Every generation gets the Wuthering Heights it deserves. This weekend, we get ours: Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” quotation marks hers, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as a version of Cathy and Heathcliff who love to hide raw eggs in each other’s beds as kink. The movie has been the subject of all sorts of discourse for what feels like years, ranging from its casting (can Robbie, 35, play a teen?) to its racial politics (“Is Heathcliff white?”) to Fennell’s filmmaking (“Is Saltburn stupid in a good way or a bad way?”) to whether Fennell careens unforgivably outside the bounds of the beloved Emily Brontë book by adding things like bedrooms wallpapered with human-skin-approximating latex, furious masturbating on the moors, and Charli XCX. On Thursday afternoon, as the movie opened across New York City, I visited various theaters to experience said discourse in the wild, to understand what was drawing actual people to actual theaters on opening day (Elordi, Robbie, Fennell, Brontë, or skin walls), what various subcultures of New Yorkers thought of Fennell’s film, and how horny everybody was feeling in general.
