Wuthering Heights

new and improved?

Got into a fun argument with a friend who loves the novel Wuthering Heights. Our argument was about the recent movie version starring Margot Robbie. To say the least, it takes remarkable liberties with the original text. The film is sort of Wuthering Heights, Cathy and Heathcliff, as revised by DH Lawrence and that woman who wrote 50 Shades of Grey.

My friend declared the movie makers should be arrested for crimes against literature.

I said, well, sometimes famous characters escape the covers of the novel that first contained them. They wander the world free and reappear in fan fiction, movies, tv series – transformed.

My friend said sometimes those characters wake up in a new movie and scream, “Let me out of here!”

I felt I could not complain about literary “borrowings” of this sort. I wrote a play about the poet John Milton and his daughters and another one about the famous artist Grant Wood and his wife. And you can be sure I took remarkable liberties with my characters.

Just last year, a writer wrote a bestseller called JAMES, his radical revision of the Jim in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. He won a Pulitzer for that novel.

Still, it’s fun to imagine angry offended characters who feel they have been libeled.

The ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff find themselves alive in the world, walking the mean streets of modern Liverpool. How did that happen? What returned them to life?

Emily Bronte’s tragic lovers are confused, baffled, frightened by the modern world, its mobs of people wearing peculiar clothing, shorts, halter tops, horseless carriages, airplanes, computers, cellphones.

Soon, they fall into the hands of do-gooders, possibly librarians and school teachers. One well-meaning person tells them they are famous, beloved, and shows them that movie, the new Wuthering Heights starring Margot Robbie.

“Look how famous you guys are! How hot!”

Cathy and Heathcliff storm out of the movie theater enraged and begin their quest to find out who directed that film, who wrote it, who produced it.

A dark, twisted tale of revenge and literary criticism.