REMEMBER Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights? It’s the novel about a sexy romp that scandalised 1820s society written by the enfant terrible of her day? No? The one where a thirty-something blonde seduces a hot young Yorkshire man? Nope, me neither.
Emerald Fennell has adapted a big screen version in time for Valentines’ Day. It’s called ‘Big Blonde getting it on the Heath’. No wait, it’s called “Wuthering Heights” with inverted commas to signal that it’s not the book. Thanks Emerald, but it was never in doubt.
Wuthering Heights, the unpunctuated version, was a romance about Cathy and Heathcliff, dark-headed childhood sweethearts who want to run free on the moors. Obstacles are thrown at them (for her, money woes, death in childbirth; for him, status issues and an obsessive streak) and it takes death to bring them together. No one understood them. Poor people, old people, rich kids with their milky feeble lives, God himself, couldn’t understand their deep love.
The novel is the stuff of teenage girl fantasy. Heathcliff, the prototype hot, bad guy who obsesses over cool Cathy, the only woman who can understand him. Kate Bush understood. She was a teenage girl. For those of us who read the book in teenage years, we are obsessive, passionate and insanely jealous of this beautiful book. And this new version has been found wanting.
Emily Bronte understood the rules of romance and how to keep the flame alive. Marriage and gritty reality would not do for young female readers. Cathy and Heathcliff got together in the afterlife where they could be together and unseparated at last. Actual sex out of wedlock sex was a no-go. Cathy was in love but she was also a smart and ambitious girl who knew the rules of the late 18th century. Husband Linton would have her packing had she given herself over to Heathcliff. Cathy we had a good time but you are a hell-bound harlot…
And Emily knew that the flame would fizzle out had the lovers actually got together in marriage. Just speculating but six months into married life, when the rows started, Heathcliff might be dragging up his wife’s rich ex-boyfriend and she might be worrying she married a loser. Adult sex and marriage are sensibly kept at a distance from the romance. It just wouldn’t work. But Emerald Fennell wants to ‘re-imagine’ the story for modern audiences, so she throws in the one thing that Cathy and Heathcliff didn’t have. A sexy romp between consenting adults, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.
The actual story is steeped in the values of when it was written, when people died young, love was time-pressured and believing in the afterlife was necessary. Transport Heathcliff and Cathy to modern times and they’d be labelled as stalker and borderline personality disorder.
If you squint, hard and don’t love the book? Well, the film looks pretty, like a video track or a perfume advert. And each to their own. But I knew Wuthering Heights, Wuthering Heights was a friend of mine and you, sir, are no Wuthering Heights.
“Wuthering Heights” opens in British cinemas on Friday 13th February.
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Photos Courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures.
