Look, I get it—there’s nothing like being a bitch on the internet. People make whole careers out of it. At least two dozen of my X mutuals got their followings from being mean to a low-tier pop star when they were in the trenches (Katy during her last album cycle). The clickbait economy has made us all contrarians, which means that being right and true is boring. Sometimes, you just have to stir the pot. So when a handful of photographs from a movie by someone you hate drops, it can be—understandably—fun to take a dig at it.
That’s what happened to Emerald Fennell recently, when the shoot for her upcoming Wuthering Heights remake (starring our king Owen Cooper), finally hit those Yorkshire Moors. We all got a closer look at the styling of this version of Catherine Earnshaw, played by Margot Robbie. The photographs, shot from a distance, saw Robbie looking poised and perfect in what the Daily Mail called a “dramatic off-the-shoulder wedding dress.” But instead of inspiring elation or curiosity about what the film might be doing—or even what time period it’s set in—it sparked near-universal derision over its supposed historical inaccuracy. “This is a face that has sent a Microsoft Teams invitation,” one post on X read. “So you’re telling me they couldn’t even do a quick Google search to see what a wedding dress from the 1780s ACTUALLY looked like,” read another.
To clarify: all we know about Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is its cast and its source material—not what the Saltburn director wants to do with it. But the casting of Robbie as Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff—two of the most talented and yet iPhone-faced actors working today— should have told you everything about how precious Fennell wanted to be in terms of faithfulness. Since the announcement, I’ve had a sneaking suspicion the film might be a contemporary piece. Maybe she’s switched up a centuries-old text in many other ways too: cut characters, added new ones. That’s the beauty of adaptation— moulding something old into something with its own identity. But that doesn’t matter because nobody will see it. They quote-posted an unofficial image from one scene and wrote the whole project off.
“It’s never fun to be angry, but it’s fun to post about how angry you are.”
It’s never fun to be angry, but it’s fun to post about how angry you are. But that also regularly makes you look really stupid, especially when you decide to speak your mind about something you have little knowledge of. I mean, we collectively gagged over all of that unofficial BTS footage and imagery of Joker: Folie à Deux—Gaga in full clown-ass regalia, looking insane. We were so excited. And it ended up being garbage.
The same attitude too is attached to Warfare, Alex Garland’s rightfully contentious film about a group of American soldiers during the Iraq war staging a siege on a terrorist cell. The film’s hardly a nuanced look at the semantics of right and wrong, instead opting to be an indiscriminate blood fest that frames the whole operation as completely senseless, a massacre with no winner. Still (perhaps, granted, due to Garland’s last film Civil War), people are already heralding the film as a nasty career move for its cast of internet boyfriends, who seem to have signed up for pro-war propaganda. A photo of the key cast members that A24 posted on X garnered a mix of responses: people meme-ing about the length of Will Poulter’s arms, gay guys being thirsty, and tweets like: “Beautiful that they’ll get to spend their afterlives in hell together too for making this movie.” The film isn’t out in cinemas for another week. And sure, it’s fair to express skepticism about a film’s political alignment. But there’s something almost unhinged about making a statement so grandiose, cutting, and personal about something you haven’t even seen yet.
It continues, and will continue, for as long as rage bait feels good to us. The internet boyfriend stacked cast of The Beatles movies has just been announced and you’d expect people to be excited about seeing four of the hottest young actors in a line-up together. Instead, everyone’s acting like it’s an April Fool’s Joke. “Casting director needs to get fired,” someone comments on our Instagram. “Electric chair,” another person responds. But other people love it, and are mad only at the fact they have to wait three whole years to see them (the film drops in April 2028). Peaks and troughs, we say. The good and the bad. But if there’s one thing to learn from Joker: Folie à Deux—and trust us, there’s a lot—it’s that we can be wrong sometimes.