Emily, Is That You?

What? There's a movie coming out this month about Emily Bronte? (In the UK--there's no US release date yet.) Why didn't I know about this sooner? Let's watch the trailer (here's the link). 

Hmmm. Must've been the wrong link, the wrong trailer. That didn't look like Emily. Oh, wait, no, there's the title. Emily. Hmmm. Well then.

I admit first and foremost that I'm reacting to the trailer only. Trailers are generally sensationalized. Maybe the movie is completely different. But for the sake of conversation, here is why the trailer leaves me questioning whether I will even watch the film at all when it becomes available for me to watch. 

My Victorian novels professor liked to reference "the Bronte myth," this idea of the Bronte sisters as these wild figures wandering out on the moors. It's an idea that stirs up people's imaginations and has been in large part responsible for people's fascination with the sisters--but it's not an entirely factual look at the three small town, parson's daughters. A couple of years ago, we had that quiet film To Walk Invisible that aimed at showing the reality of the sisters' lives without sensationalizing them. This film is obviously taking a completely different direction and just sticking with the Bronte myth, adding to the embellishment. 

We get it. Emily was the more disturbed of the three sisters, if that's the word you want to use. Even though Charlotte is labeled the genius, the argument can be made that Wuthering Heights is a more perfect novel than any of the ones Charlotte wrote. And when you read the sisters' poetry, Emily generally has the best. There is obviously that "artistic disturbance" to her writing, that deep way of thinking about all aspects of life. And all of those thoughts were contained in one shy young woman who didn't like to venture out and was hesitant to share her writing even with her sisters. Of course our imaginations latch onto that and want to make it so melodramatic and modern.

I realize in watching the trailer that I know less about the specifics of Emily's life than I do about Charlotte's. I don't know whether her tutor friend in the trailer is based on a real person or not. I would imagine he is--unless the movie really is just throwing reality out the window. (By the way, is Branwell in this movie? What's a sensationalized Bronte film without the drunk brother?) But even if Emily had a close friendship with him in reality, what's this passionate kiss in the kitchen? Come on. Did we forget what era this is? This is why I sometimes have only so much patience for period films: they're too modern. And oh, yes, then we have to follow with her father's voice warning her about bringing shame on the family. Yes, father Bronte was harsh on his family--but let's call that what it was without having to add more to it. I sense the stirrings of modern, feminist perspective--and I don't think the Bronte sisters would have been modern feminists even if they had been born in the current era. But that's a whole conversation.

Yes, the fact that the sisters were women who were writing and then even publishing what they wrote went against the norm of society. It was quite bold of them. But those stirrings in the heart that lead many of us to write are common to humanity. I really love reading their writings and studying their lives; I can relate to a lot of things with them. But the Bronte sisters were just people. Emily Bronte was just a quiet woman living in a small town and thinking deep thoughts because she observed so much life in every little thing she saw. That's why her novel is set similarly in a small town dealing with a very isolated set of people. It's all about getting to the humanity of it. 

Titles for the Fall

With fall, I would think that there would be plenty of stories to mention the fall harvest and that sort of angle. Plenty of them do mention the harvest briefly, but it usually doesn't seem to form the center of a story for the simple reason that the fall harvest is a good time and stories need conflict in order to have any sort of plot. So it's more common for stories to have an overall sense of the decay and overall windiness of fall than of the bounty of the harvest. At random, I've chosen three titles to touch on today.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe. I mentioned decay, so naturally I was thinking of this story. It's all about decay: the decay of the house and the decay of the people in it and the decay of the family in general. For a dark look at fall, this is the story. Since it's Poe, it naturally also ties in well with Halloween. More, though, than the "spooky" elements of the story, it's the elements of nature that he describes that make this story fit in so well with the atmosphere of a season of the weather.

Silas Marner by George Eliot. I don't remember if this short book focuses in particular on any one season. But the overall feel of it has always made me think of fall. Silas Marner is, in many ways, at the autumn of his life. He is no longer young and he has nothing to make him look forward to the next day--and when he loses his gold, he loses all his happiness. Yet he finds a new kind of gold in the form of a gold-haired child who falls into his lap and becomes a daughter to him. The color gold, simply, is reminiscent of autumn because it's the color that many green leaves turn. And the sense of the old that will soon be replaced by the young is very much like the changing seasons: the blooms and green grasses and leaves fall and fade away in autumn to make way for fresh ones to come in spring.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Probably this book has more of winter in it than spring, but it feels more like fall. There is so much talk about the wind and the isolation and the moors and the wind, all of these harsher elements of weather. And then there is Heathcliff. He is Nature, this inexplicable and unstoppable force, this harsh element of weather that rushes in and takes over for a season before fading away again. He's too alive to be winter; instead, I think of him as fall (winter is his death). Here is a combination of the previous two titles in the sense of darkness and seasons that will change.

From a daily perspective, no, I don't think of fall itself as dark. It's an exciting time, when the weather cools off enough to start going outside again more often (or at more times of the day). While the wildflowers of spring are beautiful, so can be the dry grasses of autumn. And with the holidays coming up, you start getting a nesting feeling that takes you into the short days of December. So, no, I don't think of fall as dark; it's just that there are some wonderful dark elements to books that focus on the changing of seasons.

Star Wars & Wuthering Heights

I was thinking about the first time I read Wuthering Heights. I was thirteen, and I don't remember being particularly disturbed by it or even needing to define or give reason to its plot or its aims (I waited until college to start thinking about its theme). But it was always a story of compelling, memorable characters and settings.

Which all reminds me much of my experience with Star Wars. When I was young, I looked at the costumes (which are what define the characters, though I didn't think of it in that way at the time) and at the different locations and sets. I liked the blue milk that Aunt Beru pours, the way that Luke throws the poncho over his head on the way to the Millennium Falcon's docking bay (side note: the only thing that The Force Awakens was missing was a poncho--Episodes VI and I both had ponchos), the pink clouds above Bespin, the way Luke comes out in ROTJ looking all cool dressed in black and using the Force, the green trees on Endor, all of these things were Star Wars to me.

And then I got older and started to think about what it all meant--after I had already absorbed and memorized everything.

So on to my comparison. I want to cover (quickly) four items.

Generations

Wuthering Heights (I'll just call them WH and SW) can be confusing to read the first time because it deals with multiple generations and they mostly all have variations off of two or three names. Confusing names aside, SW also deals with generations--and in the same mixed up order. First you see (in SW) the children, then you go back and see the parents, and then you go forward and see the children's children. So both stories blend and constantly reflect back on not only the personal identity of the characters but also their parentage--and the way that their parentage affects them. Sometimes they have a positive legacy from their parents and sometimes it is a negative one. Either way, they're all in it together because they're family and it's the family that the audience is focusing on.

Good/Evil

SW is an obvious story of good versus evil, with the Force representing both sides and with characters struggling to stay on one side of the spectrum. WH is a little more complicated and certainly less direct: there are characters you would describe as good and characters you would describe as bad and characters that are either good or bad at different moments. But I think you are aware as you read of this concept of different people making different choices about what they do and therefore about who they are. Whether or not WH is a story about good and evil, it is a story that dwells on both the positive and the negative.

The Villain

And both WH and SW have a memorable, ruthless villain. Darth Vader was a legend as soon as he first walked on screen; even though he was almost flat for most of the time (before you learned about who he was and therefore about the conflict that came to define his character), he was so established that it didn't matter. He is powerful and terrifying and unforgiving. Heathcliff is similar in his colorful characterization: you read him and you can just imagine him there and you do not want to ever meet him because he is so cruel. Whether or not you can apply the word evil to him is debatable (as everything is): he sort of just is. He does act evil at many times (though you kind of wonder if Cathy had married him and they had just gone off to live quietly away together if maybe he wouldn't have been that bad--but that's irrelevant because she didn't). Either way, they're both known as villains (unless you've only watched bad WH movies where Heathcliff is portrayed as a lover--yes, there's a love story in WH but it isn't like that at all).

Healing

Ah, the best part. You know, SW is one of my favorite fictional representations of redemption. You have Darth Vader, a completely evil figure, and you learn that he was once a man and you see him decide that he regrets his choices--and he chooses to forsake his past and become a new person, someone good again. The generation of evil ends with that one choice and he frees his son (and daughter) to start a new era free from the Emperor. In WH, the healing also comes with a new generation. At the end of the novel, both Heathcliff and Cathy are dead and it is Hareton and young Cathy who are alive, finding peace and essentially declaring a resolution to be content, if that is the right way of putting it. They are setting aside the "sins of the father" so to speak and choosing to move on with their lives like regular people, finding some happiness after all that's happened. A new generation and a new start.

Both stories have intense imagery, of people, of places, of actions, and of emotions. There is strong conflict and quite a bit of darkness. But in the end both stories find a quiet place, a place where hope can grow even after all the bitterness and hate--and that is the kind of hope that is inspiring, otherwise it means nothing.

Oh, and my songs for this post are Breaking Benjamin's "Great Divide" and "Ashes of Eden."

 

Wuthering Heights: Seasons of Good & Ill

I wasn't even going to write anything about this movie until I glanced at the Netflix reviews and saw that, with a couple of exceptions, most of them were terrible. Really? Was it really as bad as that?

The thing is, I've never watched another movie adaption of Wuthering Heights. I just couldn't, ironically, stomach any others. I only started watching one and stopped a few minutes in: it was too ridiculously different from the book. Although I believe that there is a love story within the book, there is much more to it--and it is a very specific kind of love story.

The 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights by Andrea Arnold was, from start to finish, confusing and disturbing. Slow, too. But that, my friends, is why I could stomach it. The novel is confusing and disturbing and multi-layered (which can force slower reading). It's a brilliant masterpiece, but it is also confusing and disturbing. So for the movie to include these rather non-cinematic traits was, in my view, a success, whatever else the film did or did not do. Everything that is outside of the cinematic norm (from the lack of music, the often close camera angles, the dialogue shown from a distance, the quietness, the nature shots, the violence, etc.) is what helps make this movie different and moving in a much more methodical way.

That isn't to say I loved everything about this movie. For instance, while the cinematography constantly likened Heathcliff to Nature, implying the theory that the cycles of violence in the story are just seasons of Nature that will run their course and then pass away, there is no cycle after Heathcliff. There is no story of the "new generation" that takes over once Heathcliff and Cathy and Linton are all gone. But, as I understand it, this isn't something that most films include, anyway. And it's understandable: the plot is long, convoluted, confusing, and circular. It's a great plot, but a difficult one to portray on film. So while this version may not have portrayed all the cycles, at least it got one near right.

It needs at least a mention to address the (first) casting of Heathcliff as black. What could have been a complicated introduction of race into the story felt, in fact, more subtle. It simply helps to emphasize, for modern audiences, Heathcliff's isolation. In the book, he does look like an outsider and he is nearly always treated this way; the casting just gives a visual to this difference. It also helps to further liken Heathcliff with Nature. In the scene where he starts covering Cathy in mud, it isn't as if he's trying to make her black--it's as if he's trying to connect her deeper with the earth.

All this said, I still wouldn't recommend the movie to most viewers. It's more of an art house film, and yes, you're right if you call some of it disturbing (but I thought The Hunger Games was disturbing, and look how popular that was). So watch it if you're familiar with the book and want to ponder one visual approach to the story.

Helen: The Modern Cathy?

I usually try and spread out my posts on Primeval, but I don't have another topic I really want to focus on right now and my Primeval posts have been getting a decent amount of views, so here I go with more rambling about the show.

Cathy, assiduous readers will recall, is from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (and it is Cathy senior I am discussing). Cathy is, of course, at the center of a love triangle with Heathcliff and Linton--she chooses Linton, but really loves Heathcliff. She is also, at certain points, sort of like the unrestrained feminine force. She even seems on the psycho side at times. (It's things like this that make the novel so entertaining to read and analyze . . . )

Like Cathy, Primeval's Helen sets up her own triangle. Back when she was married to Nick, she had an affair with Stephen. In Seasons 1 and 2, Helen seems to go back and forth between the two, trying to gain the trust of whichever one she thinks will listen to her. It doesn't take long for Cutter to dismiss her, so it is Stephen who ends up trusting her (essentially to his doom, you could melodramatically say). Would that make Cutter Helen's Linton and Stephen her Heathcliff? Maybe. But you could also argue for the opposite. Cutter also becomes the man Helen can't have (since he keeps rejecting her), like Heathcliff (although Cathy could have chosen Heathcliff--sort of).

Let me return to the "unrestrained feminine force" idea. Helen is completely mad. And completely smart and driven. She's disturbing because she always lies and we hardly ever know everything she knows or what exactly her plan is. She says things against humanity, but always comes back to humanity--back to the ARC, to Cutter, to Stephen. I suppose you could say that she's disturbing to Stephen because she's desirable, even though he knows what her personality is like. Is she femininity gone completely off? Sort of. Although this isn't because she has been, like a nineteenth century character, suppressed--it's just because she's Helen.

I wonder what Cathy would think about Helen. She might think Helen has some good ideas, but I think Cathy would be very unlike Helen if she were born today. If that were the case, would she have had any reason to ever pick Linton over Heathcliff? The two of them could have just lived their life together, not like Helen who had to constantly be discovering new things and feeling in power essentially over existence. Since Helen's character isn't responding to repressed Victorian women's ideals, she has to respond to other things. Technology, science, ethics, knowledge, awareness, privacy and publicity, that sort of thing.

Favorite Fictional Couples

My last post gave me the idea for this one. Fittingly, then, I will start with the couple I mentioned there; after that, there will be no particular order to the list. Also, these are mainly supposed to be instances where it is the pair I like, not just one individual.

1) Abby & Connor (TV: Primeval) - I probably talked enough about these two last time, so I'll just repeat that I love them together. They just make the world brighter and happier when they're together.

2) Jane & Rochester (Book: Jane Eyre) - This relationship has taken on such a symbolic meaning to me. The two can only properly come together once they have learned to be individuals. Yet they are drawn to each other because of their differing elements, the elements that complete each other.

3) Jeannie & Major Nelson (TV: I Dream of Jeannie) - Even when they're having their spats, these two still adore each other. Their love is like some spark of magic that refuses to go away.

4) Nat & Daisy (Book: Little Men & Jo's Boys) - I suppose I like this pairing mainly because of Nat. He comes from such a sad background, then he and Daisy meet and never look back. They're both very demure.

5) Eowyn & Faramir (Book: The Lord of the Rings) - There is a similar Jane/Rochester thing that happens here: the coming together of these two characters marks certain other changes in their lives. Eowyn in particular must learn something more about herself while she is in the Houses of Healing, where she meets Faramir.

6) Cathy & Heathcliff (Book: Wuthering Heights) - How could I do a list like this and not include these two? People who say that this book is just about hate and not love are simplifying it too much; there is a love story in it, and I think the love is probably just the easiest part of the novel to grasp onto. There's nothing so compelling as tragic love, eh?

7) Gatsby & Daisy (Book: The Great Gatsby) - Speaking of tragic love, I also felt compelled to include these two. It's true, I'm not so interested in Daisy as Gatsby, but his love for her is wonderful. The green light is wonderful. Their story is tragic, sweet, and simultaneously hopeless and hopeful.

8) John Keats & Fanny Brawne (Movie: Bright Star) - Watch this movie and you'll never read a John Keats poem the same. More tragic love here, though much sweeter. There are similarities to Nat/Daisy, just with poetry and death added in--a couple little differences . . .

9) Caspian & Ramandu's Daughter (Book: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader & The Silver Chair) - I love this pairing because, being part of a children's story, it's so subtle. No superfluous romance or flirting, just two characters who fall in love--it's fairy tale-like.

10) Anakin & Padme (Movie: Star Wars) - I wasn't going to add these two in because of all the hate the prequel trilogy tends to get. But I have to admit that I like characters' stories in the entire six part arc. There is so much character conflict in this love story and so much fate and fear/hate challenging love that I do have to include it.


I'm sensing some patterns here. Four out of ten are tragic stories. I think you could easily say that three of the six leftover could have very nearly been tragic. Four out of ten couples either pick on each other or something similar. Six out of ten of the women step out in some particular way from the traditional women's side of things--some of them being (like Eowyn) a little more wild, I guess, than their counterparts (Faramir, though a soldier, has a very gentle nature that is contrary to Eowyn's).

Since all of these characteristics were still just percents out of a whole, I can't say how much they tell about my own tastes without comparing my list to ones made by other people. After all, though I know I tend to like the tragic loves, don't many of us? That's one reason why Titanic (which I actually don't like much) did so well in theatres and why Romeo and Juliet (which I don't really like, either--but I'm not a big fan of Shakespeare in general) is probably the first Shakespeare play children hear of.

The Phantom is Also a Rochester

Click here for my introduction to "The Rochester Character" and here for the second addition to it.

I have a fourth character to add to the jumble of Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre, Henry Higgins from Pygmalion, and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. The newbie is the title character of The Phantom of the Opera. I mean him no offense by calling him "the phantom" instead of his name, Eric; it's just that most people don't know his name. Even less people than know that Sleeping Beauty's name is Aurora, I'd say.

The most obvious similarity here is the controlling characteristic. Out of the four, the phantom seems the one who has the most control. The entire opera is under his control. Heathcliff only controls a couple of houses out in the country, Higgins only controls his work and everything relating to it, and Rochester acts like he's in control, but really isn't. He has a past and present with Bertha that he can't escape and Jane chooses to leave him.

With the exception of self-centered Higgins, they're all exerting this control, to a degree, for a woman. The phantom sets up his elaborate scene to gain Christine, like Heathcliff wants revenge for Cathy and Rochester wants to be able to have a future with Jane.

The phantom is very similar in my eyes to Heathcliff with the buried-deep good core beneath so much evil from the pain of the past. (That's a nice, wordy description, isn't it?) He, like Heathcliff, couldn't be accepted by the world, because of his appearance versus his lack of social standing. He used the excuse to cause torment to others. Christine isn't much like Cathy, though, except that they both choose another man. Christine is a better person, which is why she doesn't love the phantom back, even if she can and does pity him.

Heathcliff is a Rochester

To continue with "The Rochester Character," here's the next character to add to the bunch: Heathcliff from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Although I don't have too many particular feelings for Mr. Heathcliff besides a little pity, I do love his name. It's short to say, long to spell, a stand out among other characters, and it has a nice natural influence. But on to our comparison.

Heathcliff, like Rochester and Higgins, is also changeable and moody. But he's darkly so. He's always sinister, even when acting kind. Most of the time, his quick changes in mood are when he figures out how he can manipulate the people around him to suit his plans for revenge and ruining everyone's life. Happy person. That pessimism links him closely to Rochester, who broods over his past, then broods over losing his only hope in Jane. But Rochester only broods, Heathcliff acts with vehemence.

Though it's odd: I think of Heathcliff as having a naturally good center hidden somewhere inside of all his evil and Rochester as having a naturally hard and dark center inside his attempts to overshadow it. Which in the end, he does manage to do, thanks to Jane for "showing him the light." Going back to that pity I have for Heathcliff, I don't think he ever really wanted to do wrong. But he had no one. He had an adopted family that didn't like him much. He had a friend that he loved who was forsaking him for a passing (and rich) fancy of hers. It killed the good in him. It makes me wonder what Heathcliff would've been like if he had chosen differently. He threw himself so entirely into his evil purpose that I'd like to see that force put into a good purpose.

I said that the good in him was killed, but it wasn't entirely taken away, all the same. This is why I see him with a good center: even in all his darkness, he still remembers Cathy so tenderly. He tries to gouge out his heart, but it's still there. Which is similar to how Rochester simply despairs without Jane, but still loves her and is able to continue on with her so easily when she does come back.