at least angelina and billy bob fucked in the limo on the way to the oscars
On pre-approved passion and why nobody's actually unmoored anymore.
Emily Brontë would hate this: Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, two of the most conventionally attractive people in the industry, put forth a Wuthering Heights press tour that confirmed they were definitely fucking on screen and maybe would love to fuck each other off screen. They had not fucked yet, at least not on the below junket sofa— plunging us further into never-ending purgatorial teasing. The effect has not been erotic. It's been one of the most unsexy things I've seen.
She had custom signet rings made for both of them. Skeletons in poster pose wrapped around each other. Gold, naturally. Emily Brontë’s novel quote “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” engraved inside. You know, for privacy. She gave him one as a wrap gift. He filled her hotel room with roses on Valentine’s Day. My favorite detail: he left a note in character as Heathcliff (did he use a marker or crayon to make the Hallmark card?). In my mind’s eye I see it written in red ink. She was so flattered because he was “a little bit Heathcliff himself.”
Like all women, she felt “unmoored”and “co-dependent” when her man wasn’t around set. Like a kid without their blanket, if you can believe it. She saw Heathcliff as the ultimate bad boy. Before you ask: yes, she said “he’s mine” even though he most definitely isn’t.
I get that forcing something as innate as sexual desire doesn’t work (unless you’re Jake Gyllenhaal in which case I shall have thoughts). Desire is involuntary, metabolic, the thing that happens despite your better judgment, sometimes even despite your consent. Obviously you can’t workshop chemistry into existence through sheer repetitive effort and some well-placed Vogue Australia quotes. But this, I think, is my larger point: Temu desire versus Real McCoy desire.
We are fluent in the aesthetics of desire (online, in press) and have lost the actual thing somewhere along the way. Or we prefer the simulation—cleaner, controllable, Instagram-ratioed, coordinated with the PR department, sexual speculation all but outsourced to Warner Bros' studio executives. Take that much care to build something fanfiction-like into existence and you get a photo-op like: staged handsy moments at kooky pubs, paparazzi romps through Mayfair that require three takes to get the lighting right. It's palatable as romance because we've all seen this performance a thousand times. But real desire makes you look dumb and stupid. It makes you jump on Oprah's sofa. Real thirst is feral and unpredictable.
In some ways, this is Wuthering Heights’ attempt to bottle the magical psychosis of Heated Rivalry and I need someone to sit them down and explain why that show is radical and they are not. Canadian Shane has been piss-missiled by his heated rivalry with Russian Ilya in the show. They hate-fuck their way through increasingly dire consequences until one wonders if hate-fucking can lead to love? (Answer: yes).
In Heated Rivalry sex is literally at the center because Shane and Ilya communicate through their bodies when words fail—they speak many languages but English isn’t one of them! The sex IS the plot—how they learn what they want, what honesty costs. Jacob Tierney understood the assignment; problem being there was never an assignment. Just like Connie Sumner tells to her friend in the film Unfaithful: “[desire] is like your body’s taking over...and your mind’s just...going away”. Tierney treated intimacy as narrative infrastructure built on physical vocabulary. The intimacy coordinator Chala Hunter talked about choreographing vulnerability and sex as a language unto itself within these scripts. It’s not decoration or punctuation either—it’s syntax!
The Wuthering Heights press tour thinks you can capture that energy by just performing intimacy loud enough and often enough and with enough custom jewelry, until people forget you’re both going home to completely different people. But desire does not exist like that — so much so that even if you announce your own every single week with such forced devotion it ceases its form altogether. It stops being want and becomes laborous production which produces nothing except fatigue for everyone involved.
There also isn’t any genuine mischievousness in talking about your obsession with someone so much, or any curiosity regarding “what if” Robbie was fucking Elordi?! No one thinks that. Paradoxically, mischievousness becomes forced at planned intervals so mischief itself becomes saturated—there's too much manufactured transgression happening everywhere online that adding more just makes it all blur together when there's no reality anchoring any of it.
You know what’s the one remotely intriguing subversion this press tour could have attempted? Margot and Jacob publicly loathing each other, trading barbs and “I hated every second filming with him” leaked soundbites, all smiles and venom on the press circuit. Snide comments about how filming sex scenes were “a challenge” because, obviously, the chemistry was more volcanic than romantic candlelight. Snarky anecdotes about how their chemistry was less ‘birds of paradise’ and more ‘cats in a sack.’ Then audiences walk into theaters February 13th and watch them sexually destroy each other on screen and there’s real friction—a gap between what we thought we knew and what the film reveals1.
(This clown show surely tracks with Emerald Fennell’s entire filmography so far, which is far more invested in aesthetics and superficial spectacle than actually going deep into the themes it supposedly explores. She traffics in surfaces so slick and shock so loud you almost forget there’s no real intellectual plumbing beneath. She wants credit for transgression without doing the work of it.
Anyway, I digress!)
Once upon a time, press tours were a polite hors d’oeuvre before the main course: actors flexed their craft muscles, tossed off witty anecdotes, and flirted with chemistry like a teasing appetizer. The performance served the film. This press tour performs a simulacrum of the film itself—the obsession, the passion, the intensity—which makes the film redundant. Why watch two hours of Catherine and Heathcliff destroying each other when you’ve already consumed that narrative through two months of press? Now the performance IS the thing, which isn’t whetting my appetite anymore—it’s eating the film’s lunch and sending me the bill.
We know studios believe this strategy works. Take Anyone But You, the Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell rom-com that put press-pairing (and having a fake affair with your hot co-star) on the syllabus. Month’s worth of press with the subtext “are they or aren’t they?”— the tension was the story. The film rode that ambiguity all the way to $220M ($25M budget) worldwide; one of 2023’s most profitable movies relative to its budget.
I cannot be the only one who thought Powell and Sweeney were sleeping together, and neither could Powell’s ex girlfriend of three years. Gigi Paris, went public about the affair rumors destroying their relationship. Apparently, she flew to Australia during filming to break up with him in person, "bawling" on the plane because she understood what was happening. He assured her that the flirtation was just part of the job, and she could either play along or walk. Lucky for us, she chose the latter; it’s never too late to make sure that Glen Powell respects you as a woman and also put on one last good show for his movie. "I just wanted respect," she said. "Don't make a fool out of someone you've been with for over three years, talking about forever with."
The rub is that Powell actually gave Sweeney "all the credit" for the whole rumor mill. "I don't have the mental capacity to pull anything like this off, but she's very smart," he said. Translation: destroying a three-year relationship to sell a romantic comedy was a smart career decision. Sweeney later admitted that the affair-baiting was deliberate strategy.
But that strategy—poisoning your own well for publicity—would never fly with Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley. Robbie is married to him, and Ackerley is credited as an executive producer on Wuthering Heights (did you know?) through their joint company, LuckyChap Entertainment. The matching rings are a business expense, my love! So you get all the aesthetic signifiers with none of the (disastrous but genuine) ambiguity that made the Anyone But You version work. You also get no chance of Gigi Paris crying on a plane because your chemistry is too combustible to fake. The affair-baiting is pre-approved by the person who would theoretically be threatened by it.
The most outrageous thing about modern celebrity culture is how legible it all is. When Robbie pricks her finger into Elordi’s palm, there’s blood from Barbie 2 riding on that risk. When Elordi does it back, he will also have something to lose (you). Once you’re worth something at all, you have to behave. And so they perform for us: “I’m with someone,” but I’ll also wear someone else on my hands, clutch their arm, smile wide.
I’m not criticizing this arrangement, of course. Though it’s deeply unsatisfying, it is also mostly harmless. But if there’s a lesson here, it’s not just that a real relationship gives us something to talk about. It’s that we increasingly prefer floundering around in an intentionally vague, sometimes cruel (for Gigi Paris at least), media-mogul-cult-archetype performance of desire, rather than engage with and enjoy the havoc of what’s undeniable.
And if we prefer the performance, perhaps it’s because we feel more in control—of the desire, of the passion, of the relationship itself. The real thing is mercurial and ferocious and far from aspirational, which is why we can only enjoy it on screen but crave it for ourselves. In a world where even love has become a commodity, it seems like we’d rather be the audience than the lover. And what Hollywood has realized is that this is exactly what drives us as consumers: not an actual desire for desire, but an insatiable hunger for managed intimacy.
Which is why, if Billy Bob and Angelina2 poured gasoline over their bodies and set themselves on fire in front of paparazzi today, they wouldn’t be held up as icons of sex. They’d be locked away in an LA mansion like a forgotten polycule with no Living Arrangements clause—perhaps the ultimate punishment for reckless lovers: to live without even a performance of desire.
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I’m not pitching a new PR playbook here—just pointing out that the sole flicker of life in this whole charade would be flipping the script somehow.
I don’t mean to sound like a millennial complaining about how things were better back in my day (my day being roughly ten years ago). We traded that chaos for this content, and I get it; I eat it up too. But don’t let anyone fool you into thinking it’s what we want.
Emerald Fennell…how…why?
I blame that other overprivileged flea bag.
And isn’t Margot Robbie the least sexy most beautiful actor ever? Elordi, though, is a very handsome plank of wood.
If there is more incomprehensibly over-rated filmmaker at work right now, I’d have to think a long time to come up with a name. Potentially til the end of time itself.