by frequently denying them the catharsis of a story that is competently told.
In his 2007 book on pastiche, Richard Dyer argues that the deliberately imitative approach to art seeks to 'confirm, delineate and at times even bring the genre (back) into being', an affirmative process as opposed to an innately destructive one. Pastiche becomes a way of re-introducing audiences to concretely identifiable tropes, especially in times when the sturdy genre piece has become nebulous, or even ceased to exist in the soup of art stuff. It is 'always and inescapably historical', according to Dyer, and comes about due to different, often tessellating, reasons, such as previously inaccessible works becoming available to the public, 'heightening a sense of the variability of ways of doing things', as well as the permeating feeling that an artistic movement is 'coming at the end of an era'.
We can't blame Quentin Tarantino for this mode of filmmaking, as much as we may want to. He is not solely responsible for a post-modernist approach to cinema, but it would be naive to say that his refusal to be read in an 'artistic vacuum', as David Roche put it in his book Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction, hasn't had a huge impact on the extent that cinephiles have become the new generation of filmmakers, and as a result, movies have become a series of intertexts overlapping. If there are no new narratives, as post-modernism argues, then our movies will be a mixture of high and low art, smashed into one, with references there to signal themes and genre, rather than stand on their own as confident authorial statements. Fennell is absolutely a proponent of this mode of cinema and she's not alone. In the horror space, for example, her contemporaries include Coralie Fargeat and Osgood Perkins, and in more artsy circles, there are filmmakers like Anna Biller, Amanda Kramer and Bertrand Mandico.
Still, Fennell draws more ire than all of them, most simply because she is able to attract an audience of cinephiles and layman alike for the hate watch, for the eye-roll, filling out cineplexes with people who wanted to be there to say they watched the massacre of art as it happened, but will vehemently deny they had a good time. Her films transcend the cinema screen into discourse, turning movies into moments into eventual cringing at why you cared so much about such an empty thing. Fennell creates maximalist chewing gum - you love it for its flavour and you don't expect it to be a meal that keeps you full.
For me, her work can be catergorised as "multiplex pop pulp", drawing on the disposability of pulp narratives and the thievery of mainstream culture that was prominent in the Pop Art movement. Pulp as entertainment is far from new, and has been a part of the fiction ecosystem since before the beginning of the 20th century. According to Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson's book, Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines, the cheapness of the paper necessitated the cheapness of the story; the artists and writers of the stories in these magazines were 'prized for their ability to depict action and strange or horrifying scenes'. One sub-genre of pulp that circulated in America around 1912 was known as the 'girlie pulp', which would often publish stories about pre-marital sex, would include illustrations of nude women and was peppered with risqué humour. The pulps published around this time often avoided depicting actual sex but would always include a romantic angle, flaunting the conventions of good taste at the time. Most importantly though, many of the authors and editors in these magazines were women.
Pop Art, a movement that originated in the 1950s and 60s, was a response to both abstract expressionism and the post-war explosion of popular culture. It revelled in the commodification of culture and deliberately did not seek to transform its subjects but rather close the gap between art and real life. Lawrence Alloway stated in a key essay on this movement, The Arts and Mass Media that 'stylistically, technically, iconographically the mass arts are anti-academic' and that the topicality of this kind of art was far more attuned with the 'variables' of modern life than the fine arts, which are often held in high regard as 'a repository of time-binding values'. No longer was the artistic gaze reliant on a nebulous internal realm that could only be conveyed through the successful expressions of meaning through the deliberate brushstroke. As Tony Scherman argues in his article on the Pop Art movement for American Heritage, 'pop argued that the world was worth looking at—and it won the argument'.
There is this lingering pressure as a female artist to be emotionally galvanising and "authentic", so deep in the ground that your work must only be read as autofiction, a version of yourself spewing onto the page, onto the screen. This wry distance Fennell holds, her willingness to indulge in plastic and insincere aesthetics, in false and unrelatable characters, is something that greatly appeals to me. It is also something people despise about her. Her liberation of the existing aspects of other texts and the refusal to give them the reverence they seemingly deserve makes her a target for people who have been trained to attach massive amounts of their identities to fictional creations.
Promising Young Woman is not a rape revenge film. Beyond surface level nods to the genre, rarely does it conform in unseating the audience with graphic depictions of sexual violence and then equally graphic violence against its perpetrators. Fennell instead uses the mould of this genre to tell a story about obsession and self-harm. Cassie spends most of the movie voiding her personality in an attempt to wholly embody the values of pop feminism, becoming a scold skulking in the shadows to intimidate men into good behaviour.
Here, Fennell creates overbearing poppy, millennial pink interiors about performing, and whether women ever get to stop. Cassie often mugs for the camera, her gaze steady and penetrating. She will stand barefoot in the street with ketchup running down her arm, staring at the men until they leave her alone because she is so cool. Except she's not cool. She's thirty with no friends or relationship, living at home with her parents, enacting the same tedious ritual of justice every night with no meaningful way of knowing if it's helping any of the men she is trapping and lecturing. She ends her nights alone, smug but empty.
Cassie has sterilised her humanity to become whichever persona is required of her. As a result, she is unable to see the worth in human relationships, becoming a vessel for righteousness and nothing else. When she does let her guard down and begin trusting that things could be okay, Fennell spins her world sharply, waking her up with the noxious thought she has known the whole time. Cassie is right about people, and every fear she allowed herself to be vulnerable to comes flooding in at once. Everything that could go wrong has. What is left except the vessel?
As an audience, we never get confirmation that her actions do anything. The ending of this film would suggest that she succeeded, that she sacrificed her life for the cause. But what cause? All she succeeded in was divesting herself from reality, becoming the only woman left who remembers what happened to her friend, Nina. Cassie invests her energy in becoming an infinite memory. The horror of this film for me is that the sly emoticon wink that ends the movie holds no weight to it. She was just murdered. She succeeded in nothing. The rape revenge film becomes nothing but a translation of imagistic violence, happening just off screen. You don't get the rape, and the revenge is meagre and state-controlled.
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Saltburn is not an 'eat the rich' film. It's a film about the strain assimilation has on one's patience. Oliver reads his assigned reading list, wears the uniform correctly and uses 'thus' in all the ways that smart, rich people are said to do, and still, he sticks out like a sore thumb. He did everything was supposed to do and yet, he is on the outside looking in, desiring to wield the sadism that has been needling his skin. He is the only one clutching his side, holding his organs in, whilst his peers lounge in the pleasant summer heat.
Fennell asserts almost to the point of exhaustion that the people admitted into Oxford are not smart and are not the most deserving. They were simply born correctly and fit their skin well. This film has been described as a vampire story, but I think it's closer to being that of an alien who simply cannot pretend to be human in the right way because the walls to the upper classes are simply too high and cannot be knocked down. Instead, Oliver must stealthily scale the heights, allowing anyone in his way to drop beneath him.
Oliver witnesses how the Cattons repeatedly and viciously discard those who are no longer useful to them, all the more upsetting because it is hidden beneath a noxious British politeness. Along comes Fennell to explode the respectable, restrained export of British aesthetics, peeled off to show the world. Pamela is murdered off screen and is accused of seeking attention. Farleigh is cast out, despite being family, because it is easy for them to believe that he is responsible for Felix's death. Venetia comments cattily that Oliver's appeal is how 'real' he seems, an ironic statement that only becomes funnier on rewatches, but the deliberate construction of his identity doesn't actually void his attachment to reality, as he seems to be the only one able to manipulate this family on their own terms. He slips through the net because he is hovering above them, not wriggling beneath their feet.
Still, in spite of the seemingly triumphant ending of Saltburn, there is a dissonance between how Oliver speaks and how the camera portrays him. He is often lurking, watching, off to the side, not mastering the narrative but glomming onto it. His schemes are not without reasonable anguish, and Fennell is unwilling to admit that he is a simple villain motivated by greed. His desire is bodily and desperate. Felix is not just an identity to subsume. He should be the object of lust that validates Oliver's humanity, something Felix refuses to be.
Fennell has repeatedly created what I would call "the pathetic avenger". Both Cassie and Oliver speak directly to the camera in monologues about their righteous anger, their twisted schemes, as if to convince us (and themselves) that their plots towards loneliness and bitter rumination are worth pursuing. Both characters live empty lives, wholly dedicated to addictive passions, moving towards a goal that is death or an empty house. Pop politics are used to display the hollowness of aphorisms and the horrors that lie beneath our inability to process our pain externally.
"Wuthering Heights" is not an adaptation. As with her previous films, Fennell uses the genre piece as a launch pad for her interpretation of their tropes and the limitations they have in conveying reality. Responding to her own connection to the source text, Fennell heightens and flattens the aspects based on what she finds useful and what she feels can be discarded. She is god. She is a scavenger. Literally using the font from the poster of a lost 1920s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Fennell announces immediately that her work is historical, not because of its accuracy but because it is pilfering from history, looking for parts. Much like Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein, which also received a fairly mixed reception with audiences, it's an adaptation that is in conversation with every adaptation that has come before it, imbued with the specific flourishes of each filmmaker. For Del Toro, it's monster fucking and daddy issues. For Fennell, it's transgressive sexuality and resentment.
Reminiscent of a bodice ripper book cover, Jacques Demy's Donkey Skin and a Baz Luhrmann film, Fennell uses these signifiers to forgo a simple retelling and upends the idea that genre cinema can be anything except its tropes. Fennell commits the cardinal sin of not holding literature itself as an untouchable, reverential object, but rather a part of culture to played with, moulded and usurped to fit the cultural moment and authorial voice. She entwines herself with her text, along the intertexts, and uses them as a language to convey her specific relationship to genre. More than this, she insists that the classic literary text is not above the low brow dick joke. In many ways, Fennell is referential to everything except the source text itself, acknowledging outright that she could not capture the universal feeling of something held in such high regard. And so, she heightens the artifice and turns it into a pop object, a little dollhouse as a gift for her teenage self.
Catherine Earnshaw, as Fennell writes her, is petulant, spoiled and entitled, insisting on the love of her fantasy object brother surrogate, Heathcliff, whilst never granting him the honor of personhood. Their connection is based within this power imbalance. When Cathy insists that she and Heathcliff are the same person, have the same heart, she is stating that a heart can easily be discarded with the promise of privilege. Her life as a rich woman is static and tedious, and is maintained by her refusal of the truth that she is flesh. Her sexual desires are offset to the lower classes, acted out as a performance for her so they can be held at a distance and then denied to maintain this static image of herself.
Because the film embodies the erotic novel, one that specifically prioritises its lead female perspective, all other characters become sucked in and razed by the central romance, which is ultimately translated as a desire for ownership that rich white women have been encouraged to feel entitlement over. They can't own land after all. They must be given an outlet. Heathcliff is the outline of a man that the actual character will not submit and squeeze himself into, made all the more bleak as even his transgressions against Cathy's power are positioned as erotic. With this subtext in place, it is curious that an actor of colour wasn't cast to play this character, as the simplifying of the text in this way wouldn't have detracted from a fascinating depiction of racial hierarchies, even if they were modified in Fennell's re-writing of the novel. Still, despite being criticised for reducing key characters to collateral in a story about annoying white people, Nellie and Edgar, the two characters of colour in Fennell's rendition, are the only rational parts of this version. Perpetually irritated and unwilling to placate the feelings of this obnoxious woman-child, their actions would only read as villainous, as has been argued by critics, if the audience were to misread Cathy's interpretation of reality as rational and grounded, which Fennell refuses to allow.
Emerald Fennell makes joyously, often unintentionally silly films, with characters who take themselves far too seriously and perform angst that is both tactile and painful. She loves a twist and is willing to crater any tension she has built to skip straight to the momentous ending, a booming soundtrack and a giant full exclamation mark before cutting to black. She is acutely aware that the favour of the audience is in high demand and slippery, and chooses to jump over their wishes in favour of her own, what gives her the most pleasure, even if it is sadistic, illogical, plagiaristic and rage inducing. Her work sticks in your teeth for long enough to irritate but is also easily pried out by a sharp fingernail. She loves pop, its aesthetics, its topicality and its shiny surfaces, and slides right off them directly onto the screen.
*
Further Reading:
Wuthering Heights (2003, directed by Suri Krishnamma)
Wuthering Heights (2011, directed by Andrea Arnold)
Romeo + Juliet (1996, directed by Baz Luhrmann)
Addison Rae, Diet Pepsi (2024, directed by Sean Price Williams)
Jasmine Vojdani, Is Heathcliff White? | Vulture