Wuthering Heights

A couple of weeks ago I got around to buying Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, after a friend recommended it. It was on my enormous to-read list, but never very high up, since I didn't really know anything about it. Two weeks later I have been to see the new film adaption by Andrea Arnold and even listened to the song by Kate Bush. In a word, I have become slightly obsessed with it.

Right now I am reading Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, and after reading Wuthering Heights it is a bit of an effort, given that Austen is arguably a much more stereotypical 19th Century/Victorian novelist, concerned with class, inheritance, romance, marriage and aristocracy (more on this in my next entry). But Wuthering Heights isn't stereotypical by any sense of the word. I'm never really sure what to expect from the books I read at the moment, because I rarely know very much about them. I'm just going through a list of the 100 greatest novels of all time because the BBC and the Guardian, amongst other places, have told me I should. So Wuthering Heights was a surprise...

One of the first parallels I drew, despite the 200 year difference between them, was Wuthering Heights and Shameless (or, to an extent, British drama in general). Essentially, a couple of families entangled in love, sex, arguments and violence. One of the most frustrating things about reading classic literature (particularly Austen) is the concern with propriety and appearances. Pages and pages of interior monologue regarding one of the female characters debating whether or not to say hello to one of the male characters, and running through all the repercussions that it could lead to. Seriously? Was life in 19th Century England really this frivolous? This can be portrayed with hilarity, but it is still a huge relief to read something from the same era which doesn't place so much (if any) focus on propriety.

Wuthering Heights revolves around the connection between the two main characters, Heathcliff and Catherine. I won't go into any great detail retelling the story, because anyone who is interested can get a much better account from Wikipedia. Primarily, the narrative focuses on their emotions; passion, love, jealousy, betrayal, hatred, most specifically the betrayal Heathcliff feels when Catherine marries their wealthy neighbour, Edgar Linton. The majority of the novel focuses on Heathcliff's ongoing search for revenge against Linton as well as Hindley, the abusive eldest son of the man who adopted him. Heathcliff is one of the most remarkable anti-heroes ever created. Almost every decision he makes, every action he takes, every sentence spoken, is violent, aggressive and manipulative. And yet I felt a huge amount of empathy towards him because of the way he had been treated. His suffering is portrayed as such that no matter how despicable his actions, they seem justified. He's even kind of sexy.

It has been apparent for some time now that one of the things I look for in film and literature is a certain level of bleak. It is why I like Charles Dickens, and it is why I like a lot of art-house and independent films. Wuthering Heights is bleak. Oppressively so, as the turmoil, grief and ongoing war of the characters never really wanes. Almost all of them die. Some of them are simply left to wither away because no-one cares about them enough to help. And this is further embellished by the setting, which is one of the most iconic and unforgettable aspects of the book, and one which Andrea Arnold really develops in the new film adaption. Rough cliffs, desolate moors, windswept trees; rain, snow, storm clouds. Unlike the characters in Austen's novels, there are no balls for the characters to attend, no society to consider, no expectations of others to suppress their feelings.

I see that I have digressed into a book review, which wasn't my intent...

When I saw the poster for the new film adaption of Wuthering Heights, it spurred me on to buy and read the book before going to see the film. Reading the original first just makes more sense to me. If you watch the film first then all those hours spent reading the book later won't be as enjoyable, because you know most of what's going to happen (I have recently read Jane Eyre, but I watched the new film first so I knew exactly what was about to happen all the way through it). Anyway... After already establishing a love for the book, I was now even more excited about the film. I'd seen Fish Tank by Andrea Arnold, so the idea of her doing a period adaption was intriguing to say the least. But the fact is, Arnold's style of directing is exactly what was needed.

Raw, passionate, powerfully atmospheric, and unforgivably gritty, it remains completely faithful to the novel, yet so far removed from traditional costume drama that it feels completely new and original. I cannot recall the last time I saw a film with such cutting attention to detail. The hand-held camera drags you down into the mud and zooms in on every blade of grass, every drop of rain, every hair. The focus blurs in and out, now on the characters faces, now on a beetle crawling through the grass. The only soundtrack is the wind howling into the microphone, a tree branch rapping against a window, a horse breathing, or the constant drip of water. Mist, rain, moors. Every aesthetic wonder of the book is pulled into focus and studied in detail.

I think this is a lesson in how to make a great adaption. And proof that an art-house approach works surprisingly well with a genre that usually takes the big-budget, star cast approach. Atmosphere and imagery are two of my primary concerns with films, and not the computer generated type (fuck CGI of all kinds). Many people find an elaborately designed rendering of spaceships, cities of the future, and imaginary worlds displayed on the big screen as the height of aesthetic capability. But if I'm honest, I'd much rather watch films that take a unique look at the things which already exist: fields, woods, and even urban landscapes (but one's that haven't been looked at before, because I'm sure I'm not the only one who is bored to death of seeing the New York skyline). And as the cast, unknown or TV actors, couldn't have been better really. Usually, films which use an all-star cast (the types where the trailers spend more time listing the big names than actually showing a preview of the film) are going to be narratively shite. And films that use unknown actors tend to have a much higher quality concept. If you are making a film set in Yorkshire, for God's sake use actors from there. Don't hire a big name like Anne Hathaway to completely fuck it up.

Since I read a lot, I see a lot of adaptions of the books I've read, and unfortunately, this is usually a disillusioning experience. There is nothing more frustrating than going to the cinema to see the film adaption of one of your favourite books completely ruin it (A primary example being Harry Potter) through bad acting, a bad script, changing things, or omitting them completely. It was about 30 minutes into Wuthering Heights when I realised that it was already one of the best adaptions I'd seen, and there was a flood of relief that for once, they got it right.