I staunchly defended this Emerald Fennell’s right to create an ‘interpretation’ of a lauded classic, for many weeks before I actually sat down to watch “Wuthering Heights” as it is so named.
I said, people must be allowed the freedom of expression to express their creativity on a piece of literature such as this!
Mind you, I am a purist. I love Emily Bronte’s dark and insane work. It spoke to me at ten years old in one particular way, and then over the years as my ever-growing brain revisited it, it spoke to me differently each time. The older I get, the more weary I feel towards it, but it still has its inexplicable pull.
As younger me put it:
I finished a re-read of Jane Eyre last month and yesterday I turned the last page on that chaotic nightmare that is Wuthering Heights. It’s my fourth time reading it and I tell you, it’s emotionally unhinged. It tells me a different story each time I read it. This time, it spoke of futile hope when love and kindness are not given freely. Also that people ought to socialise with people other than their own families sometimes lest they all marry each other for want of better things to do.
So I watched this controversial “Wuthering Heights”. I was prepared to put aside all judgement and criticism and just attempt to enjoy it for what it was but I fear.. I … could not!
Oh I could not. Oh how disgusted I felt! How stunned and how witheringly irritated. I felt as though it had been stripped bare of all of Bronte’s painstaking intricacy, only leaving the haunting imagery of a weak sexual fever dream of what a fifteen year old, over twenty years ago, would have imagined it to be, not having understood it at all.
We have a tortured love story, consummated towards the end, but never satisfied with an everlasting union, and a set decked for conquest. Adorned for gaudy exuberance. Attired for extravagance. We are shown so much visually, but are told so little. I see feeble attempts at deeper analytical exploration, but it all falls so terribly flat. We have the brilliance of a woman who lived a short life over 150 years ago stripped to bare, primal essentials, and dressed in modern-day fluff.
Oh, it was awful. I tried to detach from Wuthering Heights to watch it as it was meant to be, an entertaining piece of pulp, but I could not. I found it lacking substance. Empty like a vanity cake. Decorated so vibrantly, nothing inside. A rotten core. No core at all. Where is that rich, decadent yolk? We just have a cracked shell.
The film did fantastically well, of course, so I expect the makers got what they desired from it, and that is all that matters, isn’t it. I do wish they had named it anything other than ‘Wuthering Heights’ – because they could have made it any story at all. They didn’t need to say it was what it wasn’t.
Ocean Bream 