Wuthering Heights

[GCAcademic]

Anyone planning to see this? From the trailer I was expecting it to be marmite and not in any way a straight adaptation of the novel, but the reviews I've seen so far are universally uncomplimentary. I'd already booked to see it, so will go in with an open mind!

I want to see it again 🙈

It might have been more powerful if the tables had been turned & he was the complicit partner on his knees wearing a collar and chain?

I’m not sure how Fennell could have arrived at the interpretation that Isabella was a willing participant. Her long letter to Nelly states the exact opposite. She loathed Heathcliff.

Me too actually!

Me three!!!

Yes, but I think what EF was riffing off was the disturbing speech where Heathcliff tells Nelly, when she visits the Heights just after Heathcliff and Isabella return after their marriage, that she had married him under the delusion that his gruff exterior hid a love for her, but that he’d never hidden his dislike of her and his brutality, that as they were eloping he’d hung her dog and told her he wished he could hang everyone who belonged to her except one, and that she’d assumed he meant her (but it was Cathy, obviously) — and that he’d been astonished at how cruelly he could treat her and she’d still come creeping back for more.

Of course making this a consensual BDSM relationship makes Heathcliff a lot less evil. In fact, in EF’s adaptation, he doesn’t (possibly) murder Hindley, abuse and rape Isabella, forcibly marry Linton to the second Cathy, whom he kidnaps, dispossess Hareton etc etc.

She made it up as she went along. She is fibbing when she says it's her 14 year old interpretation. I'd feel any 14 year old with imaginings like she put in the film is quite a disturbed child.

In the book Isabella also has enough about her to get away and at least attempt to raise her son out of Heathcliff’s clutches.

Yes, that bit of Yorkshire has a very distinctive look and they did some odd things with the stonework at Wuthering Heights. I saw Emereld Fennell saying it was all about things looking wet. From Variety:

'During her research, Davies found the Trefor granite quarry in Northern Wales, which was abandoned and near a “big brutal structure on top of a hill.” Davies says, “It’s got nothing to do with Yorkshire, but it has the essence that Emerald wanted. Once we found that, then we started sort of layering on elements of the Yorkshire vernacular, of those big tiles.” The tiles were wet and shiny. She goes on to say, “There are a lots of modern materials used in traditional ways, and traditional materials used in unconventional ways. Everything’s flipped on its side, just to make the audience feel more uncomfortable.” '

Yes, obviously they are making WH grim and grey and threatening. The polar opposite to The Grange - at least at first sight. But it started to look a bit Roose Bolton at Winterfell in Game of Thrones crossed with Lord of the Rings. Those big towering hulks.

Well it is Yorkshire

I saw it again today, husband in tow this time. Surprisingly, he actually quite liked it, lol!! ❤️

My DH did too.

I absolutely loved it and can’t wait to see it again.

I thought the costumes, cinematography and soundtrack were excellent.

Martin Clunes was fantastic!

Saw this tonight - as a film totally independent of the novel, I enjoyed it! Reminded me of those erotic novels I read as a teen 😂

But it is not Wuthering Heights.

Its been decades some I read the book and can’t say I recall Cathy knocking one out on the moors or Isabella being some sort of porn star

I liked the guy who played Edgar, then again I was always Team Edgar

I was surprised to see how much I enjoyed the costumes and cinematography

Like Heathcliff are end walking down a dark red corridor and the doll house, plus the bedrooms of the Lintons. I thought it was very clever

As someone who went in completely blind never having read the book I really loved it.

I want some Margot Robbie hair tutorials.

Yeah, my hair is more Isabella on steroids.

I want a ribbon room, TBH I dint know how I’ve managed all these years without one.

Me too! Thought it was great & can’t wait to watch it again!

I agree. There is no way a 14 year old read that book like that, unless she read some weird fanfiction instead. I actually didn't mind the Isabella story in this, as my interpretation was that the king letter was written at Heathcliffes instruction, to provoke the Lyntons to come to see them or reply. Isabella in the film had more agency I thought, which isn't like the book but it's unrelentingly awful in the book.

I'm rereading it for the first time since I was a teenager. So far Heathcliff is guilty of rape, kidnapping, repeated assault (including of two children), false imprisonment, theft and unauthorised exhumation of a dead body. How on earth anyone could ever read the book and view him as a romantic hero is beyond me.

Indeed! I read an old magazine last week with a World Book Day feature (it was 25+ years old). They were interviewing teenagers and asking which literary character they would most like to be. One boy said "Heathcliff, he sounds like the kind of guy girls fancy."

The film made me feel queasy and sick.

It’s because every screen adaptation exaggerates and romanticises his relationship with Cathy (which in fact takes up very little of the novel) and depicts H as a sort of elemental Byronic hero, as distinct from tame, domestic Edgar. People then read the novel via the frame of reference of the adaptations.

Victorian readers saw him as a brute. The idea of him as a romantic hero dates from the 1939 Hollywood adaptation. Which also started the ‘tradition’ of cutting the second half of the novel in adaptations, which in turn contributes to the idea that his love for Cathy dominates his life and makes him far less of a monster, just because it takes out many of the instances of violence, the rape and abuse of Isabella, the false imprisonment, kidnapping and forced marriage of Linton and Cathy the second etc etc. Which means he’s more amenable to being reinvented as a romantic hero.

Exactly he should be in jail!!