After watching Hamnet twice in a week last month, my fizzing excitement and awe have finally died down to a gentle, ever-burning ember – just retreated into the background enough for me to become hot and riled up again as the release of Emerald Fennell’s pitiful take on “Wuthering Heights” looms nearer.
I believe there are a few instances in which it’s okay to slag off a film before watching it. Everything my eyes have been subject to about this train wreck – from the promo, the trailers, the billboards, to interviews with the creator herself – has told me that this film is going to be nothing but an utter pile of rot. And the only reason it’s going to be an utter pile of rot is because of the way it has obliterated one of the greatest novels ever written.
I’m not talking ‘the book was better’ or ‘it wasn’t a faithful adaptation’ – I’m talking she chewed up the book in her brainless 14 year old self’s mouth and regurgitated it twenty-five years later. If she even read it.
I have no expectations for a faithful adaptation
Like so many other people who are seething with rage, I first read Wuthering Heights in school and it immediately became one of my favourite novels. Through studying it, I didn’t fantasise about a Cathy who looked like me and a Heathcliff who also looked like me – I, along with my classmates, picked apart the text and the context, explored themes and wrote essays that always included something about Heathcliff’s ambiguity and ‘otherness’, Cathy’s ‘wildness’. Then I read it again for fun almost every winter as a young adult and, now, a fully-fledged adult.
I was obsessed with the unhealthy obsession, the moody moors, how fucked up the characters are – not because I thought it was a beautiful dark romance but because of the exploration of human psychology and the complexities of the characters. At the time, I was also writing stories involving gory murder and blood, torture and kidnapping etc etc. My teachers weren’t impressed, I think.