Tired of movies for kids? Superhero capes and flatulent animated squirrels? Me too. Fortunately, you and I are in luck. This weekend brings the wide release of Saltburn director Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. As is befitting Fennell’s established style, the movie offers over-the-top sexual titillation (though, crucially, zero nudity) and elaborate production design. Plus, a contemporary pop soundtrack from Charli xcx. A horny film version of a 19th-century novel is as adult-skewing as it gets at the box office these days.

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi suck face and stand around in the rain in expensive costumes for over two hours in a movie that Fennell proudly declares a loose translation from the page. It excises a large portion of the book’s story and focuses its eye primarily on the illicit romance between Cathy Earnshaw and swarthy Heathcliff. Crucially, it should be pointed out that Heathcliff is technically Cathy’s foster brother, which allows Wuthering Heights to fit comfortably into one of the most popular genres of online video in the world.

Another crucial change from the book is that bad boy Heathcliff, while described as ethnically ambiguous and “dark” in the novel, is very much a pretty straightforward white Australian Elordi. Fennell says that Elordi most represents the version of Heathcliff she saw in her head when she was 14 and reading the novel for the first time. I can’t quibble too much with that, since Wuthering Heights is squarely in the public domain and film-makers can do whatever they want with it.

There are, by my count, 18 different filmed adaptations of the book. More often than not, Heathcliff is played by a white actor – Richard Burton, Tom Hardy, Ralph Fiennes and countless others. It’s nearly impossible to accuse Fennell (who also cast the decidedly white roles of Linton and Nelly with actors of color) of whitewashing a story that’s been presented in that fashion for decades. There are exceptions, of course.

In the 2011 film directed by Andrea Arnold, Heathcliff is portrayed by James Howson, a Black British actor. Howson was the first Black actor to play Heathcliff in a film, was plucked out of obscurity for the role, was paid about £8,000 for his work, and quickly went right back to obscurity. The movie was a box office failure and one can’t help but think that one of the main reasons to cast an actor like Jacob Elordi is to ensure enough star power to make back the production budget. Who am I to argue against the holy Saint Commerce?

While I’m happy to accept Fennell’s rationale for casting based on her teenage imagination, I would likely go in the other direction if I were in her position. What did I imagine while reading Wuthering Heights at 14? Mostly battle scenes from Star Trek, while hoping my CliffsNotes version would arrive in the mail soon. Can I be criticized for wishing Heathcliff – a sour-faced weirdo whose sole goal in life is pitiless revenge against his foster family – wasn’t white or Black, but Optimus Prime from Transformers? I was 14. What the hell did I know about great literature? With a startling lack of spaceships or cars that turn into robots (and back again), what is an American boy supposed to relate to?

But now I’m an adult with a fully developed brain, and I can see Wuthering Heights as a powerful story of class resentment, prejudice and the way those terrible forces curdle the human soul. It seeks to nod to the way in which we other those we don’t understand.

Cathy and Heathcliff are kept apart because of his low social status – a status reinforced by Cathy’s brother Hindley forcing Heathcliff into life as a servant. That’s easy to accomplish because Heathcliff is explicitly different from the Earnshaws. Not just because he’s been adopted, but because he looks different. Even his backstory – his race and where he’s from originally – is a mystery that sets him apart from the other characters.

One of the most defining characteristics of my own personal backstory is that I’m the product of a interracial marriage and was raised in America, a country where such things were illegal up until the middle of the 20th century. I can still remember the feeling when a grocery-store checkout clerk asked my dad if I was adopted. Interracial relationships and the biracial progeny of them are still a rarity in popular media. One of the most prominent examples is 2015’s Focus, which ironically stars Margot Robbie and Will Smith. It’s a solidly entertaining film, but one that doesn’t really engage with the social subtext of that pairing. Not that it has to.

I’m not begging every movie with an interracial coupling to have something heady to say about it. If the charming conman plot of Focus stopped to preach to me about racial tolerance, it would be about as helpful as Transformers or the Starship Enterprise showing up in Wuthering Heights. But Focus wasn’t about those things. Wuthering Heights, in so many ways, is.

If I had the ability to make Wuthering Heights as a movie, first of all, I’d probably respectfully decline. I still can’t shake the need to include robots. But if I did do it, I’d probably emphasize the aspects of the story that spoke to me the most – the alienation, the othering and the feeling that basic respect is just outside of my reach.

The aspects of Wuthering Heights that spoke to Emerald Fennell the most are clearly kissing a hot guy that is sort of your brother. As is her right. But the one question I’d ask her is this: as a clearly intelligent and talented artist, why was she incapable of imagining a story with an interracial relationship? Maybe for the same reason I imagined Transformers stomping around on the moor. Because we see only what we want to see.

• Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist