Gothic masterpieces

The Atlantic discusses 'The Rise of CliffsNotes Cinema'.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the lovelorn Ophelia famously drowns. The prince of Denmark has cruelly spurned her, her father has died, and she’s stricken with grief. If only she had realized Taylor Swift’s vision for her: In the song “The Fate of Ophelia,” the pop star imagines that she has instead been saved by a new suitor. Her version of the tragic figure, Swift sings, is “no longer drowning and deceived, all because you came for me.”

Hollywood has been making me think of Swift’s track quite a bit lately. The sparkly earworm deploys one of her favorite tricks: messing around with a literary classic for lyrical fodder. Cinema has been going through its own “Fate of Ophelia” era these past few months, with a litany of new adaptations that dramatically alter their source material. The writer-director Emerald Fennell turned Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s Gothic novel about obsession and social status, into erotic fanfiction. [...]

Updating a classic isn’t inherently a bad idea; Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, a dutiful adaptation of Shelley’s 1818 novel, just won three Oscars, and Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has enjoyed an excellent box-office run. Yet most of these projects have been as superficial as Swift’s single, in which Ophelia survives just by pledging “allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes”—a cheeky reference to Swift’s fiancé, to be sure, but Ophelia’s problem was never really about the vibes. That reductiveness, though, works far better in a four-minute pop song than in a feature-length film. Call it the rise of CliffsNotes Cinema—watered-down transformations that offer glossy but thin summaries of the originals and strip away the challenging material that helped turn them into cultural mainstays in the first place. These movies make the provocative palatable: Uncomfortable relationships and nuanced characterizations—essentially, what made the stories endure—get lost in the fog of showy filmmaking. [...]

This type of nuance all but disappears in CliffsNotes Cinema, which often looks incredible—I’m certainly taken with the costumes in Wuthering Heights, as well as with the soaring sets in Frankenstein —but robs its audience of the chance to analyze anything for themselves. That’s largely because these movies dull the sharpest edges of their source material, aiming for obvious takeaways regardless of how nonsensically they’re rendered. Despite never giving its titular character an opportunity to explore her original identity, The Bride! gleefully insists that she has become an avatar for female empowerment. Rather than explore the book’s larger point that class is an inescapable burden, Wuthering Heights makes its central conflict about whether its protagonists can be together. These films argue that their characters act on raw emotions: lust, fury, sadness. Yet these feelings fail to linger in the audience. Unlike a Taylor Swift song that gets stuck in your head, they just fade away. (Shirley Li)

Collider ranks 'The 10 Greatest Gothic Book Masterpieces'.

4 'Wuthering Heights' (1847) by Emily Brontë

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” The recent Emerald Fennell movie version was divisive, but Emily Brontë's original is a bona fide classic. Wuthering Heights tells the story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, whose intense and destructive love shapes the lives of those around them across generations. Set on the windswept Yorkshire moors, the novel unfolds through layered narration, revealing the consequences of obsession and revenge.

The backdrop reflects the characters’ inner turmoil; all wild, untamed, and unforgiving. Wuthering Heights is a classic tale of passion and pain. There are also explicit supernatural elements, though they are used sparingly. Catherine’s ghost (whether real or imagined) lingers over the story, blurring the boundary between life and death. But, as with the best Gothic fiction, the supernatural is less important than the emotional reality it expresses. [...]

1 'Jane Eyre' (1847) by Charlotte Brontë

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.” Jane Eyre charts its heroine's evolution from orphan to fiercely independent woman. When she becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, Jane falls in love with the enigmatic Mr. Rochester, only to discover a dark secret hidden within the estate. Thornfield Hall is a quintessential Gothic setting, with its locked rooms and mysterious sounds and the storm-lashed moors around it, while Rochester’s secret introduces elements of suspense and horror.

Structurally, the novel balances realism with Gothic intensity. It grounds its story in social reality, particularly the class and gender dynamics of the time, while also allowing moments of uncanny coincidence and heightened emotion to break through. Its biggest strength, though, is its compelling protagonist, a three-dimensional figure, torn between desire and principle, passion and restraint. (Luc Haasbroek)