From the director who brought you Saltburn comes a story of violent passion, bleak moorlands, and the mutually destructive relationship between a teenage girl and a ‘dark-skinned’ brooding antihero. Emerald Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights adaptation has placed Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi into the shoes of Emily Brontë’s Cathy and Heathcliff, a casting choice that has infamously perplexed readers and critics upon its announcement last September.
Elordi and Robbie, for all their talent, deviate considerably from the characters they will be portraying. Like many other period dramas falling victim to ‘iPhone face’ casting and 21st-century embellishments, the pair feel oddly misplaced in Brontë’s Yorkshire. Most notably, Heathcliff is described by Emily Brontë as ‘dark-skinned’, and while his ethnicity is never explicitly stated, he is likely of Romani or East Indian descent. Heathcliff’s outsider status is central to the novel’s romantic and social tension, and his being an outsider is augmented by issues of both class and race.
However, fidelity to the source material doesn’t have to mean scene-by-scene replication. Films are constrained by runtime and driven by visuals, and many literary scenes are like untranslatable words in a foreign language when trying to adapt to the screen. Pages of a character’s inner monologue would be frankly unmarketable if accurately translated to screen with no artistic flair, and many filmmakers find themselves at the mercy of studio demands for runtime, meaning they simply cannot afford to include everything. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example, spans well over nine hours in its entirety and still omits significant parts of Tolkien’s original. Yet, Jackson’s choices in the ‘to cut or not to cut’ debate work because they preserve the central plot of the story he wanted for his movie, while maintaining respect for the source material. Some content can be cut, and not a great deal of the overall picture changes, but this is not the case for what viewers are seeing with the new Heathcliffe and Cathy.
But how far can filmmakers go before reinterpretation turns into distortion? Most viewers understand that film and literature are different media, and it would be patronising to assume otherwise. The frustration doesn’t come from minor adjustments or those necessary evils that arise from the adaptation process, but instead from drastic changes to the story’s core. Those ‘essential organs’ that should survive the journey of translation – characteristics of age, race, and background – are not irrelevant details that can afford to be upended to cast marketable public figures.
When done well, adaptations can be refreshing approaches to a known tale. Greta Gerwig’s Little Women pleased audiences upon its release in 2019. Along with altering the timeline’s linearity, Gerwig notably left the ending ambiguous: Jo still marries Professor Bhaer, but it remains unclear whether this is Jo’s fate or the ending she penned to sell her novel. In the book, Jo marries Professor Bhaer as a reluctant Alcott writes the ending that her own publishers desired for her heroine. Gerwig’s film is not a letter-for-letter adaptation of the original, but her changes enhance the experience of watching the March sisters grow, rather than detract from it.
At the other end of the spectrum are adaptations that lose their footing entirely. Director Mary Harron has expressed disappointment over the reception of American Psycho in pop culture. Though both the book and the film are intended as satires of the ‘finance bro’ archetype, Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman has been bizarrely embraced as a role model by some viewers. Those putting this satirical figure on a pedestal misread or missed the plot altogether, accidentally idolising a figure that was created to be mocked.
It’s easy enough to argue ‘you can’t please everyone’, and directing a film is an entirely different ball game from writing a book. However, the uproar over Robbie and Elordi’s casting teaches us that, at the very least, audiences ask that adaptations remain faithful to the parts of a story that really matter to its overall message.
After all, no one listens to Kate Bush expecting a Brontë lecture. But they do expect Heathcliff, and not Elvis.
