to recapture what is embedded in the individual, but to free it to be symbolized in another language. Thus, in order for the spectator to engage with a film translation/adaptation, the novel has to be freed from its literary language so as to take new life in the new language of film (Cho 11).

Linda Hutcheon, a film adaptation critic, also agrees that transposing words into images in film enables literature to be released from its own language and transformed into a new language (Hutcheon 53).  If you consider Director Suri Krishnamma’s 2003 Wuthering Heights film adaptation in this way, then it looks as though it may have succeeded as an art form.  By taking the nineteenth century novel completely out of its context, we are able to interpret it in a new light.  Or are we?

Robert Stam can help us question what it means to find a medium between the two art forms: film and literature.  He notes that

the intuitive sense of adaptation’s inferiority derives…from a prior valorization of historical anteriority and seniority: the assumption, that is, that older arts are necessarily better arts (Stam 4).

This is an interesting concept to consider, the fact that a novel competes with a film adaptation.  Surely most of us who have seen this film will agree that it is no competition for Emily Bronte; however, considering another quote from Stam, “film is perceived as the upstart enemy storming the ramparts of literature” (Stam 4) we see that film is considered, in some ways, a threat to the novel.  This spurs the question: should a film remain verbatim to the novel and jeopardize its creative aspects, or should it strive to retain the elements that make it a artistic new rendition of the original?

“If somebody goes out to make a movie that isn’t designed primarily to entertain people, then I don’t know what the f*** they’re doing”

-Coen  Brothers

One element of this film that makes it super modern (and Hollywood-like) is the use of music written by Jim Steinman: music which enables Heath to become a rock star overnight!  While this music seems out of place for Heath when comparing him to Heathcliff in the novel, it works to make the film appealing to a teenage audience.  It offers an addition to the sentimentality of this film, while at the same time adding to its cheese factor.  Besides, what MTV movie would not have music in it? What is more appealing than when the camera pans in on a “hot” male actor sitting playing a guitar with his shirt off?  Hutcheon reminds us that

The context in which we experience the adaptation—cultural, social, historical—is another important factor in the meaning and significance we grant to this ubiquitous palimpsestic form (Hutcheon 139).

Therefore, we expect this kind of musical soap-opera for a 21^st century adaptation.  The further and further we get away from when the novel was written, the more the adaptation is fitted to culture.  Stam notes in his book that “an adaptation that updates the text for the present is upbraided for not respecting the period of the source, but respectful costume dramas are accused of a failure of nerve in not “contemporizing” the text” (8).  From cultural influence we’ve come to appreciate and want drama, sex, beauty, fast-paced action (note how this adaptation utilizes quick cuts and alterations to the scenes to make it so we see about five minutes of Cate and Heath’s childhood—speeding the film up in attempts to pack a 200+ page novel into 88 minutes), partying, drinking, murder and swearing in films: everything that makes a movie so picturesquely Hollywood.  However, there is no easy way to make a film from a classic piece of literature…think about it!  Either way, someone is going to be upset with the result.

Despite their cheesiness, listen closely to the lyrics in the film and you’ll realize that they are actually self-reflective and very important to understanding the use of natural imagery in the film and the connection between Cate and Heath in the setting.  Take for example, these lyrics in the main song in the film “I Will Crumble.” 

If you want to sleep I’ll pull the shade

If you should vanish I’m sure to fade

If you should smolder I’ll breath in your smoke

If you should laugh I’ll smile and pretend that I made the joke

And if you should ever leave me

I will crumble

That’s just the way I am

I hope you never leave me

That is to say

If you should sink I don’t want to swim

If you lock the door I’ll beg to come in

If you should sing I won’t make a sound

If you should fly I’ll curse the ground

And if you should ever leave me

I will crumble

That’s just the way I am

I hope you never leave me

That is to say

I will crumble(4 times)

If you’re an explosion I won’t search for shelter

If you’re the sun I’ll sit here and swelter

If you’re the moon I’ll stay up all night

If you’re a ghost I’ll be haunted for life

And if you should ever leave me

I will crumble

That’s just the way I am

I hope you never leave me

That is to say

I will crumble(8 times)

This song works to enhance the strong bonds of love between Cate and Heath.  However, since we know that Heath is the poor “other” in the novel, this portrayal of him as a rock star is very unrealistic and purely meant to take the film out of its 19^th century context and make it more geared towards a 21^st century audience.  The music is used mostly in sequences of montage, where the camera flashes to the young lovers exploring the “Heights,” or of the characters thinking about each other and experiencing flashbacks of the past. 

Music is important in this film because it attaches emotion to the superficial characters, (and not to mention, their mediocre acting) and adds to the drama that makes this a teenage soap-opera.  According to Elliot, the type of music also parallels in Heath, who is the “big rock star, his lyrics serving as an open window to his tortured heart”, and Edward who plays the classical orchestra instrument, the cello.  While most of us can probably say this isn’t the best film we’ve seen, the music does add to the Mike Vogel “hotness” factor and gives this film the pop-culture flair that is entirely fitting for an MTV movie.  

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Isabel: Close your mouth Edward.

Raquelle: Don’t tell me you’re boned up for that white trash.

Edward: No, I’m just…

Isabel: Pathetic. Can’t you see she belongs to him? Don’t worry sweetie, when I finish stealing him from her you can have the left overs.

Despite Isabel’s initial lustful reaction to Heath, her relationship with Heath develops into something else completely. After Cate leaves Heath for Linton, Isabel takes Heath under her wing in a way and encourages him to develop his music. Isabel thus becomes completely consumed and obsessed with Heath almost in the same way that Heath is obsessed with Cate. Her love for Heath consumes her and almost destroys her because Heath is incapable of loving or even noticing anyone or anything besides Cate.

Isabel almost turns into the female version of Heath because he consumes her so completely. Isabel’s captivation shows a mysterious kind of spell that Heath’s foreign, “other” origins cast on her (and Cate). She becomes consumed with Heath and wanting him to love her, to see her. Isabel’s love almost destroys her, just as Cate and Heath’s love almost destroys them. The question must then be asked, is there something about Heath’s “otherness” that captivates and consumes women past the point of recognition?

The following is a clip from one of the scenes at the beginning of the film when the Lintons first meet Heath and Cate. It shows Isabel’s first reaction to Heath.

This clip is also posted in the post about music but clips towards the end show the relationship between Isabel and Heath.

And if you should ever leave me, I will crumble—
That’s just the way I am,
I hope you never leave me
That is to say…

If you should sink I don’t want to swim
If you lock the door, I’ll beg to come in
If you should sing, I wont make a sound
If you should fly, I’ll curse the ground

 

The song very much represents the love between Cate and Heath: captivating and necessary. Even during the time when Cate and Heath are separated and Heath becomes a rock star, it is clear from Heath’s performances that he is lost in the music and consumed with thoughts of Cate.

In the film, Linton is also a musician, however a very different kind of musician than Heath. Linton is shown playing the cello a few times throughout the movie. Every time he plays, the emotions expressed are very different than those of Heath. Linton’s music is soothing and classical; he plays on the cello. These elements are very predictable of his character as well as his position in life. Linton’s music lacks the soul, heart and feeling that Heath’s embodies. There is no deep urging and longing felt when Linton plays; you cannot feel Linton’s emotions when he plays as you can when Heath does.

At one point toward the end of the movie, Linton plays Heath’s song at a party for his parents. Heath comes storming in to the party and yells at Linton to stop playing his song. Heath understands that Linton is playing the song because of Linton’s love for Cate, but Linton lacks the passion that Heath has when he plays the song. Heath is not only angry that Linton is playing the song for Cate, but is also angry because the song is so much a part of him that it is painful for him for someone he hates to be playing it for the girl he loves.

The difference of emotion between Linton and Heath and the way they both use music in the film again is another element that separates Heath as the “other”. Through his music especially, you can feel how he is different from all of the other characters, even Cate. Heath has a passion and violent emotion for life and love that is almost impossible to describe and thus makes it necessary to be felt through the film and the music. One of first things we see Heath doing in the film when he comes to the Heights is play the piano. I already discussed the representation and rejection of Heath as the other in this scene.  Hendrix comes running up and smashes the piano cover on Heath’s hands. Heath constantly being connected to music in the film, therefore, is one of the biggest factors connecting him to his part as the other because of his passion.

The following clip is a compilation of scenes from the movie as well as the songs that Heath writes. The film clips show the passion between Heath and Cate’s relationship as well as the passion in Heath’s music.

The screenwriter keeps the dialogue, the same plot, and the same characters.  The director dresses his actors in accurate period dress of double-breasted suits, corsets, and petticoats.  The famous and recognizable cast speaks native pan-British accents on camera even if English is obviously not their first language (Binoche).  And the director shoots the writer’s famous characters in sets of the period—in the wild moors you almost imagined when you read the book.  By attempting to stay true to the book, the director has created far less of a challenge for himself…hasn’t he?

But then ask yourself this.  Is Paramount’s version of the story your Wuthering Heights?  Is Binoche your Cathy?  Is Fiennes your Heathcliff?  Do the actors even believe they can proximate your Cathy, your Heathcliff?

Apparently not.  In a 1992 Sunday Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times, Ralph Fiennes told Matt Wolf in an interview that “his fine-boned, fragile good looks don’t automatically suggest Bronte’s rugged romantic.”  He states, “I just thought, physically, vocally, I was too lightweight.  I imagined a sort of Ted Hughes type…Someone craggy-faced and hoary.”  He expresses his fear of being compared to the other Heathcliff actor, Lawrence Olivier, rather than the infamous literary character of Bronte’s text.  At the time, he was relatively unknown, evidence that the director did not want audiences to associate Fiennes’ past work with his role as Heathcliff.  (And certainly not his past work with Olivier’s.)  The same goes for Binoche, who, as a French actress, only did two other English-speaking films, one of which was for TV.

Yet, it is clear that these young actors were chosen also for their contemporary beauty and their Hollywood potential.  With their screen beauty, Fiennes and Binoche could attract audiences that were unfamiliar with the passionate love story or even tempt those who were doubtful of a faithful and good adaptation of the beloved classic.   The book is (almost) always better, we know.  But, there are reasons this novel continues to reinvent itself on screen:

1. Hollywood can always try to make the screen version better than the last attempt.
2. The book will forever have an audience that cherishes the story.
3. The traditional/heritage adaptation is closest to readers’ imaginations.

Hollywood’s attempt to make the perfect straight film adaptation of Wuthering Heights will carry on, even beyond the trendy, unfaithful adaptations.

Here is an example of such a shot between Catalina and Alejandro:

Another interesting cinematic technique used by Buñuel, is the framing in most of his shots. In two identical scenes, a female character (either Catalina or Isabel) looks out the window to see Alejandro and one of those two girls embracing. Buñuel uses the window panes to frame the onlooker inside the building, trapped. This symbolizes how that character is imprisoned by the circumstances of the situation.

The most intriguing theme of the film is that the movie is said to be surrealist. Surrealism is a genre of film that is very dream-like. Here is an example from another Bunuel film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVbTEVfLksU

Remarkably, the film is not at all until the last minute o the film. Alejandro is shot, leaning over Catalina’s casket, and he hears a voice. He looks in the direction of the voice and hallucinates that Catalina is calling him to come. Then with a quick cut, the viewer sees that instead of the figure being Catalina’s ghost, it is really Ricardo with a rifle. He shoots the gun, and another quick cut to Alejandro jerking back and dying. Although this film is called surrealist, it is not.

Another example that is constantly seen throughout the film is the lighting in the farm, specifically when Alejandro is there. No matter what is actually going on in the scene, if Alejandro is there, the lighting is always very dark and for lack of a better word, moody. This reflects the feelings of Alejandro, who is tormented and in anguish.

Another aspect of the film to watch is the positioning of the characters throughout the film. One can tell who has more power between characters on film by looking at how the characters are positioned in each shot. In this film, this theme is very prominent. Catalina is predominately standing in scenes with Eduardo who is usually sitting; Catalina usually has the power over him. She seems to stand over him, and look down upon him. This symbolizes the power Catalina had, and in contrast, we see how Eduardo gains the power over her after she helps Alejandro escape. Catalina falls into a chair because of her emotions, and Eduardo literally stands over her, yelling at her to choose between Alejandro and Eduardo.

Another interesting scene in which the power is bouncing back and forth between the married couple is the scene in which Eduardo is lying down on his bed. For the majority of the scene Catalina stands over him, but when she wants to get his approval, she lowers herself below him and the bed, willingly giving him the power in that situation.

The most interesting character to watch in this regard is Alejandro. Throughout the film he is standing. He is constantly standing because he has all of the power. He only sits once, and only for a few seconds. During the scene in which he actually sits, he is matched by the only person that can stand up to him metaphorically and cinematically, Catalina. She challenges him about how much power he really has, and his emotions get he best of him, making him sit in a chair while Catalina stands over him, gaining power. A good instance of Alejandro showing how much power he has occurs when Ricardo is working at a table, hunched over. Alejandro comes and sits on top of the table, across from Ricardo. Alejandro looms over Ricardo, who is further away from the viewer.

“Get out of this civilized house!”” Hindley screams at him during a dance to celebrate Catherine’s return from the Lintons when Heathcliff dares to show his face.

 How does the identity of a gypsy change the audience’s viewing of Heathcliff?  There can be no doubt that Heathcliff is framed as evil and savage in both the novel and the film. In one context I have discussed, his rough behavior and subhuman treatment by the rest of the characters signals his Irishness and demonstrates the British prejudices against Ireland; another places him in the role of the Gothic hero/villain. Yet at least in literature and within the film, there are stronger arguments to label Heathcliff as a gypsy.

For one thing, in the Victorian context, it makes him a much darker persona. The Irish persona was one of an ignorant, lazy, and gorilla-like man—a dumb puppet of sorts. The gypsy label is a stronger declaration of Heathcliff being Other. The gypsy lifestyle is much different than the British one: nomadic, uneducated, and most importantly, the stereotype of having unstable emotional development and primitive intellect. A notion that could tie his Irish and gypsy backgrounds together is that he may be a descendant of the nomadic gypsies in Ireland (“tinkers”) that are of Romanian descent. While Heathcliff is downtrodden by the inhabitants of the moors, their treatment of him indicates that physically, his features may obviously have pinpointed him as a dark-skinned other.

Ralph Fiennes, a fair-skinned British actor with blond hair, was clearly made-up to play the role of Heathcliff, and I find it remarkable that his facial skin was darkened and he wore a black wig. The film, while leaving his origins ambiguous, really strives to mark him out as visibly dark, physically and emotionally. Nord believes that “the language of light and dark the novel deploys to distinguish between physical and temperamental types is not just metaphorical but also, apparently biological or racial” (197). It overtly marks him as Other, in such a way that the prospects of his ethnicity are widened. Heathcliff as a gypsy is shocking if he is a hero, or typical is he is villain. Because he is portrayed as a complex adult, his heartfelt emotions (from the noble to the wicked) are more likely to be seen as bad or evil in the because he is typified as gypsy, and the connotations gypsies hold in society.

Beaumont agrees, and goes even one step further, saying, “Indeed, Heathcliff’s language is quite violently vital and creative […] it is also suggestive of the social inversions staged by early nineteenth-century slave rebellions. His colorful fantasy of systematically effacing the lives of his chief persecutors is wonderfully inventive in its evocation of an entire culture of ritual human sacrifice” (141) Heathcliff is linked to the native populations that the British empire conquered and forced to work on plantations. While his background is never revealed by Emily Brontë, this explanation would clear up much of his anger at the British class structure and ideals, and his profound craving for revenge against the Earnshaws and the Lintons for their lifestyles.

If this is the impression the film wants to give, it does a good job with the implied details: in one scene, Heathcliff is forced to sleep in the stables with the horses (notably, in Gulliver’s Travels, the talking horse-like creatures were called Yahoos, which Elsie Michie mentions in her essay on Heathcliff as Other), and in another he mocks Catherine for wearing a fine dress around the house while he eats meat messily off the bone with his hands, licking his fingers. The disparity between them in clearly shown, but for all of that, Heathcliff’s ambiguity within the film makes his plight more emotionally wrenching.

As children sitting on the moors, Cathy asks Heathcliff where he came from, more in awe and wonder of her strong but gentle playmate than in disgust of his likely lowly background. Cathy as an adolescent repeats that question in her face, in her eyes, every time she sees Heathcliff with the Lintons also present, except in derision of his bastardization instead of wonder. Sonstroem adds, “He bursts into the world of Wuthering Heights as a marvel, a nova, sui generis, unsettling the other characters, who try futilely thereafter to fit him into their preexistent categories” (55). The solution to the betrayal and deep human hurt of Wuthering Heights is often connected with the understanding of Heathcliff, a character who may fit binaries but refuses to be contained by them.

Alejandro’s most important opposition is found in Eduardo, the presumably passive and gentile man who Catalina has married. Eduardo is introduced as he works on his bug collection. There is a jarring close up as he drives a pin through the head of a moth, pinning it to a board. Following this violent image, the camera pans across the multiple boards with many moths and butterflies pinned to them.

This action seems to be the only way he is able to exert power in a world that otherwise belongs to stronger individuals. Possibly, he seeks to eradicate the satanic Other as represented by the insect. In various ways, the action of killing the insects seems to function as another parallel to spirituality, as if the caged insects represent humanity under the gaze of a Judeo-Christian God.

Throughout the film insects are visualized or discussed, always in terms of power. Alejandro describes crushing his foes like spiders under a rock. In a moment of frustration with Alejandro, Ricardo snatches a moth out of the air and feeds it to a spider on the floor. In these situations, the violence enacted towards the bugs demonstrates the human capacity for violence and animalistic actions.

Alejandro’s vampiric portrayal is most obvious when he interacts with Isabel. He visually preys on her during every embrace they share; he lunges at her neck as if about to feed on her. The masochistic Isabel seems to thrive on this attention, disregarding Alejandro’s apparent blood-lust.

Their final embrace is a medium shot focused on the back of Isabel’s head. Alejandro once again lunges at her neck while lightening crashes outside. Interestingly, his one embrace with Catalina is not at all predatory, but is actually relatively tender. It seems as if she shares enough of his tendencies to be an equal. Like the Heathcliff of the novel, Alejandro acts completely on his urges, in sharp contrast to those around him. He is unrestrained by the rules of society, which is visually symbolized by the myriad images of spying and entering unannounced or uninvited. Alejandro makes his appearance in the film by bursting into the Hacienda after Maria has told him he may not enter. He repeatedly bursts through doors and windows, crossing the physical and symbolic boundaries of the societial structure. In his interactions with Catalina, he is ruled by uncontrollable emotion that he reveals in apostrophizing his will to physically harm others. Alejandro is vampiric–carnivorous and animalistic. In highlighting these tendencies, Bunuel uses the character to draw out the themes of body versus soul—physical desire versus spiritual transcendence.

Bunuel accentuates the religious themes in the film by incorporating elongated sequences in which Joseph stands before the stark exterior of the house waving a crucifix while reciting scripture. Shortly after one of these sequences there is a close-up of a bucket of frogs, carrying with it the implication that Joseph intends to perform some kind of exorcism in order to drive the demonic Alejandro away. The final scene is filled with Christian imagery as well. Bunuel provides a wide shot of the graveyard, austere and full of white crucifixes. As in the original novel, Alejandro defies the idea of heaven by calling for Catalina to haunt him while he remains on earth. Shortly following her death, Ricardo follows him to the graveyard and shoots him. Alejandro breaks the lock and descends into Catalina’s tomb as if he is descending into hell.

Despite his vampire-like attributes, Alejandro is mortal, just like Catalina. With their adherence to their emotions and drives, they are perhaps the most human of all of the characters in the film.