Wuthering Heights (Two)
My cautious optimism about this adaptation certainly underwent a thorough drubbing this evening. Now, it looks like PBS has once again whacked the stuffing out of the UK original--a check at IMDB reveals that at least thirty minutes have gone missing somewhere--so I won't complain about the horrific choppiness of the final half, the way in which the plot suddenly accelerates to warp nine, or the klutzy transition from Cathy dying back to Linton and the second Catherine. Or, rather, I am complaining about them, but I can't tell whether to blame the writer or the US editors. Moreover, the rest of my complaints should be understood provisionally, as some of the problems may well be the fault of PBS instead of the script. (Perhaps some UK viewers may wish to chime in.) That being said...
If there's one image that sums up just how badly this adaptation went off the rails, it's the final shot of the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff...haunting Wuthering Heights. Given that even this adaptation has associated their passions and desires with the moors, it makes no sense to effectively entrap the two of them behind a window, cheerfully watching Hareton and Cathy holding hands as they trek off to the Grange. It doesn't help that this moment arguably harkens back to the novel: Lockwood spies on Cathy and Hareton through a window after Heathcliff's death. (I'll give the director and writer credit for incorporating the novel's frequent use of windows--looking through them, trying to get out or in through them, etc.) Lockwood, however, is alive at the time, and Bronte uses the moment for comic effect (once again, the famous Lockwood sex appeal hasn't had time to work). In effect, the adaptation doesn't just ignore the novel; it also ignores itself.
It also seems to me that the adaptation de-demonizes Heathcliff. Quite literally: when Nelly Dean finds Heathcliff dead in the novel, she desperately tries to erase "'that frightful, life-like gaze of exultation before any one else beheld it. They would not shut: they seemed to sneer at my attempts; and his parted lips and sharp white teeth sneered too!'" And Joseph joyously proclaims "'Th' devil's harried off his soul,' he cried, 'and he may hev' his carcass into t' bargain, for aught I care! Ech! what a wicked 'un he looks, girning at death!'" The novel insinuates very strongly that Heathcliff may well be a sort of demon (and not of the figurative variety), and certainly that he is en route to damnation. But in the adaptation, Heathcliff rests quite calmly on the pillow...having blown his brains out, instead of dying by thwarted obsession. The script demands that Heathcliff do to himself what Hindley failed at. Moreover, while Heathcliff remains an unpleasant human being, it's an oddly mundane sort of unpleasantness (attempting to bash Hindley's head in aside). While we see him fighting with Cathy before he marries Isabella, their mutual tortures on her deathbed have gone (or have they? I'm wondering if the editor is at fault), and they certainly seem nice and cozy out during a rainstorm on the moor. His marriage to Isabella appears to be generically unhappy--did I blink and miss the hanged dog?--and Isabella's confrontation with her brother made Edgar Linton seem as obnoxious as Heathcliff. And Cathy #2 has surprisingly little trouble standing up to Heathcliff. It's no surprise when he suddenly deflates at the end, simply because there's nothing supernatural to his evil at all.