As a full-time English Literature student and part-time movie-watcher, one of my greatest pleasures is building a mental web of intertextuality: The way texts are influenced by, adapted from, or allude to previous texts. Canonical works such as the Bible, Greek and Roman classics, and Shakespearean plays have long served as the foundations of or inspirations for works across literature and film.
Milton’s Paradise Lost and Steinbeck’s East of Eden radically reimagine stories from the Book of Genesis. Carson’s Autobiography of Red draws from and gives new life to fragments of the lyric poet Stesichorus’s Geryoneis. My Own Private Idaho, The Lion King, 10 Things I Hate About You, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and countless other seemingly modern tales imaginatively retell or rework Shakespeare’s plays, themselves retellings of older stories. What makes adaptations like these work is that they believe in the works they are drawing from while establishing their own unique vision.
Walking into Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation last week, I certainly was not expecting anything near Paradise Lost’s level of innovation and depth. Somehow, it still managed to disappoint.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a novel about obsession, rage, revenge, cruelty, and abuse. It’s about the class resentment and racial anxieties of the 19th-century British Empire. It grabs hold of its reader and doesn’t let them go. It does not invite the reader to mourn; it demands that we sit with our discomfort.
Fennell’s Wuthering Heights saps the novel of all this substance, flattening it into a glossy, Romeo and Juliet-esque tragedy marketed as “the greatest love story of all time.” The novel, on the other hand, actually only grants about a third of its narrative space to Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship, focusing primarily on cycles of violence and abuse. Heathcliff is a victim of brutality and of racial Othering, but our readerly empathy for these struggles is stretched and challenged as he perpetuates calculated violence against other characters. Casting Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and framing his character as a sardonic and misunderstood dreamboat instead of a complex, tormented, terrifying figure goes beyond mere divergence from the source material: It squashes any possibility of transmitting the novel’s thoughtful commentary on social dynamics in 19th-century England. What the film lacks in real nuance it attempts to make up for in shock value and aesthetics, yet it ends up falling short of any meaningful intervention, entirely out of touch with what makes its source material so compelling.
What stuck out most to me, though, was that I couldn’t even enjoy criticizing the film because it isn’t an isolated failure. The film is symptomatic of a much larger, disappointing cultural trend: Reliance on the profitability of nostalgia at the expense of originality and creativity. Studios greenlight lacklustre sequels and adaptations because they perform predictably and consistently well at the box office. Despite mixed reviews and criticism, Wuthering Heights is still the highest-grossing title of the year so far, bringing in $83 million USD at the global box office on opening weekend.
Clearly, though, despite the prevalence of adaptations like //Wuthering Heights//, there remains a strong cultural desire for original and innovative works. The massive commercial success and critical acclaim of recent films such as Everything Everywhere All at Once and Sinners prove as much. Even so, these original works don’t stand entirely alone. Everything Everywhere All at Once began as Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s response to The Matrix but draws in allusions to other director styles and films, from Wong Kar-Wai to Princess Mononoke. Sinners reinvents the vampire genre and deepens familiar character archetypes and dynamics through the dimensions of race, religion, and class.
Creation always comes from a vast and interconnected web of inspirations. The parameters for good retelling, then, are not so different from the parameters for good art in general. For an adaptation to work, it must both believe in the works it’s drawing from while establishing its own unique vision. All works should contribute to this conversation across time, as this connection is what allows art to deepen its individual and interwoven meanings instead of being watered down.
