6 hours ago
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The most astonishing thing about the first trailer for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is not the extreme closeup of dough being kneaded into submission. It’s not that in the lead roles Margot Robbie is blonde and 35, and Jacob Elordi is white, when Emily Brontë described Cathy as a teen brunette and Heathcliff as “a dark-skinned gypsy”. It’s not the gaudy splendour of the interiors – silver walls, plaster Greek gods spewing strings of pearls, blood-red floors and a flesh-pink wall for clutching and licking. It’s not Robbie’s gobstopper diamonds or her scarlet sunglasses or her stuffing grass into her mouth or the loud snip of her corset laces being slashed with a knife or her elaborately – erotically – bound hair as she contemplates multiple silver cake stands stacked with vertiginous fruit puddings. It’s not any of her dresses – the red latex number or the perfectly 1980s off-the-shoulder wedding dress topped by yards of veil half-wuthered off her head. Nor is it any of the times Elordi takes his top off.
The most astonishing thing is that the trailer says Wuthering Heights is “the greatest love story of all time”. Which is almost exactly how the 1939 Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon film was trailed – as “the greatest love story of our time … or any time!” Have we learned nothing? I am not talking about the fact that (like Oberon’s!) Robbie’s wedding dress is white, which is not period-correct. This has exercised many people on the internet. I’m more worried about the fact that almost a century since Olivier’s film, we are still calling it a love story – a great one! The greatest! It’s being released the day before Valentine’s Day! – when what actually happens is that Cathy rejects Heathcliff because she’s a snob, and he turns into a psychopath.
This is why the novel is all but unfilmable – unless you stop halfway through. The 1939 film cut from Cathy’s death to her ghost walking hand in hand with Heathcliff’s while the housekeeper Nelly Dean sighs rapturously: “They’ve only just begun to live!” Most adaptations have done the same, a rare exception being Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 version which didn’t just cover the whole book but also starred Emily herself, played by Sinéad O’Connor in a big blue cloak, warning the audience “not to smile at any part of it”.
It’s true it’s low on laughs. It’s no romcom. Instead of a meet-cute there’s Cathy’s father bringing home a ragged orphan he’s found starving on the streets of Liverpool. The boy-loses-girl part is all there, but the boy-gets-girl ending never quite happens. The real question is whether it’s too brutal for the screen – Andrea Arnold’s raw, stripped-down 2011 version is probably the closest to the book’s dark energy, and even she stuck to the first half of the book.
There’s so much cruelty. Heathcliff is abused by Cathy’s brother Hindley. He then goads Hindley into drinking himself to death, takes his house and abuses Hindley’s son. He tricks Cathy’s sister-in-law into marriage, beats her, calls her a slut, hangs her dog and gaslights her, insisting this is what she wants. Cathy is too narcissistic to care about any of this. So even ignoring her death and the second half of the novel, it’s a lot. If Fennell continues to the (bittersweet) end she’ll have to deal with Heathcliff abusing his own son and Cathy’s daughter, forcing them to marry, and renting Cathy’s marital home to a middle-aged fop who slashes a ghost girl’s wrists with broken glass. (In a frame narrative. The complexity of the plot is another reason it’s a nightmare to adapt.)
When it came out in 1847, the critics did not think it was a love story. “How a human being could have attempted such a book … without committing suicide … is a mystery,” wrote the Graham’s Magazine, shuddering at its “vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors” and speculating that its author’s nightmare vision must have come from eating “toasted cheese”. The Spectator found it “coarse and disagreeable”; Atlas called the characters “utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible”; and the North American Review shrank from the novel’s “coarseness”, “stupid blasphemy” and “morbid imagination”. So in a way it’s a good sign that a viewer at a test screening of Fennell’s film found it “aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive” because, the rumours go, of a scene in which a man is being publicly hanged, ejaculates and is fondled by a nun. None of that is in the book, but Wuthering Heights has always shocked. It has always been depraved and unhinged.
Heathcliff literally begs Cathy to “drive me mad”. She feels obliterated by love, crying: “I am Heathcliff!” Love sends her into a brain fever and makes him gnash his teeth and dash his head against a tree until he bleeds and digs up her grave. All this is in the book. And we want it. Brontë surrounds Cathy and Heathcliff with characters who are so petty, hypocritical, small-minded and smug that their uncompromising love seems like a breath of fresh air. She also gives Cathy a brother who bullies her and a husband who stultifies her so that you can even argue, as critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar did, that Heathcliff is a feminist force who helps her smash the patriarchy and run wild in nature.
Perhaps, anyway, the love isn’t supposed to be real. Some say it’s, as Elizabeth Hardwick rather unkindly put it, “a virgin’s story”, a book about impossible, abstract love which can only work when it becomes ethereal or, to put it less romantically, when both the lovers are dead. Perhaps that’s why it appeals so much to teenagers – Kate Bush wrote her soaring song at 18 and Fennell has explicitly said she wants her film to reflect the book as she read it at 14. Perhaps it’s not the greatest love story of all time, our time or any time, but is the greatest story about what we think love is like when we haven’t experienced it.
But I am not sure that’s entirely the novel Brontë wrote, at 27, intellectually brilliant and canny too (she managed the sisters’ investments), physically strong (she walked miles, she could handle a gun) and an avid reader of newspapers as well as all the newest books. Her novel is absolutely bursting with ideas. In its intricate structure it holds a tension between love and nihilism. She wanted to confound us, to perplex us, to startle us, so perhaps it’s absolutely right that the trailer should do the same.
It will be a shame, though, if the adaptation doesn’t take in any of the novel’s tricky second half where, having conjured our darkest desires, I think Brontë is asking us whether we really want to indulge them. Heathcliff tells Nelly he started digging up Cathy’s corpse but stopped at the last moment. Repulsed, she asks what he’d have done if he’d found her, “dissolved into earth, or worse”, and he says he would have dreamed “of dissolving with her …!” Is this what we want love to cost? Do we really want love that is so toxic that it can only end in death and damage everyone around us? Is this love or a macabre will to suicide? And while we might enjoy this kind of love in fantasy, wouldn’t we be better off going for the kind of love Brontë actually ends the novel with, as Cathy’s daughter gently, intimately, teaches Hindley’s son to read, a scene that has hardly ever – yet – made it to the screen.
