Little meaning in Robbie adaptation

The first thing to note about this latest revival is the quotation marks director Emerald Fennell uses around its title. No one can accuse him of cheating on anyone “Wuthering Heights”.

On the contrary, in straying so far from Emily Brontë’s original text, Fennell may be her most honest adapter yet. By his own admission, his is a lustful, colorful, half-remembered dream. Wuthering Heights.

He announces this fact in the opening scene, a public execution that does not appear in the book. As the titles unfold on a black screen, the groans and gasps of the prisoner and the creaks of rope and scaffolding mingle indistinguishably from the groaning boards and springs of a bed near breaking point. When his death is over, the crowd reacts as if they were at a festival, cheering, kissing, hugging each other with hunger.

Is this dilemma aimed at us, the audience, who are trying to digest this story of cruelty, humiliation and death, written by Cathy and Heathcliff for nearly 200 years, by calling it “romance”? Look, probably not. This isn’t the last time he’ll invite us to think about his film on a level that I’m not sure he himself has.

The absolute broadest strokes of Fennel’s plot come from the same section of the book (roughly the first half) that forms the core of nearly every previous adaptation. Cathy Earnshaw grows up in Wuthering Heights, a remote Yorkshire wasteland. One day, his father takes in a homeless boy he encounters and names him Heathcliff, after Cathy’s dead brother. The couple grows together and develops a deep bond. When they grow up a little, Heathcliff hears that she is going to marry his wealthy neighbor Edgar Linton and runs away, returning years later with a mysterious fortune.

Fennel’s approach has managed to attract one- or five-star reviews—and nothing in between—and which of those ratings the viewer gives depends, I suppose, on how recently they’ve looked at the book. Again, he bends the shape a bit more than previous directors.

For example, every adaptation I’ve seen—1939, 1959, 1970, 1992, and now 2026—includes a variation of the same scene in which young Heathcliff and Cathy talk and form a tender, loving bond that never occurs in the book. In fact, all the conversations we witness between our two heroes in the book are anger, humiliation, betrayal and possessiveness.

In William Wyler’s 1939 version, which was nominated for eight Oscars and set the dominant template for subsequent versions, this is achieved by transposing the dialogue so that the nice things our lovers say about each other are now said in the book. with each other on the screen

Change happens in every adaptation, and just as the events of the second half of the book disappear, it’s always for the same reason: so we can continue to treat. Wuthering Heights not as a love story, but as a horror story with Cathy and especially Heathcliff as the villains.

When Heathcliff first came to Wuthering Heights as a child, he was black with dirt, as if he had been writhing in the marshes of the moors, “dark as if it had come from the devil.” His eyes are like “black fire” and he endures the beatings he receives from his stepbrother with a frightening, uncomplaining tolerance, as if he already knew what his revenge would be. A book full of ghosts, changelings and mysterious substitutions. When Heathcliff returns from his travels, he is “changed” and appears at people’s doors, waiting for an invitation before entering.

To avenge Cathy’s marriage, Heathcliff takes advantage of his aunt Isabella, with whom he is in love, then marries her and treats her horribly badly.

“Sometimes I have relented from the sheer lack of invention in my experiments of what it could endure, and yet I have crawled back shamefully!” he writes gleefully, adding the truly chilling detail that their tortures “remained strictly within the bounds of the law.” Until this period, I have avoided giving him the slightest right to demand separation.

Meanwhile, Cathy’s first action towards Heathcliff is to spit on him, and when they become close, it is through the pleasure of showing others how attached Heathcliff is to her. Knowing that she loves Heathcliff, she observes “heaven” when she decides to marry Linton. [doesn’t] “It looks like my home.”

After Cathy gives birth to Edgar’s child, she appears to cause her own death through sheer willpower, as punishment for everyone around her, especially Heathcliff. And when the couple finally meets on their deathbed, it is not compassion they direct towards each other, but pain and anger. Throughout, they wish for endless suffering for themselves and each other, and they receive it.

Previous films have portrayed Heathcliff as a narrow-minded man who becomes cruel and callous due to fear, loss, and humiliation. However, in the book, Heathcliff is frankly evil; an all-powerful ghost who can direct the events of the story as precisely as Brontë. When Nelly dies, he cannot close his eyes, and his “parted lips and sharp teeth” seem to belittle the attempt. This is not romance.

Fennell is as well-equipped as any modern filmmaker. heights More towards this bad dream atmosphere. He is a gifted stylist and theatrical provocateur, and the impeccable set design and costumes, theatrical lighting and grand performances on display could have turned into the kind of disturbingly erotic nightmare that subverts the romance many find here.

Instead, for all her flashy moments of provocation, Fennel actually takes the sanitization of previous interpretations one step further. Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff has none of the core-level mayhem suggested by Olivier, Richard Burton, or Timothy Dalton. In the first half of the film, he is a sad-looking and basically decent man; for example, he has complete control of the strength that allows him to lift Cathy by the front of her dress with one hand. When he returns from his travels with an earring and a gold tooth, he is angry and horny. And we are given a reason to understand that we have learned to be a very giving lover.

Now Isabella’s torture at the hands of Heathcliff is recast as a targetable, consensual game of submission and dominance. Initially played by Alison Oliver as an awkward, theater-loving teenager, Isabella is soon chained up and barking to be fed from his hand, a hidden, satisfied smile on her lips and a wink in her eyes. “What did I marry?” He writes to Nelly. “Is he a human or a monster?” Instead of leaving us to ponder what horror led to this question, as in the book, we see a montage of her being devoured.

This perhaps points to the most interesting part “Wuthering Heights” – relentless focus on female pleasure. As always, Fennell isn’t adept at subverting the male gaze; Cathy’s sexual awakening occurs while she is with Heathcliff, but she is preoccupied with watching two servants pass between the roof slats. Heathcliff pulls her close and covers her mouth with his giant hand, but she doesn’t participate in the voyeurism. He’s just watching. When he tries to look at her from the farmhouse’s bedroom window, she turns into a blurry ghost because of the intervening frosted glass.

And given that, Fennell’s interruption of Cathy’s famous “I” might make sense. I Heathcliff’s declaration. Often played as a sad or exuberant realization in movies, there’s a moment of horror as definitive as Heathcliff’s later plan to break the side of Cathy’s coffin and dissolve into a single body. Only the 1939 version reflects this – Merle Oberon says the words glass-eyed and statuesque, and the windows on either side of his head burn white with lightning.

Margot Robbie’s Cathy isn’t amenable to that kind of sacrifice, and she’s the one driving the plot. This is helped by the fact that Fennell prunes nearly every secondary character. There is nothing in this world that could distract Cathy and Heathcliff, their desires, and the (frequent) fulfillment of those desires.

To further complicate this desire would be to derail Fennell’s story. Heathcliff’s soliloquy about the dying Cathy (“Be with me always – no matter what – drive me crazy! Just don’t leave me in this abyss, where I can’t find you!”) is shouted to deaf heaven in the book and is accompanied by a wish for Cathy to “wake up in agony”. Here, a whispering, tearful and compassionate voice is heard against Cathy’s cold body.

Fennell has compared his stars To Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (“Two people who are incredibly talented and beautiful individually, but when they are together, everything is dynamite”). I found myself wondering what he actually meant by this reference.

“I could run away from him for a thousand years, but he’s still my little kid,” Burton said. It was famously said about TaylorIt almost pushes the fog out of the moors. “Our love is so angry that we burn each other.”

There’s more to Taylor than an entitled, headstrong Cathy, who constantly gets sick (or says she’s sick) and exhibits unstable power dynamics throughout her eight marriages, often to very cruel men. Heathcliff is an ideal role for Burton, as Roger Lewis noted in his book about the pair: “An angel of darkness, wild-eyed, cursed, shooting lightning.” Burton, like Heathcliff, came from bad beginnings, took the name of a man without a father, and transformed himself into the image of a gentleman; But money and praise could never completely clear his sense of damnation.

I too wonder if Fennell saw Burton’s Heathcliff in a 1958 production for American television, which physically, it pains me to say, is kind of awful.

Whatever its shortcomings, Fennell would approve of the ravenous lust this version brings. Cathy (Rosemary Harris) stares hungrily at Linton during their flirtation, and Burton’s seduction of Isabella causes him to defiantly tell his sister-in-law that “my mouth is blue from his kisses.”

But of course, just as I had from the first scene, I fell into one of Fennell’s traps here, searching for meanings that weren’t there. He probably used this couple because it brings to mind old-school Hollywood and helps with marketing-friendly rumors about its stars’ personal relationship. Critics always try to ask: What is it for? Promising Young Woman (2020) really tell us about post-#MeToo sexual politics? what is it for salt burn Do you have anything to say about the class (2023)? Is the casting of Hong Chau as Nelly and Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton, coupled with the complete dismissal of Heathcliff’s vague but clearly non-white heritage, a meaningful commentary on anything?

The answer, according to Fennell, seems to be: “Who cares? Turn up the music.”