“Wuthering Heights” as initiation

Ross Douthat, Whatever Happened to Grown-Up Movies for Kids? NYTimes, Feb. 24, 2026.

What Douthat has in mind is “telling grown-up stories in a fashion suited to the ages between, say, 10 and 16.” He goes on:

What I want is emphatically not more Y.A. culture or “tween” books or Marvel sequels. Rather I want more adult culture that’s accessible to early teenagers, that presents grown-up themes without being explicit about everything, that feels like a bridge connecting childhood and adulthood rather than a young-adult detour or a jarringly coarse acceleration.

For example:

What I want is emphatically not more Y.A. culture or “tween” books or Marvel sequels. Rather I want more adult culture that’s accessible to early teenagers, that presents grown-up themes without being explicit about everything, that feels like a bridge connecting childhood and adulthood rather than a young-adult detour or a jarringly coarse acceleration.

He then goes on to contrast the novel, Wuthering Heights, with the current movie version:

which has been framed by its director, Emerald Fennell, as an attempt to channel her own experience encountering the Emily Brontë novel as a teenager. For Fennell that means not just giving us masturbation on the moors but also sexualizing every inch of the story, every cracked egg and kneaded loaf of dough, just as a hormonal teenage mind might do.

But that’s not what the Brontë novel offered to her teenage-reader self. It told a story in which sexuality is a potent force but not a pornographic one, in which extremity is everywhere but obscenity is not, and there are undercurrents and implications that the younger reader can grasp in part and the adult reader more completely.

“Wuthering Heights” the novel initiates, in other words, where “Wuthering Heights” the movie browbeats. And that feeling of initiation is what neither explicit R-rated entertainments nor the Y.A. fiction/superhero complex can really offer: a sense of encountering a world that’s fully adult but that makes allowances for innocence and inexperience, and that can be grasped provisionally with the promise of a greater understanding later on.