Wuthering Heights (One)

I've mentioned before that while Jane Eyre has generated more TV and film adaptations than anyone would want to sit through, it is not really an adaptation-friendly novel: stripped away from Jane's voice, many of the events lose their force or, sometimes, become downright silly (the telepathy and the shattered tree being the two most notorious examples), and the novel's Gothic overtones call for something other than cinematic realism.  But Wuthering Heights takes these problems and multiplies them.  We have two unreliable narrators, only three settings (Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, the moors), and some of the most unpleasant protagonists in all of Victorian literature.  To make things worse, pop culture has turned Cathy's and Heathcliff's relationship into an accumulation of romance tropes, and adaptations frequently engage with the romance-ified tradition about the novel--not the novel itself.  (When a couple of my students did oral presentations about WH adaptations, they were shocked to discover just how often film scripts translated the couple into the most cliched of romance conventions.) 

So far, this newest adaptation is making some interesting choices.  Peter Bowker, who wrote the script, faces the unreliable narrator problem head on: he eliminates Lockwood altogether and turns Nelly Dean into a relatively peripheral figure, but he uses the novel's unreliability to his own advantage by reworking Heathcliff.  (There's also a good moment in which a scene that causes eye-rolling among many of my students--Heathcliff digs up Cathy and discovers that she hasn't decomposed!--turns out to be Heathcliff's hallucination.  Of course, the sight of Heathcliff cuddling Cathy's skeleton may cause some viewers some dismay.)  The script dislocates the viewer by beginning in medias res, with Linton Heathcliff (rather older than he ought to be?) departing the Grange for the Heights--I wondered briefly if I had missed the first half.  This being the twenty-first century and sex, apparently, being a must, the novel's passing hints that Heathcliff is Mr. Earnshaw's illegitimate child become overt here, making it far more likely that Heathcliff's love for Cathy is incestuous.  Which does not help matters any when Heathcliff and Cathy, er, get it on while out on the moors.  (Incidentally, everyone is aged up in this adaptation, not just Linton H.--Cathy enters Thrushcross Grange for the first time as an adult.)   At the same time, it's clear that Heathcliff, to put none too fine a point on it, is...a horrifying excuse for a human being.  He gloats when Hindley's wife dies in childbirth, wanders around uttering dire imprecations against all and sundry, and, most importantly, rejects Cathy when she comes back from Thrushcross Grange; in the novel, Cathy's aversion to his dirtiness is the first sign that their relationship has altered.  Under the circumstances, Cathy's decision to marry Edgar Linton is less Tragic Bad Planning and more Basic Common Sense. Heathcliff spends this adaptation in a state of self-willed self-destruct, even though characters like Hindley treat him horribly.  Far from being a departure from the novel's themes, this take on Heathcliff's character addresses Bronte's interest in the question of nature vs. nurture.  So far, nature seems to be winning.