To wonder why it seems impossible to make a good screen version of Wuthering Heights?

[middleclassdystopia]

So many adaptations of this brilliant novel and not one of them captures it properly.

Too many try to make it a sentimental love story for starters.

I've seen great adaptations of Jane Eyre and some of Austen's novels but I may well go to my grave having never seen a proper Heathcliff brought to life on the screen.

I don't agree that all the characters are nasty. Younger Cathy's family/upbringing wasn't dysfunctional. I think the reason that the screen adaptations are so bleak is because they don't focus enough on Cathy 2 and Hareton's relationship.

The Monty Python version worked well - in semaphore.

It's because it's a bloody pot boiler with a ridiculous plot, written - to all intents and purposes - by an emotionally incontinent and sexually unfulfilled teenager.

When you try to translate it onto the big screen this becomes obvious.

Do love the book, by the way.

The recent one (can't remember any names but the girl had been in Skins) was really good. Very atmospheric.

Steff the Olivier version is only half the book and is terrible. Mainly because Olivier is in it, being all mannered and actorly and generally as wooden as he always was in films.

The people in the book aren't really human, which is fine in a book but works badly when people try to translate it into The World's Greatest Love Story on screen.

Another one who agrees that it's a rubbish book - totally agree with Minifingers' summary (though sadly I don't love it, I hate it). I don't think it's a clever exploration of DV, I think it's just the random musings of a frustrated spinster who'd bought the whole Byronic "mad bad and dangerous to know" line, and thus was partly responsible for a whole slew of romantic literature ever since which conflates "sexually attractive" with "masterful, aggressive, violent, disfunctional".

Dude watching with the Brontes: www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=202

"Let's face it, the whole lot of them would get VERY short shrift on the Relationships board! They're insane!"

yes, yes, I agree with this, and I think it is quite frightening that teenagers see it as the big romantic novel.
It is so fantastically well written though, King Lear is full of insane characters but that doesn't make Shakespeare a bad playwright ...

Been a long time since I saw the Olivier version but remember it being very stiff upper lip, Heathcliff being more dashing hero than mad, abused psycho. Also only covered half of the book and tried to show it as a great love to aspire to instead of run to the hills from.

because it's melodramatic shit? Because it's impossible to have empathy for any of them?

I had the horrors when my cousin (15) was mad to read it because the main characters in Twilight think its so romantic (don't get me started on the EA and control in Twilight. I lectured her and how unhealthy the relationships were....a lot

I love the book.

The Andrea Arnold one is the best I've seen - really captured the bleak wildness of the moors and the cruelty of so many parts of life at that time, especially if you were poor. I could see a lot of similarity with her previous film Fish Tank, about a teenage girl on an estate who is sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend - loneliness, frustration, feeling like an outcast, a real understanding of how it feels to be young and 'stuck.'

Which I think is at the centre of Wuthering Heights, in many ways.

Fish Tank is a fantastic film, loved it, though there is always debate as to whether he was grooming her all along or it was just a one off drunken liaison. And again featured the lovely Mr Fassbender who was Rochester in Jane Eyrelast night.

I think those who think there is no positivity in the novel or no characters to empathise with, can't really know the novel.

Cathy dies half way through, the second half sees Hareton and Cathy's daughter grow into much more sympathetic characters. It ends with them falling in love, in a much more functional relationship.

There's so much to the book. I find Cathy's assertion to Nelly 'I am Heathcliff' interesting. It isn't expression of some ideal love but rather the idea that he is the savage part of herself which she denies in order to fulfill convention. An image. This is why she becomes delirious and dies.

The younger generation are more accepting of themselves, more balanced. Less melodramatic and all consuming. Surely a positive message about the dangers of narcissism, image, material possession and snobbery.

But the characterisation of the younger generation is practically non-existent. Nobody actually cares about them, which is why adaptations normally ditch them completely. They are the Tom Bombadil of 19th century literature.

I think rather adaptations focus so much on the first half, trying to make it a romance to sell it to the masses, that this is what people remember.

It's not really the true novel

Yes I agree. I was really surprised when I first read the book to discover that the story continues after Cathy's death. Kate Bush has a lot to answer for!

But loads of deluded people know and love the book, but I've never heard anyone except you OP saying "Oh Wuthering Heights is my favourite, I just love the bit where young Cathy puts primroses in Hareton's porridge and they live happily ever after".

Cathy 2 and Hareton's have a really hard time of it because of others but manage to find each other and love and hopefully find happiness - but it gets completely ignored in film adaptations which focus on their more selfish older relatives.

That is the love story - the first half is less love more obsession, materialism, delusions and dv.

Well I like the bit at end when the two younger damaged lovers finally break the pattern and fall in love - but I wouldn't say I loved the book.

Well it is subjective and i'm glad to be unusual!

I have always wondered exactly the same thing, OP. It is such a brilliant book with so much cinematic potential. Much of the dialogue could be retained essentially intact. The settings could not be more well suited to the screen. And yet every single adaptation has been appalling IMO.

The characters are complex and absolutely can't be reduced to one-dimensional good vs. evil. I find the emotional depth utterly convincing. You'd think that filmmakers and actors couldn't wait to sink their teeth into such a work. And yet every filmed adaptation ignores the complexity and tries to reduce the story to a ridiculously simplified version. Well, maybe someday a decent film will be made. . .

Love, love, love WH.

Read it when i was about 11/12, and loved the language and wild imagery. Read it again after Kate Bush belted her song out and loved it all over again.

Never ever understood why on earth it was billed as a love story.

I really love the book, but it's far more about ideas than plot, I think, which makes an adaptation very difficult.

Also, the book is seminal because of its portrayal of animalsitic motivation (be it lust, greed, anger, jealousy) which went against the grain of the time. You can't really capture that freshness of thought in a film, can you?