Transcription
Wuthering Heights is a psychologically messed up story, and with over 10 film adaptations, only one comes close to truly capturing how disturbing the story actually is. The 1992 Rafe Fiennes film is the most faithful to the novel, but it's also one of the few adaptations that tell the full story.
Wuthering Heights plays out like a scary movie because it's a love story, but it's a cautionary tale about what love can do. You have two people that are obsessed with each other, and they put each other through hell. They use other people as pawns to make each other jealous, and then it turns into a ghost story. Their romance was about possession. It wasn't like "I love you." It was more like "You belong to me." Their passion comes from being emotionally deprived because Heathcliff and Catherine were not good people.
Heathcliff and Catherine are bounded by their trauma. They're both each other's escape, and they're both obsessed with the fact that they know they have some type of control over one another. They get off on this emotional dominance. In the 1992 version, you really see how immature Catherine is. And then you got Heathcliff, and this version doesn't romanticize him at all. He's never gotten over anything. And because of that, everybody's going to suffer. He wants to make sure your kids pay the price. Heathcliff is scary. You don't like his thought process, and you don't like the fact that he is willing to sacrifice everybody's happiness.
This wasn't a healthy bond because when Catherine says, "I am Heathcliff," that's not love. That's her saying out loud, "There are no boundaries, and I don't see myself past him." They lust and yearn after each other, not because they're in love, but because nobody else sees them the way they do. A lot of these adaptations do miscast Heathcliff. The whitewashing doesn't help because him being a person of color is so essential to the storyline. They make fun of how dark his skin is. He is the other. His revenge, that rage, that comes from how he was treated. Really, the 2011 version is like the only one that didn't whitewash Heathcliff.
Catherine loves Heathcliff because she feels like he's the version of her that she can't show to the world. They use each other to be seen, but they don't heal together. It's such a messed up love story. And then on top of that, the next generation has to suffer all because of Heathcliff and Catherine. That's some scary right.