Wuthering Heights' shocking 'BDSM' dog collar scene explained
The eagerly anticipated Wuthering Heights adaptation by Saltburn director Emerald Fennell hit cinemas last Friday (13 February), and it's already made headlines all across the globe.
For starters, there was the whole 'skin room' thing, the 'fish-fingering' scene and, of course, copious amounts of finger-sucking, but it was the shocking 'BDSM' dog collar scene which really got film lovers talking online.
The latest adaptation has been dubbed an 'intoxicating' take on Emily Brontë's classic 1847 novel of the same name, starring Aussie A-listers Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw.
The dog collar scene features Elordi and Alison Oliver, who plays Isabella Linton, the younger sister of Edgar Linton - AKA the bloke that Cathy marries despite being head over heels for Heathcliff.
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Anyone who's read the book will know just how increasingly infatuated Isabella becomes with Heathcliff, seeing him as a romantic hero she can 'fix'.
Contrastingly, Heathcliff despises her and marries her, using her purely as a tool in his revenge against Cathy for marrying Edgar.
Cathy's maid, Nelly (Hong Chau), visits Heathcliff and Isabella at Wuthering Heights where she finds the latter chained up to a fireplace sporting a dog collar around her neck.
Elordi, Oliver and Fennell have since sat down with Entertainment Weekly to share further details on, arguably, one of the most shocking scenes from the movie.
"That was so much fun, that scene. I think that was Emerald kind of taking the killing of the dog and these really dark parts of the novel and putting them into this scene," Elordi explained.
He went on: "I had so much fun because it’s at that point that Isabella and Heathcliff are completely off the deep end. They’re living in a kind of hell, you know?"
"For him, it’s a self-generated hell," the A-lister continued. "It’s the moment that his obsession clicks over into something else - into a rabid desperation - and he loses any semblance of composure. It’s a nice point for the character, I think."
Despite such unsettling acts of power play, it's clear that Heathcliff's efforts come to no avail as he is not able to capture Cathy's attention.
"You can see it in his face when it’s Nelly at the door, and it’s not Cathy," he told the outlet. "And it’s not working anymore, and the joke is over, which means it’s real, you know? And they have to face it."
Chiming in, Oliver, who starred alongside Elordi in Saltburn, recalled speaking with Fennell about where her character's head was at during the scene.
"I remember her saying something really interesting about like, 'Because [Isabella's] actually quite a repressed person, and because she's been so infantilised, anything that is repressed, when it comes out, it's messy and unorganised,'" Oliver said.
"And 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."
She worked alongside movement director Polly Bennett to really execute Isabella's performance, spending an entire day on set testing out different techniques until they found one that best highlighted Heathcliff and Isabella's 'very complicated and strange' dynamic.
Cinema-goers will no doubt remember the sinister cheeky wink Isabella gives Nelly during the scene, which was, apparently, totally unscripted.
"We'd been shooting this scene all day, and I was like, 'What if we just get a little wink at the end?'" Fennell said. "And it's so camp, and it seems so out of sorts, but, of course, it was what we kept for the movie because it was so disturbing [and] because it was so at odds with what we were seeing, and yet it really explained everything."
Fennell went on to note that the dialogue in the scene was lifted almost 'verbatim' from Brontë's seminal text.
"That scene in the book, I think that's the reason why [Wuthering Heights] was eviscerated when it came out because I think it was just so shocking to people," she explained.
"Because there's so much in what happens there that is… very, very complicated. Very transgressive - even for now, it's shocking. And, obviously, I visually added some things to that scene, but it is almost all Brontë."
In the book, when troubled heartthrob Heathcliff comes back on the scene, a naive Isabella falls deeply for him, ignoring Cathy's warnings about his brutish temper and believing she could be the one to 'fix' him.
Similar to the film, Heathcliff then marries Isabella in an attempt to hurt Cathy, telling her from the outset of his intentions, and that he despises her.
He isolates her from her family, traps her inside the walls of Wuthering Heights, and openly mocks her before his staff. He is violent towards her, and despite Victorian conventions, Brontë heavily alludes to him emotionally, physically and sexually abusing her.
Eventually, after Heathcliff hangs her beloved pet dog, Isabella escapes while pregnant with Heathcliff's child. This is also around the time that - spoiler alert - Cathy dies giving birth to Edgar's daughter.
Whilst Fennell's adaptation of the film does portray Isabella as somewhat subservient to her increasingly unhinged husband, a number of fans of the original book have accused producers of fetishising their marriage, slamming Fennell for portraying what Brontë undoubtedly intended to be an example of a cruel, coercive marriage, as something of a kink.
By the end of the film, viewers learn nothing of Isabella's future. She is neither pregnant nor fleeing. In fact, after Heathcliff rides quickly to Thrushcross Grange to visit a dying Cathy, we see nothing of Isabella.
Tyla previously contacted Warner Bros. for comment.
Wuthering Heights is available to watch in selected cinemas
Topics: Cinema, Books, Sex and Relationships, Social Media, TV And Film, Celebrity
Rhiannon Ingle