The right kind of entertainment

The Telegraph explores a thesis that we have read before. That the Brontës, and Wuthering Heights specifically, are particularly fitted for the present political and social stormy situation:

The Brontës have transformed themselves over a century and a half, even if the ongoing fascination perhaps says more about us than it does about them. A tiny teenage manuscript of Charlotte’s is about to be sold, its value estimated at between £200,000 and £300,000, which is as good a measure of enthusiasm as any. And the release of new film versions of her and her sister Emily’s best-known books – Cary Fukanaga’s (sic) Jane Eyre and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights – offers an opportunity to think about how we have remade these books in our own image.

They were not always equally popular. Jane Eyre was an immediate bestseller, its vivid theatrical style making it a favourite to be turned into stage melodrama – as happened within a year of its publication in 1847. It has been filmed 20 times, from the very earliest days of the cinema.

Wuthering Heights was slower to make its way. Although it, too, made a tremendous impact on publication, it was always regarded as very strong meat, one for the intelligentsia that would be resistant to dramatisation. Probably only after the two marvellous screen adaptations of the late 1930s – the Jane Eyre with Orson Welles as Rochester, and Laurence Olivier’s splendid turn as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights – did the two attain popular parity.

But what do we think of them now? I find that most novelists tend to prefer Charlotte, with her dedication to repression and the unspoken – but both her and Emily, as well as their sister Anne, have been readily co-opted into various chic causes, sometimes with not very much justification. The Oxford “Authors in Context” volume naturally has a chapter on “Gender, Nationality and Race in the Brontës’ Novels”, which probably describes most of the recent thinking about their books. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar named their pioneering 1979 study of women’s plot options in 19th-century literature The Madwoman In The Attic, after Rochester’s first wife Bertha.

That’s fair enough: what women could or could not do was clearly of the highest interest to all of the Brontës. One of the things that shocked the first readers of Wuthering Heights was the total lack of restraint exhibited by its women – and towards them, as Heathcliff beats his daughter-in-law and digs up and embraces the corpse of his great love.
But other modern responses seem more attuned to our worries than their interests. Interestingly, this new film of Wuthering Heights casts a mixed-race actor, James Howson, as Heathcliff, and finds space for such non-Emily lines as “He’s not my brother, he’s a n-----”. This is the product, to a large degree, of academic industry, determined to drag questions of race and Empire from the margins of classic literature. Just as Mansfield Park is really “about“ Sir Thomas Bertram’s deplorable sugar plantations, so Wuthering Heights, because Heathcliff is said to resemble a “gypsy” and a “lascar”, must somehow be “about” racial prejudice in the 19th century.
These ideological concerns could be on the way out – but what is starting to chime in an unpredictable way is the sisters’ passion for the wildest aspects of nature. Charlotte wrote to G H Lewes, after he had foisted Pride and Prejudice on her, that Austen gave her “no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck”. Wuthering Heights – which we remember, not quite inaccurately, as a novel in which people are always running shrieking onto the moors – has a passion for nature when it exceeds our control. You feel that Emily would have been the first to protest at the wind turbines that currently disfigure Ovenden Moor near Haworth.
However, there are always deeper, less explicable reasons why a particular author seems exactly right for the times. Jane Austen entranced the Western world in the 1990s, perhaps because, in the gap between the Cold War and 9/11, questions of etiquette and social acceptability seemed to be on roughly the right scale. The madness of Wuthering Heights, as history has shown, seems exactly right for societies contemplating the abyss. The scholar Patricia Ingham has described the making of the 1939 movie in the period “between the Munich Crisis and the start of the war”, with Sam Goldwyn insisting it should be “a story of undying love… that transcends the gloomy nature of its backgrounds”.
As we contemplate similar indications of coming catastrophe, Wuthering Heights seems the right sort of entertainment. All restraint is cast aside: violence can break out in a country kitchen; the borders between life and death break down, with the living assaulting the dead; puppies are hanged, lapwing chicks gratuitously killed, and dead rabbits kept as toys. The story can seem almost apocalyptic, since almost every character dies in the course of it. Indeed, some critics have commented on the way the landscape of this new film resembles the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
Yet what is curious about both the 1939 film and this new one is that they stop halfway through. Emily Brontë’s conception was essentially purgative, of a cure to hatred: as in The Winter’s Tale, the second generation redeems the hatred in the lives of the first. The first Cathy is born Earnshaw, dreams of becoming Heathcliff, dies Linton; the second is born Linton, becomes Heathcliff, ends Earnshaw. To use only the first act of the novel is to neglect the intricacy of the concept. But we probably aren’t that interested, just now, in the ways that time works to cure suffering and crime. We are probably keener on contemplating the horrific scale of that suffering. (Philip Hensher)

Philip French publishes his own review of Wuthering Heights 2011 in The Observer:

We're made to understand the sense of wonder Heathcliff feels in the awesome countryside. We sense the rapport he has with Earnshaw's teenage daughter Cathy (Shannon Beer). We sympathise with the resentment engendered by the cruel treatment meted out by Cathy's weak, vindictive brother and the Caliban-like desire for revenge that grows over the years of subservient humiliation. The movie is at its strongest in these early scenes as Cathy and Heathcliff form a childhood bond against the bitter world and become one with each other in the natural world, suggestive of the friendship that young slaves briefly forged with their masters' children in the deep south. This is helped by the excellent naturalistic handheld camerawork of Arnold's regular cameraman, Robbie Ryan, and a remarkable soundtrack designed by Nicolas Becker that incorporates wind, birdsong, barking dogs, rain, the flapping of shutters, the whispering of leaves, the chattering of insects and the creaking of trees into a great symphony of nature.
The movie takes an uneasy turn when Cathy is absorbed into the civilising world of Thrushcross Grange, and Heathcliff is quite literally thrown out, as well he might be after telling the genteel Lintons: "Fuck you. You're all cunts." Shortly thereafter he leaves to make his mysterious fortune and be transformed into a gentleman, only to find on his return that Cathy has married Edgar Linton. With both roles now taken by older actors (James Howson as Heathcliff, Kaya Scodelario as Cathy), the movie never recovers its early power and at times becomes confused, ponderous, and risible. The novel and the 1939 film introduce Heathcliff as a fascinating, insoluble enigma. In Arnold's movie he's merely a puzzle, a tornado of resentment whirling destructively across the bleak and intimidating landscape. But the film is by no means negligible.

Jonathan Romney in The Independent on Sunday explores the new ways of approaching the classics on the screen:

Arnold's Wuthering Heights will inevitably be seen in the context of a tradition that sees the book as a breast-heaving tale of windswept passion: a tradition that takes in Heathcliffs from Laurence Olivier to Ralph Fiennes, and even (God help us) Cliff Richard. But Arnold's unvarnished version reminds us that Brontë's novel is above all a tale of pathological hatred, revenge and territorial conflict.(...)

The film's most controversial innovation is the introduction of a black Heathcliff, played by James Howson – something that may strike traditionalists as perverse, though Arnold argues that it's implicit in Brontë's description of a stray child discovered in Liverpool. "He arrives like this invader from nowhere," says Arnold, "and he's very different from everyone else. I wondered if he could have been a Romany, but Liverpool was a great slave port at that time, and there would have been a lot of slaves coming out of Liverpool."
On one level, Arnold's Wuthering Heights is an austerely impressionistic study of Northern landscape, but there's also a political edge to the film, its themes of race and class making it very much an essay on England's historical stresses.

John Walsh publishes a lukewarm review of the film for the same newspaper.

The main problem, though, is the acting. As young Heathcliff, Solomon Glave manages impressive bursts of anger (he shouts "Fuck off, you cunts!" at the Lintons, which I don't remember in the book) but exudes nothing more savage than a brooding sulk.  (...)
We get no sense of grown-up connection between the leads until Cathy is on her deathbed. This dark, near-silent film is just too grim to be borne.

The Sunday Times film listing is a bit more positive:

Brontë purists expecting a passionate period piece are going to be shocked by Andrea Arnold’s raw, rude and realistic adaptation. This is a twisted and tormented love story, full of sadism, masochism, profanity and violence — plus a touch of necrophilia — played out against misty, storm-lashed moorlands. The first part, featuring Cathy and Heathcliff as kids, is far better than the second, when the grown-up Heathcliff (James Howson) returns for Cathy (Kaya Scodelario). Howson just isn’t sexy or desirable in some way — he’s too much like a nutty stalker to engage our sympathy. (Cosmo Landesman)

Eat, Sleep, Live, Film considers the film a half masterpiece; London Film Fanatiq posts a mostly positive review; Feminéma wants to see the film (although she is not fond of the book), the singer and songwriter Elle Graham is also eager to see it.

A video interview with Kaya Scodelario can be found on omg! The Telegraph interviews James Howson:

Andrea Arnold, the director of Wuthering Heights, had wanted a young Yorkshire actor to match Bronte's description of Heathcliff as a "dark-skinned gipsy in aspect and a little lascar' – a 19th Century term for sailors from India.
"I just got there and did my bit and that was it. They said I had the part," said Howson. "I remember thinking how hard work really does pay off.
"Heathcliff doesn't really get a lot of dialogue in the film – he's just a stalker really, a watcher.
"He's an outsider in the book. That's what they wanted to get across in the film – and they obviously saw that in me."
Howson said he was paid £7,800 for the six weeks of filming, which took place in the village of Thwaite, North Yorkshire, last year.
"People have said I should have got more but that's a lot of money to me. I really enjoyed it and I'm really grateful for the opportunity I had."
His highlight was being flown with the cast to the Venice Film Festival, where the film had its premiere. Stars at the festival included George Clooney and Kate Winslet.
But with the high point came the low. He said: "When I first saw the film I noticed they had dubbed over my voice with someone else's.
"I felt really hurt. All the things I had to do in the film – the cold mornings, the difficult scenes – and then they use someone else's voice.
"But that's just the film industry – I can't be too angry about it." (Ben Leach)

On Hollywood Soapbox they have seen Wuthering Heights 1939 on the big screen:

Recently, I had the distinct pleasure of watching the original Wuthering Heights from 1939 at the Lafayette Theatre’s Saturday morning classic-movie series. (...)

Legendary director William Wyler offers many lush images of the countryside and finds a nice intimacy in the story. In many ways, he sets up the tale like a traditional ghost story, with characters recollecting their experiences with the ill-fated Heathcliff and Cathy.
Wuthering Heights earns its spot as a classic film, and to watch it in such a classic setting as the Lafayette Theatre is a double pleasure. Do yourself a favor … actually, two favors. (John Soltes)

Curiously, the Daily Mail interviews the musician Seal:

Who would play you in the movie of your life?
Ewan McGregor, though he would have to get some boot polish and do an Al Jolson. Or Laurence Olivier, if he were still alive. I loved him in Wuthering Heights. (Maureen Paton)

The Sunday Times talks about Gene Simmons, bassist of Kiss among other things:

He went to college, got a degree in education and became a teacher in New York. He taught Jane Eyre to Puerto Ricans who were not particularly interested, but only for six months because in his spare time he had formed a band. Kiss were soon playing in stadiums. (John-Paul Flintoff)

The Hackney Citizen carries a story about Anti-Library, an exhibition of books which have never been read by their owners. Wuthering Heights is one of them:

Ever bought a book knowing you would probably never read it? Meaty classics like Wuthering Heights can be hard to get through and now a gallery in Hackney has recognised this, launching an exhibition of unread books. (...)
However, some reasons for not reading a book were more straightforward. Kathy Noble, who gave Wuthering Heights, explained it “has always defeated me”. (Sarah Marsh)

the Brontë Sisters gives some links with old pictures of Haworth;  Beth's Books reviews Romancing Miss Brontë; The Argumentative Old Git discusses the otherness in Heathcliff.