Earlier this year, the author Maureen Johnson was fighting with Anthropic.

Specifically, she was wrestling with the Anthropic copyright settlement website. 

Johnson is the author of 18 books, most of them YA and many of them bestsellers. The AI company Anthropic owes her an estimated $3,000 per book (to be split 50-50 with her publisher) for several of them. The payouts are part of a first-of-its-kind settlement that was handed down last fall, in which Anthropic admitted that it downloaded millions of pirated, copyrighted books to train its AI models without authors’ permission. (According to the New York Times, “As part of the settlement, Anthropic said it did not use any pirated works to build A.I. technologies that were publicly released.”) A judge found that the use of those books without authorial permission constituted fair use, but the piracy did not. Similar suits are pending against Meta and OpenAI. (Disclosure: Vox’s Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic; they don’t have any editorial input into our content.)

The class-action lawsuit was intended to even the playing field between individual authors and one of the most valuable companies in the world. To distribute the money to authors, Anthropic and the plaintiff’s lawyers worked with a claims administrator (a company that specializes in managing compensation claims) to set up a website that authors can use to access a small piece of the record-breaking $1.5 billion payout. 

But Johnson, like other authors who spoke to Vox, quickly hit a snag: The claims site is glitchy and unreliable, forcing people to jump through endless hoops to collect the money they’re owed. By March, she had already submitted claims for her 14 eligible titles twice, spending 90 minutes each time to painstakingly fill out the forms. 

Now, the claims administrator was telling her they couldn’t find either of her entries. They escalated her through several layers of management, each of whom repeated the same thing. 

“It was getting more and more surreal, how little this system worked,” Johnson said.

Eventually, Johnson connected with an employee who she said spent the entire call giggling. He told her that he had found her first claim submission from February, but not the new one. 

“This system is really fluky,” Johnson said she told him. “It’s just not well-programmed.”

In response, Johnson said the employee giggled again. “Coding is hard,” he told her.

Johnson is not alone in her frustrating experience. Authors had six months to register their claims for Anthropic’s payout, and a lot of them struggled to do so.

Anthropic regularly touts its ethical and philanthropic bona fides. (The company is here to serve humanity’s long-term well-being! It’s the safe and responsible AI company! Claude helped NASA’s Perseverance rover travel on Mars!) But the good it is doing is based on stolen work — and the people who created that work are having trouble getting the very small recourse that they are owed.

“Everyone agrees it’s not the best data.”

All of the popular large language models were trained on books; that was the only way to get them enough high-quality text to start generating their own. Most of those books were downloaded from pirate libraries, in at least one instance on the grounds that it would simply be too expensive to pay for each title. As it became increasingly clear that this was the case, the class action lawsuits began rolling in.

Bartz et al. v. Anthropic PBC was the first to be settled. In September 2025, a judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and the nearly half a million writers it had determined belonged to the class. Things got tricky, however, when it came time to determine who those half a million writers were.

They had to be authors of books that appeared in one of the three pirated databases Anthropic used in 2021. But trying to create a comprehensive list from those databases proved difficult. Anthropic hadn’t created its own records as it fed pirated books into its training corpus, so lawyers on both sides had to rely on the pirate sites’ own data. And they had to do it quickly, because the trial came with strict deadlines. 

“It’s, like, crowdsourced pirate library metadata,” Dave Hansen, executive director of the advocacy group Authors Alliance, told Vox. (Authors Alliance has filed amicus briefs in the Bartz case and published extensive technical explainers for authors.) “I wouldn’t rely on that for almost anything, much less administering legal claims in a large and important lawsuit. But that was kind of the best that they had given the data sources being used.” 

“I think everyone agrees it’s not the best data, but it’s the best that they could do on the time frame,” publishing industry reporter Jane Friedman told Vox. “I think it was just the reality for class counsel. The judge was really expediting matters, and so they did the best they could in the time that they had.”

Neither Anthropic, its lawyers, the class counsel for this case, or the claims administrator responded to a request for comment from Vox. But it appears that the plaintiff’s lawyers and the claims administrator worked together to narrow down Anthropic’s starting list of 7 million books to only titles that were under US copyright in 2022. 

“Then they used a bunch of other industry sources to enrich that data so that they had more information about current publishers, and then used that to generate contact info,” Hansen said. “At that scale, it’s really hard to get 100 percent accuracy.” He added, “One of my bigger criticisms of how this settlement and process has gone is the data. They just haven’t been very transparent about it.”

From there, the claims administrator and class counsel used that wonky list to build their glitchy website, which is how Maureen Johnson eventually found herself on the phone with a giggling man who told her coding was hard. Other authors were in a similar boat.

“I have 19 titles in the database,” said Christopher Moore, the author of zany comedic novels like  Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Best Friend. After he had done the paperwork for 18 of them, he had to walk away from his computer. When he came back the next day to finish the paperwork for the 19th book, everything had been deleted. 

A month went by after he submitted the form a second time, Moore said. “And I got another notice: what about these other titles?” Most of the titles belonged to one of the four other Christopher Moores working as authors. One was actually his, Moore said, “but it showed it with some weird Texas copyright.” He filed the claim anyway and is still waiting to hear back. 

April Henry, who writes YA mysteries, also found unusual copyright holders on her books. “One of the books on the list appeared to be an audiobook and showed the narrator as one of the copyright holders,” she said.

Meanwhile, she is struggling to figure out how to handle the seven of her 22 books that she wrote with a co-author. “No one ever had it in their contract that you’re going to split the rights to a legal settlement,” Henry said. “You know what I mean?”

And as authors struggle to navigate the claims process, they’re doing so with mixed emotions.

“That’s not a lot for your entire catalog.”

Johnson is still furious about her experience with the claim administrator’s website. “Your AI monster ate all of our work,” she said, addressing Anthropic. “Now you’re trying to pay us off with this […] piece of garbage that doesn’t work.”

For many authors, the money didn’t seem like enough, considering that their life’s works had been taken without their permission. The full settlement of $1.5 billion sounds like a lot. But split among so many copyright holders, it doesn’t go all that far. There’s also the fact that the $3,000 number is just an estimate of what authors’ payouts will eventually look like. In reality, there is a flat amount of cash available for the class, and the more people participate in the class, the smaller the pot of money available for everyone involved gets. 

“When you think $3,000 a book times 22 books, you’re like, ‘I get $66,000,’” Henry said. But then there’s the money that goes to the publishers, and any money that goes to a co-author. “In some cases, it’s going to end up being like $500 a book,” Henry said. “At first you’re like, ‘What a windfall!’ But it doesn’t seem like a windfall.”

“For me, it’s an entire career, and it’ll come down to under $30,000,” Moore said. “That’s not a lot for your entire catalog.” 

Then there’s the question of what the new world Anthropic helped build with all those stolen books will look like for authors. “We have no idea what the long-term damage of this is to artists,” Moore said. “I’m on the downhill slope of my career, so there’s not that much that they can take from me. But if someone’s strong in the middle of their career, they could really be hurt by this.”

On May 14, the settlement will receive a fairness hearing, where the judge is set to review a number of author complaints, including what they describe as “inadequate compensation relative to the damage.” 

In the meantime, Anthropic remains one of tech’s biggest players, currently valued at $900 billion. According to the industry headlines: “Anthropic’s Claude claws its way towards the top of the AI market.”

Correction, May 6, 2 pm: This story originally misstated the number of books Maureen Johnson has written; it is 18. 

The new biopic Michael, about the tortured King of Pop, had a record-breaking opening weekend — despite the fact that the film celebrates the musical legacy of Michael Jackson, a man credibly accused of sexually abusing multiple children. 

After the success of the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, it was tempting to think that there was a permanent asterisk next to Jackson’s name. Advertisers stopped using his music, and The Simpsons pulled his episode from syndication. Now, however, Leaving Neverland has been wiped from HBO after legal finagling from Jackson’s estate, and Michael is an enormous hit. We have clear proof that audiences are ready to put that unpleasantness behind them and instead embrace Jackson’s inarguable musical genius.

Some audience members have doubtless made the calculation that with Jackson long dead, the accusations against him are distant, too, leaving them with no particular ethical reasons to deprive themselves of the pleasure of seeing a Michael Jackson concert recreation on the big screen. (“Forget what the ‘professional’ critics are saying theyve completely missed the mark on this one,” begins one audience review on Rotten Tomatoes. “If you want to experience the magic of the King of Pop, this movie delivers.”)

Other Jackson defenders have decided that Jackson was innocent. TikTok is full of videos laying out the basics of the case and asking “Guilty or innocent?”, with the majority of commenters saying “innocent.” “The world owes Michael an apology” is a sentiment that pops up a lot. 

Then there’s a variation on that defense, rooted in the long, ugly history of racism in the criminal justice system in America. Some of his defenders — including Michael director Antoine Fuqua — believe that Jackson was unfairly smeared by a system looking to bring down a successful Black man, in the same way that so many other Black men have been wrongly accused and maligned before.

“When I hear things about us — Black people in particular, especially in a certain position — there’s always pause,” Fuqua told the New Yorker. He added that an early cut of Michael showed Jackson brutalized by the police over the course of their investigation, “being stripped naked, treated like an animal, a monster,” before it was excised from the film for legal reasons. According to the New Yorker, he doubts the intentions of some of the accusers’ parents and says he doesn’t know whether the allegations are true or not. 

“This may sound like an excuse, but what many don’t understand is how hard it is for older generations to square what has so often happened in the past — the fear that society is just tearing down another good Black man — with the reality that these men could have been, or are convicted of having been, harmful,” wrote Nadira Goffe for Slate, in an article about Jackson’s loyal older Black fandom. 

Talking about Michael, then, requires pitting two marginalized groups against each other: Black men and abused children, neither of whom is served by the American justice system. It makes discussing the case even sadder and harder than it already is.

To be clear, the case against Michael Jackson really is extraordinarily strong. At least 10 people have publicly accused Jackson of sexually abusing them as children, in remarkably consistent and detailed stories. Only one accusation resulted in a criminal trial, in 2005, and Jackson was found not guilty. That, however, is par for the course when it comes to child sex abuse cases, even those in which the accused adult doesn’t have millions of dollars to spend in their defense. A 2019 study shows that fewer than one in five of all child sex abuse cases lead to prosecution. Of those, about half result in a conviction. 

On the rare occasion that there is a trial, it is almost always a bad experience for the child at its center. There are persistent myths about how child sexual abuse — that children will always have physical injuries, that they will immediately tell an adult, that they can be manipulated into lying about accusations — that affect how their allegations are perceived. A 2017 study of defense tactics in child sex abuse cases found that “just as women are met with doubt when they report sexual assault, the justice system remains skeptical of children’s testimony.” Their mothers are often blamed for allowing the abuse to happen. In Jackson’s 2005 trial, his defense lawyer sarcastically referred to Jackson’s child accusers as “these little lambs,” suggesting that they were involved in “the biggest con of their careers” against Jackson. 

At the same time, there’s a reason that a story about the American state attempting to take down a Black man at the top of his game resonates so deeply. It’s based on the real problem of how our criminal justice system treats Black people: unjustly. 

According to the ACLU, Black people in the United States are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans, while one in 81 Black adults in the US is serving time in state prison. There is also a long, long history in this country of Black men being falsely accused of sex crimes. That was the stated reason for the unjust imprisonment of the Scottsboro Boys and the Central Park Five, the racist murder of Emmett Till, and thousands of monstrous lynchings. You can understand why someone would look at this history and cry foul.

But boys and children of color — the alleged victim in the Jackson case that made it to trial in 2005 is Latino — face unique barriers when they are sexually assaulted. “As Black and racially minoritised children are located at the intersection of multiple, overlapping structural inequalities, their specific experiences of victimisation are still largely overlooked in the criminological literature,” writes Aisha K. Gill, a professor of criminology and co-editor of the book Child Sexual Abuse in Black and Minoritised Communities. Both racism and culture affect whether they are believed and the support they receive.

All of these numbers and statistics and sad moments in American history represent groups of people whom the justice system bludgeons with the law as though it were a weapon, who are routinely humiliated and rarely protected. To put them in opposition to each other is a dark and uncomfortable thing. It is far, far easier to watch a glorified concert film of Jackson’s greatest hits and bask in the glee of it. But an honest reckoning with Jackson’s legacy would require facing the strength of the evidence against him, darkness and all, and not looking away from it.

Lena Dunham, the subject of a thousand 2010s think pieces about whether or not she is problematic, has re-emerged from behind the curtain with her new memoir, Famesick. But this time around, the think pieces look different. Some of them are mea culpas addressed to Dunham. 

“We owe Lena Dunham an apology,” declared Rachel Simon in a story for MS Now. The apology came with a caveat: “Dunham is, and always has been, a flawed figure. But she never deserved our hatred, nor the expectations placed on her to get everything right.” 

“I was wrong about Lena Dunham,” proclaimed Sonia Soraiya at Slate. Soraiya argues that Dunham’s nervy, uncomfortable magnum opus Girls “activated” her own self-loathing, and that she and other critics of the era took it out on Dunham. 

“I was one of Lena Dunham’s haters. I want to say I’m sorry,” wrote Dave Schilling at The Guardian. Dunham’s memoir, in which she writes vividly about how her early fame destroyed her mental and physical health, had Schilling rethinking the way he used to write about her. “Rarely did I think about the adverse effects of society turning her into a Wicker Man-style totem for us to set on fire,” he wrote. “To a lot of us, she stopped being a person and transformed into a symbol. I can’t think of anything more unfair.” 

In Famesick, Dunham writes that the intensity of the public conversation about her when Girls premiered in 2012 exacerbated her chronic illness, which would be eventually diagnosed as endometriosis plus Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. The combination of the stress of fame and the stress of chronic illness drove her into an opioid addiction and self-destructive behavior, which would further fuel the discourse about her. 

Even in the 2010s, at the height of Dunham’s fame, it was fairly evident that a number of the outcries over Dunham’s public presence were overblown. Now, with the distance of 15 years, and Girls reclaimed as a piece of important art, some of those controversies appear remarkably stupid. We should not have been so cruel to her, the consensus is developing, and we would not have been, had she arisen at any other historical moment. 

With Dunham’s redemption cycle, we’re performing a sped-up version of the discourse cycle that saw the public reexamining the misogynistic witch hunts of Monica Lewinsky, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, et al. in the 1990s and 2000s. It’s become clear, with the distance of 20 years, that the gossip press of the 2000s was driven primarily by misogyny, occasionally dressed up as concern trolling. Now, the oft-unspoken villain is cancel culture, the slew of social media shaming and chiding that became such a virulent force at the same time that Dunham was coming up in the 2010s. Apologizing to Dunham becomes a way of apologizing for and repudiating cancel culture, making the case that we are no longer in the cancel culture moment.

But 2010s cancel culture was a different beast than 2000s purity culture. The tactics of social media dogpiling and calls for deplatforming were sometimes misdirected at, say, recipe writers who misspoke in an interview, but they also helped push forward the Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter. Defenders of cancel culture used to say that it was less about canceling the sinful than it was about holding the powerful to account for their misdeeds — but it wasn’t always clear who was powerful enough to be worth targeting, and which misdeeds were all that bad.

Dunham, as the showrunner of a conversation-driving television show, had a fair amount of power, as well as a knack for saying the wrong things in public. The questions before us now are: Was anything she said in public bad enough to justify the treatment she received? And, by extension, just how destructive was cancel culture, really? 

Cancel culture emerged from a specific moment in history that would be difficult to replicate. First, social media democratized discourse; suddenly elites were vulnerable to criticism by regular people in the public square. It also divided people into teams and made everyone angry all the time. 

This was also the era of blogs — Gawker and its sister site Jezebel; The Awl and its sister site The Hairpin; Salon, Slate, and many more — which were so fun to read and so hard to work at. Blogs were content mills that needed to be fed. The key metric for digital newsrooms at the time was how many clicks any individual story got, which incentivized quickly written hot takes about polarizing figures who sparked audience outrage. 

Meanwhile, the educated class was rapidly shifting the norms of acceptable public behavior and belief systems toward the left. In the post-Gamergate, post-Ferguson, post-Obama culture wars, everything must be understood as expressive of the shift in these norms, to be analyzed and evaluated for its fidelity and virtue. At its best, it was a valuable refocusing that helped people reprocess the hegemonic beliefs about the world they had inherited. It could also, at its worst, be reductive. Cancel culture was a tool that held the powerful to account. It was a weapon that punished disproportionately. It was bipartisan, vicious, frightening, bewildering, exhilarating. 

Confessional-style women’s blogging was also in its heyday in those days — all the XOJane “it happened to me” stories, the Jezebel tampon posts — which were so prevalent that their gravitational pull warped any piece of fiction about the intimate lives of women, including Girls, into being understood as a confession. As such, it was evaluated religiously, praised for its radical political transparency, damned for its sins.

Of all the people who were canceled in the 2010s, Lena Dunham was surely not the most deserving. She was the young showrunner of a critically acclaimed but little-watched HBO drama, with most episodes garnering well under 1 million viewers. How much influence could she possibly have wielded? But Girls became something bigger than itself; sometimes it felt that every one of the few hundred thousand people who watched it were writing essays about it. 

Some of that criticism was straightforwardly misogynistic: People wrote angry screeds about how much they hated Dunham because she was naked on her show a lot and they thought she was ugly. Some of it was in bad faith. Dunham’s Girls alter ego, Hannah, was abrasive and entitled, and in the discourse, the distance between them collapsed. People were furious at Dunham for making them watch a character as unlikable as Hannah. 

A great deal of the criticism of Dunham was plausibly in good faith, but it was extraordinarily loud. There was the criticism that Dunham and all the young women she cast were nepo babies. Then there was the way Dunham’s real-life presence sometimes evoked the same clueless arrogance as that of the character she played. Part of that involved her saying a lot of thoughtlessly provocative things, many of which displayed a consistent obtuseness toward class and race.

To begin with, Girls was set among young people in diverse Brooklyn, and yet all the main characters were white: Why? Some argued that Dunham’s blinkered, privileged characters were exactly the type of young New Yorkers who would surround themselves with other white people, while others argued Dunham’s refusal to engage with race was a sign of racism in and of itself.

Dunham responded with a characteristic mix of reason and hamfisted trollery. “If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African American, I feel like — not that the experience of an African American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn’t able to speak to,” she told NPR in 2012, after the first season aired. “I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can’t speak to accurately.” 

Dunham was right that the charm of Girls lay in its specificity, and it was reasonable for her to fear that she couldn’t bring that level of sensory, bodily detail to the life of a Black character. But the following season, she followed up the controversy by casting Donald Glover as Hannah’s short-lived Black boyfriend, who was revealed to be a Republican — a strange creative choice that tokenized what was, at that point, the show’s sole Black character.  

In the meantime, outside the show, Dunham kept making unforced errors. “I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had,” she said on a podcast in 2016. In 2019, she described sitting next to the NFL star Odell Beckham Jr. at the Met Gala, and feeling insecure that Beckham, who is Black, didn’t seem attracted to her. “The vibe was very much like, ‘Do I want to fuck it? Is it wearing a…yep, it’s wearing a tuxedo. I’m going to go back to my cellphone,’” Dunham said. Theoretically she was talking about her own insecurities, but in practice, the quote was so specific and bizarrely sexualized (truly the Lena Dunham story) that critics argued it played into a harmful narrative about how Black men respond to white women. (Dunham later apologized.)  

While the criticisms of Dunham’s body and nudity were straightforward misogyny, the criticisms of her oversight around race were more reasonable. Still, few of them merited the intensity of response Dunham received in the 2010s: not just the polite and well-reasoned essays, but the vitriolic and unending Twitter posts accusing her of monstrous bigotry and evil thoughts. In some cases, it felt as though the social justice outrage around Dunham’s racism were giving cover to people who hated her because they thought she was ugly and annoying, like right-wing commenters who claim they’re criticizing white women as an act of allyship with people of color.  

In Famesick, Dunham declines to apologize for any of her missteps — save for what was probably her greatest controversy: her 2017 defense of a white Girls writer accused of raping a Black woman.

In 2017, at the height of the Me Too movement, actress Aurora Perrineau filed sexual assault charges against Girls writer Murray Miller, saying that he raped her in 2012, when she was 17 years old. In response, Dunham and her Girls co-showrunner Jenni Konner sent a statement to the Hollywood Reporter defending Miller.

“While our first instinct is to listen to every woman’s story,” they wrote, “our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.”

“I believe in a lot of things but the first tenet of my politics is to hold up the people who have held me up, who have filled my world with love,” Dunham added on what was then Twitter.

For an outspoken feminist like Dunham to accuse a woman of lying about her sexual assault, on the grounds that the man accused was someone she knew, was a betrayal of some of her most clearly stated principles. To make matters worse, the accused man was white, and the alleged victim was a woman of color, playing directly into one of Dunham’s biggest weaknesses.

In Famesick, Dunham describes her decision to publish this statement as “the narcissism of fame in its purest form.” 

“I was so deep in my own distress — physical, emotional, existential — that I had ceased to be able to imagine anyone else’s,” she writes. She also says that the response went out the same day she returned home after a full hysterectomy, high on pain killers, under pressure from Konner, and she doesn’t remember drafting it. 

Every time I read this apology, I find myself going back and forth on it. Dunham sounds genuinely contrite — but then Dunham always does sound genuinely contrite in all her apologies, which never seem to end. 

The medical context from which she was writing her original statement sounds almost unimaginably difficult. Dunham evokes the physical and mental pain of the hysterectomy with brutal efficiency, likening her disease-ridden uterus to “the Chinatown Chanel purse of nightmares, full of both subtle and glaring flaws”; one of her doctors tells her later that he doesn’t know how she was able to keep walking. I am reluctant to tar someone forever for a poor decision made so soon after the trauma and pain of major surgery. 

Yet there is also a slippery manipulative quality to the way Dunham writes about this statement, a subtle passing of blame. Konner becomes the chief agent in Dunham’s version of events, the woman of sound mind and sound health who pushes the fateful statement on a woozy, dissociating Dunham and supposedly publishes it over Dunham’s mother’s protests. Such villainous, boundary-crossing, ill-intentioned figures recur throughout this memoir at some of Dunham’s lowest moments: suddenly, we encounter people who whom Dunham tells us are cruel or unempathetic in a way she says that she is not. 

“It is in these moments that I felt unsure whether Dunham is a victim or a narcissist,” wrote the essayist Eleanor Halls in her review of Famesick; “the truth is you can be both.” And isn’t it always both with Lena Dunham?

Knowing everything we do about Dunham, it feels reasonable to decide that she has crossed the line too many times and you are done with giving her second chances. It feels reasonable to conclude that you don’t want to pay attention to her public persona but are willing to give her consistently high-quality TV work another try. And it also feels reasonable to decide that you are willing to allow her the grace of her apology, even with caveats. 

That, in the end, is where I end up. Dunham has a compelling voice, and I find that she hasn’t done anything so appalling that it interferes with my interest in seeing what she does next.  

Part of the reason so many people are invested in parsing out how bad Dunham is or was, and how much she deserved her treatment in the 2010s, is because it is a way of working out by proxy how much we collectively need to feel ashamed of cancel culture. In the midst of the vicious backlash to progressive politics that supposedly led to Trump’s reelection, there’s a growing sense among many progressives that the eager, ugly, censorious glee of cancel culture was a tactical mistake, that it alienated supporters, that it was even immoral.

Looking back at Dunham’s career, though, reveals that cancel culture never went along any particular party lines. It was misogynistic: It attacked women with a specific glee, particularly women like Dunham, who was considered ugly yet still took her clothes off on TV. It was also feminist: Dunham’s biggest wave of backlash came after she defended an accused rapist whose accuser was a Black woman. 

Cancel culture was an expression of what was new and exciting about both social media and digital media, and also what was monstrous and destabilizing about them. It was a tool used by people on both sides of the political aisle, and also people who did not identify as political at all. It devoured people like Lena Dunham, and it was also a source of attention she seemed to court, provoking and trolling and apologizing in an endless cycle of discourse. 

Dunham was in the unique position to understand both the panicky horrors and the perverse thrills of cancel culture better than nearly anyone. Like the people apologizing to her, she, too, doesn’t seem to know if it was all that bad — only that she wishes it had not been so bad to her.

You come into a movie based on Wuthering Heights with certain expectations.

Emerald Fennell has been clear that she considers her “Wuthering Heights” — pointed quote marks and all — to be a fantasia, not a straight adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. “It could only ever be an attempt to take a tiny piece of the book and make sense of it,” she said in a recent interview. Still, as a matter of basic fact, Wuthering Heights is a story of passionate, obsessive love between two monstrous sadists, and Fennell’s version of the story is so very showy about how sexy and dark it plans to be. So you would think that the tiny piece of the story she’s trying to make sense of would be the part about the sexy sociopaths in love.

Fennell’s film opens with the sounds of a body writhing in what the audience at first believes to be sex, but soon learns are actually death throes. Its ostentatiously perverse production design is filled with rooms wallpapered with flesh-colored leather, complete with veins and moles; long, lingering closeups of moist slug trails; characters outfitted in full red latex skirts or transparent cellophane drapery. It is a film that palpably wants to be thought of as kinky — a storytelling mode that should mesh nicely with Brontë’s bleak, merciless world. 

Brontë punishes her readers for even liking her characters. Its most charismatic and compelling characters, the doomed lovers Heathcliff and Catherine, are also two of its greatest monsters. Feral and violent, Brontë’s Heathcliff and Catherine ruin lives and inflict wanton amounts of pain for the sheer sport of it all, but they also love each other overwhelmingly, ferociously, enough to tear down the world all around each other. Reading about them, it’s both difficult to wish them well and impossible not to feel that they really should be together. That contradiction is what creates the tension that powers the reader through this brutal, bleak book, with all its misery and squalor.

Yet puzzlingly, Fennell chooses to delete this source of tension from her version of the story. Her Catherine and Heathcliff are beautiful blameless horndogs, to the point that they resemble the lovely personality-free characters in Nicholas Sparks films, beset by tragedies for which they hold absolutely no responsibility. Fennell neuters her monsters, and that is the one fault from which Wuthering Heights can never recover.

The perverse power of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff and Catherine do not begin their lives as villains. In Brontë’s novel, they are first neglected children. Catherine is the spoiled daughter of a wealthy, isolated family on the English moors, and Heathcliff is the racially ambiguous foundling her father brings home from a visit to the city. At first, the pair live as brother and sister; they are educated together and, after their lessons, run across the moors like animals, considering “the after punishment” to be “a mere thing to laugh at.” But after Catherine’s father dies and her brother Hindley takes over the house, he jealously demotes Heathcliff from fellow brother to servant, leaving him uneducated and impoverished. 

The tragedy of the novel all unspools from that first act of abuse. When Catherine comes of age as a member of genteel society, she decides that although she loves Heathcliff, she cannot marry him because he is socially below her. Instead she marries a rich but weak man who she can dominate and control. At the same time, she covers up her intense and passionate nature, ensuring her fits of rage only ever happen at strategically chosen moments. 

Heathcliff, heartbroken, disappears for three years and then returns mysteriously rich, polished, and determined to exact his revenge. He drives Hindley into an alcoholic depression that eventually leads to his death, and then takes custody of Hindley’s house and child and sets about degrading each as vividly as possible. He marries Catherine’s sister-in-law and abuses both her and their child. A mere hundred pages into the novel, he has become so sadistic that he is strangling a puppy with a handkerchief. 

Catherine, in her turn, is violent with her servants, her husband, and her sister-in-law whenever she feels she can get away with it. She eggs Heathcliff on, delighting in his rages. “He’s more myself than I am,” she says, meaning, among other things, that all the monstrous urges Catherine must hide and sublimate in herself, Heathcliff is free to enact. After Catherine dies, Heathcliff goes to great lengths to draw her daughter into his clutches, where he can rage at her. 

By the time Catherine and Heathcliff are adults, they are so palpably awful that it is difficult to care for them at all. But Brontë dares you to keep reading, lavishing her most beautiful prose on these wretched, miserable people. “Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” Catherine says of Heathcliff as she resolves not to marry him. “Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad!” cries out Heathcliff to Catherine’s ghost after she dies. 

There is such vitality to their characters that the story goes flat on the page whenever they are not there, terrorizing everyone around them. They are the reason the world of Wuthering Heights is so awful and oppressive, and the contradiction between their passion and their cruelty is what makes the book dynamic and unforgettable. Without that tension, it would never have remained beloved or relevant for long as it has. 

Blaming Nelly Dean

In Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” the great monster is not Heathcliff or Catherine, or even Catherine’s brother Hindley. (Fennell chooses to combine Hindley with Catherine’s father in a perfectly reasonable consolidation of characters.) It’s Catherine’s maid, Nelly.

In Brontë’s novel, Nelly Dean is one of the central narrators. She grows up with Catherine and Heathcliff and works as a maid in Catherine’s house after her marriage, with a close view of all the horrors that are enacted there. We learn Catherine and Heathcliff’s tale because Nelly is recounting it to Heathcliff’s new tenant, so that the whole novel becomes one story nested inside another, in a sort of matryoshka doll of trauma.

Nelly, tartly sensible and with little tolerance for her employers’ dramatics, is ostensibly one of the few sympathetic characters in a novel containing precious few of them — Charlotte Brontë described her as “a specimen of true benevolence and homely fidelity.” But there’s an ambiguity to her storytelling that has led some readers to consider her an unreliable narrator, and perhaps ultimately the villain of the whole piece. She keeps silent when she learns that Heathcliff has disastrously misheard Catherine, with the eventual consequence that he runs away, and she refuses to take Catherine’s final illness seriously until it is too late for her to be saved. Would things have gotten so bad, some readers demand, if it weren’t for Nelly?

Fennell signals early on that she will be following this reading. She inserts a new scene in which Catherine’s eventual husband, Edgar Linton, listens to Isabella Linton (in Brontë’s story, Linton’s sister; in Fennell’s, his ward) explain the plot of Romeo and Juliet. “I don’t really like the nurse,” Isabella declares, before going on to argue that all the needless death and bloodshed of Romeo and Juliet could have been avoided if only Juliet’s nurse had been more responsible. 

Drawing parallels between Juliet’s nurse and Catherine’s maid, Fennell comes down hard on Nelly over the course of her film. Any mistake Nelly makes is recast as a mean-spirited and deliberate act of vengeance on people who are hotter and more interesting than she is. They are also, in Fennell’s version of the story, whiter than Nelly — Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity is erased while Nelly becomes a woman of color, in a strangely nasty bit of not-quite-color-blind casting. At the end of the film, Edgar Linton declares the maid a “torturer” and condemns her for the rage hiding within her. 

The whole thing is oddly reminiscent of Fennell’s vapid Saltburn, in which the rich and beautiful are revealed at the end to be virtuous and correct, while the poor are scheming social climbers. Fennell has a fondness for subversion, but somehow she seems to always end up subverting her way to the most conservative position possible. 

It’s absolutely possible to come to the conclusion that Nelly is unreliable or even villainous within a good faith reading of Brontë’s novel. One potential consequence of such a reading that is congruent with the emotional tone of the novel might be to remove the comfort of a fully likable character from this harsh, bleak landscape, and to allow ourselves to experience the horror of a world in which everyone is ruthless and wicked out for themselves. Fennell, instead, uses it as an excuse to reveal that Catherine and Heathcliff bear no fault at all for what befalls them, and that all of the tragedy was a result of Nelly’s meddling — a sort of Joker apologia for them, if it were already Batman canon that the Joker was pretty sexy and glamorous and had a tragic backstory.

Watching Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” there is no point at which you are asked to sit with the discomfort of finding a monster more interesting and lively than their prey. At no point are you asked to look at someone doing something terrible, and remember that they used to be a child who was treated badly. 

Brontë’s Cathy beats her servants, her horses, her husband. She flies into uncontrollable rages and plots to destroy her enemies. Fennell’s Cathy offers the occasional mean girl putdown, swiftly belied by her beautiful tear-swollen eyes, which reveal her true purity of heart. She is not so much passionate and angry as she is pragmatic and a little bit petty.

Brontë’s Heathcliff slowly and systematically bankrupts his abuser and then ruins the man’s son. Fennell’s Heathcliff kindly cares for his adopted father in his broken old age. Brontë’s Heathcliff tortures the feckless Isabella’s puppy, then seduces her and abuses her and their child. Fennell’s Heathcliff mostly stares in confusion as Isabella writhes in pleasure on the end of a dog’s leash, having not only enthusiastically consented to the treatment, but in fact instigated it. When onscreen Catherine tells Isabella that Heathcliff will eat her alive, the moment feels absurd: The audience knows by this point that Isabella is an oversexed weirdo who will do whatever she wants with reserved, pliant Heathcliff. (In fact, she does.)

No adaptation must be absolutely faithful to its source text in order to be good, but it has to do something. It has to have an energy, a source of tension, a reason to exist. But having excised the tension of Brontë’s novel from her film, Fennell replaces it with absolutely nothing. Instead, you are asked only to watch beautiful people engage in mild BDSM play upon the beautiful moors, and then die through no fault of their own.

All that gleefully perverse production design made promises, and she follows through on absolutely none of them. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” reaches no heights at all.