With the “Wuthering Heights” film trailer coming out recently, there’s a lot of talk online about whether or not the adaptation is going to be good. A viral tweet about the trailer said, “Wuthering Heights starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi featuring Charli XCX on the soundtrack is kinda the matcha dubai chocolate labubu of film.” Mags Zuniga, senior performing arts major, said about the trailer “It’s nothing like how I imagined in my head. Sure, it’s a modern remake, but this is just nothing like the original.” It’s safe to say that I’m not the only person who has a problem with the film.
“Wuthering Heights,” Emily Brontë’s best known work and only novel, is a deeply complex novel in which each character is not particularly likable. The narrators of the novel are hopelessly unreliable, and every character is deeply narcissistic. Heathcliff and Catherine each think that the world revolves around them, that they are the victims of a cruel world and that someone is coming to save them soon — after all, they deserve it. It’s an early example of gothic fiction, a view into the reality of Victorian Era English life and rules. At its heart, it’s a novel that criticizes the many rules of society that we still have issues with today.
Charli XCX contributed new original music to the film, featuring her “brat” track “Everything is romantic” in the trailer. Coming off the high of “brat” success, Charli XCX changes the tone of the movie, by modernizing the adaptation even further.
The trailer depicts the movie as a kinky, sexual, dark fantasy from the mind of Emerald Fennell, a “Saltburn” part two, if you will. I have no issue with that in itself, a dark romance period piece is a fine idea, but the choice of “Wuthering Heights” to portray that story feels incorrect. The original novel has lasted so long because it was never a romance story, it was always a social commentary with romance elements.
Even though the “Wuthering Heights” movie hasn’t come out yet, I can’t say for sure whether or not the movie is straying from the source material. However, the trailer has given me pause.
One of the biggest plot points of the novel that made it so controversial at the time of its release was the commentary on race in British high society that it portrayed. Heathcliff was an orphan adopted by a rich, white man and is described multiple times throughout the book as having “dark-brown skin.” Sophomore psychology student, Faye Michaelson, gave notes on the casting: “It’s Jacob Elordi and not Dev Patel. Why?”
Heathcliff is pushed aside by society because he is not white. He operates in high society only because a rich, white man allowed him to. And once that man died, he was put back into a lower class by his brother. He was in love with a white woman who loved him back but married a white man so that she could advance in high society. These story lines are made much more important when you consider that Heathcliff is not white. If Heathcliff is white, it changes the story. It could be a commentary on the ways in which British high society has never included BIPOC, British imperialism in India, or the ways that high society looks down on bi-racial relationships. There are countless opportunities in which this story could be hugely impactful for accurate representation.
Instead, we are stuck with a ploy for money, a kinky dark romance with a Charli XCX soundtrack that shines a light on the point of capitalism that we are in. There is no more room for originality in art, everything has to be a money driven remake. Our charms have to hang from our bags and phones, and you have to have multiple so you can collect them all.
