Contains spoilers for Wuthering Heights – the sex scenes, at least.
If you’re anything like me, your weekend was spent in the cinema, awkwardly squirming through Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights. From lashings of BDSM to strangely erotic, gooey food sequences, it’s a movie to be watched with your thighs pressed firmly together.
What fascinated me most, however, was Heathcliff’s (Jacob Elordi) hands. These huge, sinewy things, fussing with skirts, unbuttoning clothes and clasped around Cathy’s (Margot Robbie) eyes. Say what you will about Wuthering Heights’ treatment of the original source material, but Fennel has created a film which embodies the passion of its two leads with a visceral tactility.
Key to all that tactility? Well, it’s definitely the major emphasis on hands and fingers – not just Heathcliff’s – through the film. Cathy poking through a mound of jelly and sliding her pointer into a fish’s mouth, Heathcliff languorously rubbing his hands in the sticky yoke of an egg…and then, there’s the finger sucking.
Featured prominently in the film’s trailer is a glimpse of Cathy’s fingers inside Heathcliff’s mouth as the two are pulled close against the English elements, their hair whipping in the wind and volatile rain. So far, so hot – and enough to put the internet into collective hysteria. But it’s so much hotter in the movie.
The scene actually comes after Cathy has secreted herself away to the moors to furiously, surreptitiously masturbate, only to be discovered by Heathcliff. What ensues is a moment charged with shame, mutual tension, and the duo’s unspoken, ferocious love for one another. Heathcliff isn’t just sucking on fingers for the sake of it. He wants to taste Cathy, to suck up any last crumb of her he can, and she’s perplexed – and shocked, at the power of her own sexuality – that this hulking, rugged mass of a man is completely in her thrall.
Okay, it’s worth acknowledging that not every finger-sucking scenario is charged with years of simmering devotion and forbidden lust. While Wuthering Heights is the golden standard of finger-sucking, there is definitely a pro-finger agenda going on in pop culture RN.
Netflix
Case-in-point: the soon-to-be-released Vladimir, a Netflix drama which follows an unnamed female professor (Rachel Weisz) as she becomes obsessed with her younger, hot male colleague Vladimir (Leo Woodall). The trailer, which basically functions as a megamix of the show’s horniest moments, features finger-sucking – specifically, Vladimir prying the female protagonist’s mouth open and slowly sliding in two fingers – in a montage of irresistible sexual fantasies.
Then, of course, there’s the Staircase Scene™ in Bridgerton season four, where Sophie (Yerin Ha) and Benedict’s (Luke Thompson) tension, and forbidden love, explodes in a multi-orgasmic sex scene. Here, Benedict puts his fingers in his own mouth before, ever-so-slowly, ever-so-teasingly sliding his hand under Sophie’s skirt – all while maintaining the most steady eye contact known to man.