On Feb. 13, the day before Valentine’s Day, the new “‘Wuthering Heights’” movie will enter theaters, and even though it has not yet been released, it has already caused a lot of controversy. The movie stars Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, Margot Robbie as Catherine and was directed by Emerald Fennell, who is known for directing the 2023 phenomenon that was “Saltburn.”
Opinions on the movie differ, but Sophomore Landon Huss is optimistic.
“I am so excited for ‘Wuthering Heights,’” Huss said. “I love adaptations because I just like … when people have different views on things, ‘cause it’s a book, and the writer that made the movie… she had a totally different … thought process when she was reading it. And that’s why it’s like, what she pictured… like a love story that she pictured how… it would happen in her life.”
The official trailer recently dropped, adding new waves of controversy. Some people, like English teacher Alexandra Crawford, question the promo. It calls the movie “the greatest love story of our time,” but technically, “Wuthering Heights” is not really a love story, but rather a display of a very toxic relationship.
“When you’re in high school and you fall in love for the first time… [it] feels like this passion and… obsession, that drives you into insanity. It’s a love that takes away your individuality. I mean… Catherine cries out like, ‘I am Heathcliff,’ like so you’ve lost yourself for somebody else. Like you’ve given everything you are for this other person. To me, Brontë‘s criticizing that.”
Generally, adaptations can be a good thing, and can be very helpful.
“Adaptations are a great way to take something that feels really inaccessible for people who don’t want to sit down and read a 300 page book, and it gives them a chance to… get to know the story, get to know… these ideas and criticisms that the… author [was] putting out into the world and that are definitely still applicable today and it makes it… tangible,” Crawford said.
But there are limits to how much a story can still be an adaptation that is true to what the author created, in this case many, many years ago.
“When you’re taking a song or a story and you’re adapting it, there are choices that the director makes in order to shed light on something else,” Crawford said. “But taking… a love story that’s criticizing emotional love and then turning it into, ‘It’s the greatest love story of our time’… when Brontë was… using it to warn us about the kind of love that drives people to madness and death… then I think you’re not honoring the authors’ intentions.”
Something that left many people confused was the casting, especially for Heathcliff, who was described in the book to be dark-skinned, and who is now portrayed by Jacob Elordi, who is not a person of color.
“Not having a dark-skinned person play that role, especially in this time of… politics… people need representation, good representation right now because we are in such… an awful state of the world right now,” Huss said.
While the movie proposes many questions, it is still bringing back to us an important story out of British literature.
“Things that reference classics drive people back to the classics because they want to know, ‘Oh, what are they talking about?’ And that’s the beauty of continuing [to] reference back to those canonical pieces of literature,” Crawford said.
In the end, no matter how they are adapted or interpreted, the general consensus is that classics usually withstand the test of time, and in this case, hopefully the test of Emerald Fennell.
“The characters, they are so relevant… to what we experience today… just social class in Charleston County… trying to discover who we are as an individual,” Crawford said. “I think that “Wuthering Heights” is the same way. I mean, it’s so easy to end up in a toxic relationship where we think that love should be painful… That’s the beauty of all literature. Like, it shows us that we aren’t isolated in what we feel.”
