Tag: movies

When you have a crush, anything and everything can remind you of them. Such is the case in Wuthering Heights with Cathy (Margot Robbie), who sees her desire for Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) made manifest by various goos, oozes, and slimes found on the Yorkshire moors. There’s little subtlety about Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, so she stuffs her film with all sorts of substances designed to remind the viewers that this is a very moist, succulent, sticky story. There are myriad mucks at play, but not all gloop is created equal. Here are Wuthering Heights’s collective slimes, ranked by how much they seem to turn Cathy on.

9. Pig’s blood
There’s no pretending that pig’s blood is hot. During one of her tantrums, Cathy walks by Heathcliff and other hired hands slaughtering a pig, the blood flooding the courtyard of Wuthering Heights. The blood seeps up the edges of her white skirts — that’s going to be hellish to try to get out. Despite the fact that she brushes up against Heathcliff in attempting, and failing, to avoid the blood, the image does not really linger as one of Cathy’s hornier moments.

8. Leeches
Okay, Cathy isn’t actually conscious when she’s being bloodletted, but Fennell is determined to make us at least try to draw some sort of sexual implication between the leeches all over her face (and the flesh-colored walls of Cathy’s bedroom) and her rapidly decomposing body. Are leeches a goo? Well, kind of. They squirm and flop in a bowl next to her bed, making them one of the film’s wetter contributions. They’re sexier than blood itself, but only just.

7. Snail goo
One of the more artful shots in Wuthering Heights features the clearish mucus of a snail trailing along a window. Because we’re not immediately sure what we’re looking at, the shot is initially one of the film’s more subtle moments — before it’s revealed that, ah, yes, here is another wet substance Cathy is looking at while she thinks about what it would mean to smooch Heathcliff. The snail slime doesn’t seem to actively turn Cathy on, but points for originality here.

6. Rain
Precipitation might be Wuthering Heights the novel’s most canonical liquid as Northern England is a place where basically every single person and living creature is vitamin D deficient. It’s not so much that the rain turns Cathy on but that so many of her most intense interactions with Heathcliff (a.k.a. make-out sessions) occur right as the sky has opened up.

5. Spit
Heathcliff spends a lot of time straight-up licking Cathy’s face in this movie. It would be pretty hard not to be turned on by that, but it’s far from a surprising image, especially when compared to …

4. Whole-fish aspic
Who are you or I to say that people in 18th-century England weren’t eating some kind of whole fish preserved in clear jelly? Maybe that was everyone’s favorite food. As Cathy starts to succumb to boredom in her marriage of convenience to Edgar Linton, she daydreams doing … something by sticking her hand into an aspic that contains a whole fish, her index finger dipping into its mouth the way Heathcliff used to do to her.

3. Cathy’s, um, secretions
Fennell’s tendency to shock us only lightly comes (sorry) into full effect when Cathy steals off to the moors to masturbate against a giant rock, overwhelmed by her feelings for Heathcliff. Her beau-to-be follows her into the fields and sneaks up on her, stumbling over a rock at the last possible moment, disrupting what might have been her first actual orgasm. Cathy goes to wipe her fingers on her skirt, but Heathcliff instead grabs her hand and puts her fingers in his mouth. Here, the goo is more implied than actually seen, but in a movie full of sexualized fluids, this is definitely the most literal and the most explicit.

2. Egg yolk
If Wuthering Heights has anything resembling a running joke, it’s that Cathy and Heathcliff place eggs in each other’s beds as a kind of sticky prank. It’s less that the eggs turn them on and more that Fennell is committed to showing us both actors’ fingers wading through yolk. The role of the eggs isn’t to arouse Cathy, at least not directly, but the crack of the shells when she sits on them late into the film is the unmistakable sign, to her and the audience alike, that Heathcliff has returned after disappearing for a number of years. This goo is a promise: They can’t rid themselves of each other no matter how hard they try.

1. Bread dough
The morning after Cathy and Heathcliff spy on Joseph (Ewan Mitchell) and Zillah’s (Amy Morgan) kinky stable tryst, Cathy loses her composure at the breakfast table watching a very wet dough (focaccia, maybe? But in England?) being kneaded over and over again. The kneaded dough, stretched and pressed, played a big role in the teaser trailer for Wuthering Heights, and long after the lights came back on in the theater, it remains the most memorable embodiment of Cathy’s horniness: a sticky, squishy mess.