new writing: wuthering heights

at the new york times

Do you ever write something like “I guess if I go to see Wuthering Heights in the theater I will post about it. But… I am not going to do that”—and know that in so doing you are willing your own doom? In my defense, nobody had at this time offered me money to watch “Wuthering Heights” (as it is apparently stylized). Then somebody did.¹ “Avarice is growing with him a besetting sin,” Cathy says of Heathcliff. Me also.

However, the piece is not about the movie. It’s about the book and how it is one of The Love Stories Of All Time, a status that is not affected by the part where Heathcliff and Cathy are Bad People™️:

If Heathcliff and Catherine are too wicked for heaven, at least they will not be alone in hell. Their love destroys everything in its path, but it is also their redemption. Neither can live among other human beings without lashing out at them, but they can live together in the wilderness. Brontë gives them as happy an ending as they can stand, implying that their ghosts are reunited in death.

Read it here. Many thanks to Adam Sternbergh, the editor for this piece, and Parker Richards, the fact-checker. ETA: I forgot to make the links gift links! But they are now.

Further reading…. let’s see. The contemporary reviews mentioned are all collected in the Norton Critical edition of Wuthering Heights, which is where I read them. (Henry Oliver has collected more reviews here.) While working on this article, I read Ellen Moers’s chapter on the “female Gothic” in Literary Women, and also (on the recommendation of my friend Olivia) the relevant chapter in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic.² I think they’re both worth reading—I like the Gilbert/Gubar slightly more. I also recommend Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth to anybody who is interested in a history of literary reputation (not as dry as it sounds).³ And I have written about Wuthering Heights (the book) on here at least once before.⁴

Aside from my own article, the piece of writing about the movie’s general existence I enjoyed the most was this article by Cami Fateh at Feed Me:

The corset-fueled Wuthering Heights economy.

Since the article is not about the movie, you may well wonder: did I enjoy the movie? Well, no. Not as an adaptation of Wuthering Heights but also not as its own thing. Emerald Fennell’s work feels like it should fit into my occasional “these uncool popular and successful things are good” lane, much like the music of Taylor Swift or the novels of Sally Rooney. However, she keeps making uncool popular and successful things that are bad. Ah well.

I do really like “House.” I liked it before I saw the film and it’s used very well in the movie. I ended up listening to it on repeat the morning after I watched it. The rest of the soundtrack didn’t really do it for me (“Funny Mouth” is OK) but… I am not a Charli xcx devotee / angel. I think people who are will be quite happy with it.

As far as the movie goes, some thoughts below.

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Emerald Fennell has a gift for well-composed, memorable images. There are shots from Promising Young Woman I remember clearly, and I think that’s worth saying, as there are many no doubt “better” movies I’ve seen that I don’t remember at all. Making good images should get you pretty far along the path toward making good movies, and yet, somehow, it does not. If you watch a slideshow of cool screenshots from this movie set to Charli xcx’s “House,” you will probably have a better time, and certainly be imagining a better movie, than if you actually watch it.

Thus it’s easy for me to summon up impressive images. Cathy’s death scene, where she bleeds to death after a septic pregnancy: Margot Robbie lies angelically dead, with the blood flowing out of her, and the leeches applied to cure her are, for some reason, climbing around on the wall in a way that sort of looks like wings. It all looks amazing even if it makes no sense.⁵ When Cathy gets married she walks in her gigantic wedding dress across the moors because it looks good. Why not? It does look good.

And then there are images that are less impressive—at one point Cathy rides a horse to Wuthering Heights because it looks cool but then she walks away in the rain because that also looks cool. The horse presumably… what? Takes an Uber home?⁶ I shouldn’t be asking myself questions like “where’s the horse,” because I should be swept away by the spectacle. Yet there isn’t all that much spectacle. The cool looking moments are there, but they don’t build on each other. Fennell is addicted to montages⁷ and there are I think three (?) different montage sequences in “Wuthering Heights” standing in for concrete moments when we would actually see a relationship built: Heathcliff and Cathy becoming friends, Cathy and Edgar being married, and finally Heathcliff and Cathy having sex in various locations.

There are lifts from Pride and Prejudice throughout the movie, but the most significant is that Catherine injures herself snooping around the Grange to acquaint herself with her new wealthy neighbors and then is forced to stay, in a sort of slapstick version of Jane Bennett’s visit to Bingley. In the novel, she and Heathcliff are snooping and laughing at the Linton children for their competitiveness over their pet lapdog, but then Cathy stays at the Grange because she’s attacked by the Linton’s bulldog (while Heathcliff is thrown into the cellar). This moment is one of various insinuations that the Lintons are as violent in their own soft way as anybody else in this story, as when Nelly describes Edgar Linton’s attitudes toward Catherine thus:

The soft thing looked askance through the window: he possessed the power to depart, as much as a cat possesses the power to leave a mouse half killed, or a bird half eaten.

Unlike Heathcliff and Cathy, who are undisguisedly wild, the Lintons look like pampered lapdogs but are bulldogs if crossed. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is drained of all its violence, aside from the opening.⁸ Fennell’s provocateur image has been a big part of this movie’s hype cycle, but if you strip out the opening scene (in which we watch a man get an erection as he’s hanged) very little in the movie even rises to the level of “mildly distasteful” unless you have a raw egg phobia.⁹ Saltburn isn’t a good movie, but it is a genuinely gross movie. Barry Keoghan’s naked dancing, penis a-wag, is actually the kind of thing you don’t see in a lot of movies. Here, though, the shocking stuff has been removed, like the moment where Heathcliff hangs Isabella’s dog and leaves it to die. No doubt Fennell understands, correctly, that if she portrayed Heathcliff doing that, it would be for a modern audience a real point of no return, an unforgivable action. But it’s unforgivable in the book, too.¹⁰ Isabella does not understand that there is no soft heart inside Heathcliff waiting for kindness to bring it out, no lapdog inside the bulldog: Heathcliff is a wolfish man and Isabella is a fool, a weakling, and a coward who cannot defend a weak and dependent creature against him. That is what will happen with their son.

Jacob Elordi has a face that cannot convince me he is aware of the existence of evil,¹¹ and is thus miscast as Heathcliff. He spends his first part of the movie looking like he’s wandered off from a production of Jesus Christ Superstar.¹² Much dialogue from the novel is reproduced verbatim, and yet it no longer refers to anything, and nowhere is this more true than with all the references retained to how scary and beastlike and violent he is—Heathcliff is said to have a terrible temper, but there’s only one scene in which he even gets angry and it’s when he is a child and Cathy calls him stupid. Heathcliff is in fact just kind of a sweet and somewhat dumb guy in this movie.¹³ The worst thing he does is leave the house for five years. Cathy’s a kind of straight man wondering why everybody’s so mean to her.

Again, though, the problem isn’t really that Fennell changes these things, or that she removes the second half of the book, it’s that she takes away all of the wildness and violence of the book and puts nothing in its place. I don’t listen to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” and go “actually Heathcliff should be begging Cathy to come in uhhhh read a book Kate Bush?????”¹⁴ because the song has its own force and momentum. It’s fine to use a famous work to create something new of your own, to manipulate cultural reference points for your own purposes, but… you have to make something new of your own and have your own purposes, you know?¹⁵

Back to sleeping for all of February,

BDM

snoozemaxxing

P.S. Patlabor is coming I promise. 😔

1. Also, I watched Saltburn. Here is my review:

2. Coincidentally, the Gilbert/Gubar chapter is also in the Norton Critical edition. I am pretty sure the Moers chapter can be found in essay form here, but I don’t currently subscribe to the New York Review of Books so I can’t check.

3. Previously.

4. I also re-read Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which, while not relevant to this article, always makes me feel like I’m wearing the glasses from They Live.

5. The walls are supposed to look like her skin, and so I guess the idea is that they’re so like her skin the leeches are just crawling around on it, because it’s so skinlike, even if you’re a leech. In a music video (see footnote six), I would not be asking myself questions like “why are the leeches on the wall” because “it looks cool” would suffice. But in a movie.…

6. Really, Fennell should be a music video director, because music videos run on her kind of cool moments. However, these days the high budget music video is the province of a handful of stars who have nostalgia for the form and one of them exclusively directs her own. So she’s making movies.

7. My biggest problem with Saltburn… somehow.

8. I did actually have a moment during the opening where I was like… “is this movie going to be good.” But then the rest of the movie happened.

9. Maybe aside from the scene where Isabella pretends to be a dog (see footnote thirteen).

10. When Hareton is killing the puppies, on the other hand, the moment is brutal but practical: the puppies are not pets but working animals that aren’t needed. Their deaths are / seem to be clean and fast. That is a distinction a modern audience would probably not be able to take on screen. (I include myself there.)

11. Which works in Saltburn.

12. As far as “whitewashing Heathcliff” goes, in Victorian racism terms being Basque (as Elordi is) is probably enough to get all the epithets applied to Heathcliff in the book.

13. A representative example: Isabella writes her letter after eloping with Heathcliff about how he’s a demon, which is presented close to verbatim from the book. Then it’s revealed that actually the letters are ploys to get Cathy’s attention because Heathcliff can’t write. Isabella writes them for her in exchange for Heathcliff being “nice” to her, which means letting her pretend to be a dog. Isabella is presented as having the upper hand over Heathcliff. Aside from I guess “adultery,” Heathcliff never does anything wrong the entire movie; he is noble and self-sacrificing even as a child.

14. I was always under the impression Bush had not read Wuthering Heights, just seen a movie, but I’m not sure if that’s true. Anyway the point is, it’s a good song.

15. Also, if this does well, I think Emerald Fennell’s gonna adapt Villette… I can feel it… I can scent it on the wind…