I have seen the future of cinema, and it is Jacob Elordi, looking sexy and simmering; and Owen Cooper looking winsome, forever. It is classic books enclosed in quotation marks. It is fairy tale palaces erected in the West York Moors. It is preternaturally gigantic strawberries; women staring at gigantic crustaceans in bowls of jelly; rooms the size of football pitches painted the colour of the heroine's skin. It is walls covered in photogenic leeches while the heroine’s blood fills the whole room; and houses piled floor to ceiling with discarded gin bottles.
And bonking, endless, endless bonking; and even a little bit of fairly decorous Victorian masturbation.
I suppose I must have read Wuthering Heights at some point in my life. Or perhaps it’s like Pollyanna and I only saw the BBC Sunday Tea Time adaptation. It is almost completely unlike Pollyanna in other respects. But I think I remember the broad details: a family adopts a feral orphan boy; the daughter develops a quasi-incestuous love for her new foster-brother. They talk a lot about being a single soul divided in twain and how love means never having to say you are sorry, but she grows up and makes a sensible marriage to someone else. Who is rich, but not, so far as I recall, as rich as all that. Then she dies and does a cover of an 80s Kate Bush track. There is a second generation; and a Russian Doll set of unreliable narrators, but everyone has lost interest by that point.
I am pretty sure that there must have been a little more plot. And I don’t remember there being that much kinky sex. I don’t remember Heathcliff being a person of colour, particularly, although he may possibly have been swarthy. “People of African descent are wild and untameable” might not be a trope you particularly want to bring to the fore in a modern movie. I get that some couples positively get off on being awful to each other; and there are some potentially explorable shades of grey in the space between “kink” and “abuse”, but I am pretty sure that the book doesn’t make this point by showing a couple of subordinate characters doing sexy stuff with riding gear in the stables. Or, indeed, showing the leading man and his secondary squeeze engaged in full-on what I believe is called puppy play. (Did I mention that I enjoyed Pillion very much indeed?) I am pretty sure Emily Bronte didn’t show us Cathy wanking on the moors, and I really don’t know where the crowd ogling the hanged man's hard-on came from.
Possibly, for people who are plumbed differently from me, the film worked as a sort of art-house erotica. Nothing wrong with that, particularly. But there is a limit to how long I remain interested in watching two appalling people involved in brutal clandestine assignations (although in fairness, with no visible body parts.) And take that away, and what you are left with is a sort of portfolio of studiously artificial imagery. Women in camp pantomime frocks, legions of them. Parties of two or three are presented with vast photogenic banquets — shades, slightly, of Stephen Berkoff. Any time anyone is served pleasant looking food, it is automatically thrown on the floor. There is, inevitably, a sinister dolls house. It never stops raining. Wherever possible, people are viewed through open doors several rooms away; or through confusing mirrors. Cathy walks some five miles from her home to Linton’s palace, without getting any blood on a diaphanous wedding dress.
Those quotation marks are doing a lot of heavy lifting. This is not Wuthering Heights, this is “Wuthering Heights”, a parody, perhaps, or a transcription of a gothic novel into another medium, or a riff on the cultural idea of the novel. This is the kind of thing that people who haven't read Wuthering Heights think Wuthering Heights is like. Quite possibly, director Emerald Fennel hadn’t read the book either.
It’s certainly a thing. I am not even going to say that it’s not an interesting thing. In the 1920s there were those who said that this new-fangled dialogue stuff was going to take away the purity of silent cinema. I am by no means saying that this collage of blood, leeches and bondage isn’t in its own way a form of art. I am always puzzled and intrigued, by no means unpleasantly, when I go to see an exhibition of modern art. I will be a little sorry if it replaces cinema, but I am already a very old man, so my opinion is of limited relevance.
I’m so cold. It’s mee, I’m Cathee, I’ve come home. I think it might have been improved if they had done it in semaphore.
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2 comments:
For better or worse, I think Dave Allen at Large permanently imprinted WH into my young vulnerable mind more than anything else.
-- there are some potentially explorable shades of grey in the space between “kink” and “abuse” --
How many shades? 47? 48? 49? Hmm?
So, serious comments. I read WH last year after reading Wildfell Hall to try to get a feeling for the Bronte era setting.
(1) I'd say it is as close to kinky as you could do in mainstream literature of the time. Big H admits to opening his sister's grave and laying down beside her. There is a lot of cruelty and I suppose you could look at that through an S&M lens. So a sexy / kinky adaptation seems entirely reasonable.
(2) The book is deliberately vague about big H's ethnic background but does refer to him as dark, so anything in the range of "dark" Englishman to, I dunno, say Turkish is possible. Hmm, given English colonial history, potentially several other countries are also on the table.
"Classic literature, but sseexxyy" isn't something I have much interest in either but it sounds like this director nailed it, so good for her. Someone tell her about The Histories of Herodotus and let her go wild.
No one should care, but that was me.
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