O Wuther, Where Art Thou?

As we approach Halloween, I figured it’d be fitting for the newsletter to feature a bit of spookiness. I opted—MISTAKENLY—for William Wyler’s 1939 film Wuthering Heights, under the MISTAKEN impression that it would channel some of the eerie Gothic vibes of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. This was, I repeat, a MISTAKE. But I’m going to tell you about the movie anyway!

My first eyeroll occurred during the opening credits, where Emily’s surname is spelled with an acute accent on the “e” instead of an umlaut. (Emily’s father invented that spelling specifically to make his name look cooler than the original “Brunty,” but I’m all for calling people what they wanna be called unless it’s “Secretary of War.”) This foreshadows the movie’s approach to its source material: It looks about right if you squint, but what was once so distinctive as to be borderline absurd has been replaced with a more commonplace, less interesting approximation.

Sidenote: Am I a fan of Emily’s book? No, your honor, I must admit I’m not! It had me bellowing “When are all these people going to DIE?!” every few minutes. I made a game out of identifying moments when the characters acted like actual human beings, and by the end of the book I had awarded myself three points. And yet! I have to respect Emily’s “F— you, this is what I’m into” energy. The movie willfully glides over her weirdness, fingers in its ears.

A title card tells us we’re “on the barren Yorkshire moors in England, a hundred years ago.” Our Avatar for the Audience, a guy named Lockwood, stumbles through a snowstorm to seek shelter at Wuthering Heights amidst ominous music. So far, so spooky!

Lockwood meets the current Wutherers: standoffish Heathcliff, played by a grayed-up Laurence Olivier; his stressed guard dog; his bummed-out wife; and two stone-faced servants, Joseph and Ellen. Lockwood’s actually renting Heathcliff’s other property, the Grange, but Heathcliff radiates the “DGAF” attitude at which landlords excel. He has Joseph stash Lockwood in an unoccupied bedchamber that doesn’t even have a useable fireplace for warmth/light/coziness. Still kinda spooky!

But when a window blows open in the wind, the music devolves into the most saccharine snoozefest you’ve ever heard and every trace of spookiness nopes right out of there. It doesn’t come back when a mysterious voice self-identifying as Cathy calls for Heathcliff to let her in. It doesn’t come back when Lockwood freaks out, convinced that he’s seen a woman outside and that a spectral hand has touched his. It doesn't come back when Heathcliff rushes to the window calling for Cathy, or when he hastily exits the house, possibly to grab takeout but more likely to seek a reunion with his dead soulmate.

The rest of this movie isn’t remotely spooky. It’s not even atmospheric. It’s a straightforward tragic love story that would’ve made Emily brandish a hot poker and demand, I DIY-cauterized a dog bite with THIS so that I would live long enough to write my single dark, bizarre, brutal novel, all for you to turn it into conventional romantic drivel?

Pretty much, Emily. Sorry.

While Heathcliff’s either A) picking up pizza or B) checking out of the Life Hotel, Lockwood's like WTF and Ellen’s like YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW. Ellen has worked for the Wutherers for decades, and she offers to give Lockwood the whole scoop on Heathcliff and Cathy. We flash back forty years.

Sidenote: For those doing the math at home, that brings us to about 1799—roughly thirty years later than the book’s ostensible setting, but the events don’t really correlate to any real-world circumstances, so whatever. Costume-wise, the movie goes unrepentantly 1860s when it has a recognizable aesthetic at all.

Mr. Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights returns from a trip to Liverpool with a grumpy urchin in tow. He claims to have found young Heathcliff on the streets and decided to adopt him. In both book and movie, Earnshaw is portrayed as a kind benefactor for kidnapping a random unhoused child on a whim.¹ But to say he’s failed to consider how this will impact his family’s dynamics is a massive understatement.

Earnshaw’s son, Hindley, is livid about sharing his dad’s affection and makes tormenting Heathcliff his full-time job. On the other end of the spectrum, Earnshaw’s daughter, Cathy, becomes Heathcliff’s defender and partner in crime, consoling him with such yikes-worthy lines as “I’ll race you to the barn; the one who loses has to be the other’s slave” and “Your father was the emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen.” That second one’s a direct quote from the book, as are many of the film’s best and/or most upsetting lines. But the screenwriters (including an uncredited John Huston) add some gems of their own too: “I’ve always wanted to know somebody of noble birth,” Cathy says, establishing her primary character trait: class consciousness.

Sidenote: Neither book nor movie entertains the notion that Heathcliff might have Black ancestry, despite his having been kidnapped from—er, found in—Liverpool, a major hub for the transatlantic slave trade, and despite other characters constantly remarking on his dark skin. This movie gives us our first in a long line of white cinematic Heathcliffs, although it does NOT give us an all-white cast. More on that shortly.

In a scene invented for the movie, the pair pretends that a craig on the moors is Heathcliff’s castle. Heathcliff proclaims Cathy his queen, which I assume is intended to be cute/moving but which feels appropriately dark to me, given how the average English monarch has treated his consorts.

Shoutout to the child actors, who do their own stunts, from whaling on each other with horsewhips and fists to jumping over stone walls on horseback. At one point Cathy and Heathcliff plow through a herd of sheep at such a brisk canter that I checked the movie’s Wikipedia entry for an “On-Set Injuries” subheading.

So to be fair, there is more violence and peril in this movie than 1930s audiences were used to seeing in their average period romance. It’s still tame compared to the novel, but I do imagine the content must’ve been skirting Hays Code censorship like Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix. Is any of it spooky? Alas, no, although I wouldn’t put it past Home Depot to offer a collection of Halloween yard skeletons that includes two kids, their horses, and a handful of sheep.

After Earnshaw dies, Hindley takes over Wuthering Heights, makes Heathcliff work as a stablehand, and does for the Yorkshire wine industry what Gaston must’ve done for the village poultry farmers in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. His alcohol intake is on par with the Rock’s daily cod consumption circa 2015. It’s very bleak but not in a spooky way.

Child actors have been jettisoned in favor of our stars. Olivier is smoldering away as Heathcliff, and Merle Oberon is our vibrant yet brittle Cathy. They’re still careening around the moors together, exchanging swoony looks without actually doing much PDA (#ThanksHaysCode). But TWIST: A foray to spy on the posh neighbors, the Lintons of the Grange, goes awry. Cathy gets bitten by the Lintons’ guard dog. (Lotta aggressive dogs in this story—that much stays true to the source material and might’ve been Emily's solitary concession to the “write what you know” truism.) Our injured heroine stays with the Lintons while Heathcliff goes

• A) to fetch the doctor

• B) to tell the Wutherers what’s happened

• C) to wander the world in search of his fortune???

If you guessed C, you’re somehow correct. The rest of this movie is a compilation of one or both of these characters going Goodbye forever!!! and reneging five seconds later. Heathcliff is barely gone long enough to get through a probational hiring period at Panda Express before he returns to see how Cathy’s doing.

She’s doing great. Her leg has healed after weeks of luxurious recovery at the Grange (Oh, I couldn’t POSSIBLY stand up long enough to return to the home of my abusive brother). She’s in her Civil War era, judging by her new clothes and hairstyle. Edgar Linton, a dull snob whose only occupation is providing a picture in the dictionary next to the word “unprepossessing,” proposes to her.² Cathy plans to accept. Ellen’s like What about your adoptive brother, though?

Cathy offers a book-accurate response. Shot: “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff.” Chaser: “And yet… whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” In between those lines, Heathcliff, who’s been eavesdropping, makes another swift exit, missing Cathy’s confession of love. Upon realizing he’s gone again, Cathy runs outside calling his name, then spends several more weeks recovering from the greatest plague of period dramas: Getting Rained On. The only cure, as Sense and Sensibility fans know, is marriage.

By the time Heathcliff returns again, now (TWIST) mysteriously rich, Cathy has been semi-happily married to Edgar for several years. Heathcliff sets his revenge plot in motion:

1. Take advantage of Hindley’s catastrophic debts to get control of Wuthering Heights

2. Make Cathy jealous by marrying Edgar’s sister, Isabella

3. Actually that’s it

Sidenote: The novel involves an ultra-unhinged Phase 2 of the revenge plot wherein, years after Cathy's death, Heathcliff kidnaps Cathy’s teenage daughter and forces her to marry his son, to get back at… Edgar? I guess?? It's like a half-baked sequel retreading the highlights of the original book, only it's IN the original book.

While Hindley’s addiction isn’t his fault, he’s such garbage in every other way that his ruination feels deserved in both book and movie. Isabella, however, is the book’s ONLY sympathetic character. Her greatest crime is being a naive teenager who briefly thinks she can fix a guy. Book Isabella clocks her mistake immediately, on account of Heathcliff’s horrific abuse, and manages to GTFO and raise her son alone until her death. Movie Isabella has a different fate: remaining alive and trapped as Heathcliff and Cathy’s third wheel, proof that their passion for each other is stronger than the conventions, betrayals, and sheer pettiness that’ve come between them.

Look, if you buy the love story, fantastic. That’s gotta make for a more satisfying viewing experience than waiting in vain for further spookiness to materialize.

Whenever Olivier and Oberon shared the screen, all I could think about was how much they hated working together on this movie. Olivier was peeved that Oberon got cast instead of his girlfriend, Vivien Leigh, and everyone was on edge because when it came to the number of takes per scene, Wyler walked so Kubrick could run.

At one point, after they’d been standing super-close for filming, Oberon snapped, “Tell him to stop spitting at me!” and Olivier lost his freaking mind: “What’s a little spit, for Chrissake, between actors? You bloody little idiot, how dare you speak to me?” Then Wyler told him to apologize and Olivier got offended! On second thought, he deserved every retake Wyler put him through.

It feels apt that if you scratch the surface of this ho-hum romance you get something much messier and more disturbing—i.e., Hollywood. I suspect Emily would've appreciated this, given how much she would’ve disdained the watered-down finished product. Book Heathcliff is an absolute menace who beats up nearly everybody within reach; Movie Heathcliff is just coldly embittered. Book Cathy is a narcissist who doesn’t do one genuinely kind thing for another character, including Heathcliff; Movie Cathy is just kinda shallow and indecisive. The screen versions are more palatable, but without the “WTFFFFF”-caliber depravity of the originals, they’re just not that memorable.

I mean, obviously both actors are hot and charismatic, so there's that. Oberon’s performance is especially solid. But nothing about the story is as interesting to me as the meta situation: lines about status and social climbing and compromising of one’s true self, delivered by and to an actor who spent her entire career trying to hide her ethnicity. That's right—I've finally looped back around to addressing why this wasn't an all-white cast.

Oberon was born in India with multiracial ancestry but pretended to be a white Australian; her darker skin tone was fairly easy to hide with makeup on black-and-white film. In 1939 she hadn’t yet suffered severe skin damage from the complexion-lightening treatments she would use in preparation for filming in color. But she did have to listen to Heathcliff’s lines condemning Cathy’s “dull fear of… the world” and “that weakness you call virtue”—Cathy’s willingness to live inauthentically in exchange for prosperity and security.

All this is deeply sad. BUT NOT SPOOKY. STILL COMING UP EMPTY ON SPOOKINESS.

You know what's also sad but unspooky? Depression! After Heathcliff marries Isabella, Cathy falls victim to another classic malady: Losing the Will to Live. This one has broken period-drama containment and can infect pretty much any lady in any era or genre. (Lookin’ at you, Revenge of the Sith.)

Meanwhile, Movie Isabella³ isn’t physically abused by Movie Heathcliff (#ThanksHaysCode), just subjected to broody indifference. So it’s arguably understandable that she keeps trying to win him over and even finds herself heartened by news of Cathy’s imminent death. But it’s also a bummer, especially because Book Isabella is one of the few characters who says “F— this nonsense, I’m OUT.” You deserve better, Isabella! Justice for Isabella!!!

Heathcliff rushes to Cathy’s side. They gaze out a window at the moors together till she flatlines. He begs her to haunt him, which has the potential to be spooky but comes across as merely mawkish—contrasting with the book, in which he DIGS UP HER GRAVE to get cozy with her corpse.

Flash forward: Ellen wraps up her “Previously on Wuthering Heights” spiel by noncanonically asserting that the phantom Lockwood saw was “Cathy’s love, stronger than time itself.” Insert emoji of your choice; I'm personally leaning toward a melting smiley face.

If I could ask Movie Ellen two questions, they would be these:

1. What would you say you do here?

2. Why are you shipping this toxic quasi-incestuous romance so hard?

Unlike Book Ellen, who’s fairly close in age to the protagonists, Movie Ellen is basically a mother figure to the Wutherers—aside from the whole rooting-for-her-kids-to-hook-up thing. But by this point there are no children for Movie Ellen to look after, and it’s Isabella who trudges offscreen to fetch Lockwood some tea. If Ellen’s not the designated tea-getter, what is in her job description? Nothing related to fostering spookiness, that’s for flip-flop-flapjacking sure!

Now that Lockwood’s up to speed, the doctor arrives bearing a final TWIST: He saw Heathcliff walking on the moors with a woman, only to then find one (1) corpse—Heathcliff’s—near the craig that Heathcliff and Cathy once called their castle. “And one set of footprints in the snow.” Well, Doc, obviously that's because Jesus was carrying both of them! In this round of Spooky or Unspooky I’m sure you can tell where I land. I just hope Isabella wasn't expecting Heathcliff to bring back fish and chips for dinner.

The closing shot shows Heathcliff’s and Cathy’s ghostly forms walking unspookily together across the moors. Wyler resisted shooting this, because it was too cloying even for him, but producer Samuel Goldwyn insisted. So they slotted it in at the last minute—using body doubles, since Olivier and Oberon were out of there the nanosecond the main shoot wrapped. This final deception papering over a chaotic reality tickles me. Perhaps it would’ve tickled Emily too.

Plot, pacing, and structure: 2. On the surface the movie’s relatively faithful to the events of the first half of the book, which is a plus if you… enjoy the events of the book. It even does a narratively competent job of repurposing those events to create the story Hollywood wanted. That story just happens to be pretty meh.

Characters: 2. In some ways they’re more sympathetic than the book versions, but that’s more a feat of omission than of any added nuance.

Historical accuracy: 1. You will learn nothing about history by watching this movie. You will forget some of the history you did know.

Themes: 2. Love might indeed be stronger than time, but this love couldn’t even withstand the fallout from Cathy's first-ever spa weekend. These two are not together in eternity unless Eternity is the name of an otherworldly couples counseling practice. Nevertheless I award one point for Don’t Marry a Rich Loser, plus one point for Your Mistreated Stableboy Shall Inherit the Earth and Bury You In It.

1  Or—my conspiracy theory—presenting his own illegitimate son as a foundling. Relatedly, ask me about my thoughts on George Wickham sometime.

2  Before filming this movie, Oberon actually dated David Niven, aka Edgar, which is like if Meryl Streep had dated a tub of sawdust that dodged taxes and palled around with William F. Buckley. I cannot believe how much action that guy got throughout his life. What’s the opposite of a catch? A hot potato?

3  Geraldine Fitzgerald manages to make Movie Isabella interesting, if not actually likable, and since I too have gone on record as being impatient for the protagonists to die, Movie Isabella and I have that in common.