Ok DCUM, what do you think of the Wuthering Heights movie?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s gross that in this day and age she made Heathcliff white. WTF. Other races exist, and even Emily Brontë was aware of them and gave the character a fully realized personality, not just one of slave or peasant.

Since when was Heathcliff not European?

And yet here you are thinking European = White. Sigh.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Heathcliff was not white in the novel? I didn’t realize that.

He was white in the novel, probably Spaniard, Romanian, gypsy or italian.

Back in that day, Europeans considered British, Germans, Italians, Spanish, Turkish, etc to all be entirely different races.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Heathcliff was not white in the novel? I didn’t realize that.

Him not being white is the main plot. I'm guessing you were really clueless or your English teacher was terrible.

He was a gypsy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I enjoyed the movie OP to answer your question. Steamy + fun to watch. DCUM will take the fun out of anything. The filmmakers were quite clear this movie was not a direct adaptation from the book which is over 150 years old.

Understatement of the decade.

I haven’t seen the movie but I think the posters are saying it’s a real missed opportunity to make a hot interracial relationship that would be more true to the forbidden love nature of the book.
But maybe the filmmakers were a little uncomfortable making healthiff who is sort of a bad guy or at least morally ambiguous the sole POC.

I read the book dozens of times as a teen but need to reread it as an adult.

This is sort of beside the point but I listened to an interesting podcast about Elizabethan England saying there were actually a lot of people pf North African descent — via the moors in Spain and interactions with Spain — in England and most converted and intermarried so there are actually a lot of Brit’s with African ancestry. They did a whole study of 17tj century parish records.

I think when I read it as a teen I didn’t know what lascar meant and assumed he was like a “black Irish” kid speaking Irish (gibberish). But re-reading. an African or Indian kid makes more sense—or likely mixed race with white father and African or Asian mother, which I’m sure tjere were tons of. The 2013 movie Belle is a true story of a late 18th century British woman whose mother was an African slave and father was a British sea captain — a great movie and a story that definitely would have been known to Bronre since it was a big part of the British abolition movement. I think it’s likely she intended heathcliff as a similar character — a child of a woman of color and a white British father who was adopted by a friend or relation of the father.

There are a ton of mixed race British actors so I don’t feel like it would have been that hard for them to find someone.

The Bronte sisters bring up mixed ancestry characters a lot in their books. Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester's wife was Jamaican and creole.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:From what I read, Heathcliff is described as a gypsy and a dark stranger in the novel. Could it just be that he’s dark in mysterious or does it imply that he’s from a completely different race? I never understood it this way. The actor who plays Heathcliff is tall, dark and handsome.

I'm French and have lived in the UK. "Gypsy" means traveling Roma people that mostly came from Eastern Europe but that have very distant Indian heritage (they migrated in the Middle Ages or something). They are not of African or Arab descent. In Bronte's time, gypsies would have looked like the gypsies of today, and since the settled populations looked down on them, they probably wouldn't distinguish between impoverished English folk without a home and actual Roma, if both looked relatively similar. If you walk in the streets of Paris right now, you can see gypsy women holding babies in their laps begging for money, usually near metro stations. They are purposefully scruffy to attract sympathy, but they do actually have relatively pale skin and dark hair (also today they're slaves to a begging racket, so don't give them money - they'll have to hand it over to the menfolk in charge).

So casting a Caucasian with dark hair in the role of Heathcliff is entirely appropriate.

Yes! Exactly this.

Heathcliff was Eastern European gypsy descent.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:From what I read, Heathcliff is described as a gypsy and a dark stranger in the novel. Could it just be that he’s dark in mysterious or does it imply that he’s from a completely different race? I never understood it this way. The actor who plays Heathcliff is tall, dark and handsome.

I'm French and have lived in the UK. "Gypsy" means traveling Roma people that mostly came from Eastern Europe but that have very distant Indian heritage (they migrated in the Middle Ages or something). They are not of African or Arab descent. In Bronte's time, gypsies would have looked like the gypsies of today, and since the settled populations looked down on them, they probably wouldn't distinguish between impoverished English folk without a home and actual Roma, if both looked relatively similar. If you walk in the streets of Paris right now, you can see gypsy women holding babies in their laps begging for money, usually near metro stations. They are purposefully scruffy to attract sympathy, but they do actually have relatively pale skin and dark hair (also today they're slaves to a begging racket, so don't give them money - they'll have to hand it over to the menfolk in charge).

So casting a Caucasian with dark hair in the role of Heathcliff is entirely appropriate.

NOPE.

For the love, people. Can you do some reading. The evidence is in the book. You can google it.

It is in the book.

Heathcliff is eastern European Roma, aka gypsy.

Read the book, not wikipedia.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:From what I read, Heathcliff is described as a gypsy and a dark stranger in the novel. Could it just be that he’s dark in mysterious or does it imply that he’s from a completely different race? I never understood it this way. The actor who plays Heathcliff is tall, dark and handsome.

I'm French and have lived in the UK. "Gypsy" means traveling Roma people that mostly came from Eastern Europe but that have very distant Indian heritage (they migrated in the Middle Ages or something). They are not of African or Arab descent. In Bronte's time, gypsies would have looked like the gypsies of today, and since the settled populations looked down on them, they probably wouldn't distinguish between impoverished English folk without a home and actual Roma, if both looked relatively similar. If you walk in the streets of Paris right now, you can see gypsy women holding babies in their laps begging for money, usually near metro stations. They are purposefully scruffy to attract sympathy, but they do actually have relatively pale skin and dark hair (also today they're slaves to a begging racket, so don't give them money - they'll have to hand it over to the menfolk in charge).

So casting a Caucasian with dark hair in the role of Heathcliff is entirely appropriate.

NOPE.

For the love, people. Can you do some reading. The evidence is in the book. You can google it.

DP. So how did you feel about the actually inaccurate casting in Hamilton? That wasn’t about fictional people, open to interpretation.

That's the whole point in Hamilton and people are free to dislike it.

Versus this movie feeling like it misses or chooses to gloss over something significant.

Heathcliff was gypsy. Read the book, not the cliff notes on google or some substack

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I enjoyed the movie OP to answer your question. Steamy + fun to watch. DCUM will take the fun out of anything. The filmmakers were quite clear this movie was not a direct adaptation from the book which is over 150 years old.

Understatement of the decade.

I haven’t seen the movie but I think the posters are saying it’s a real missed opportunity to make a hot interracial relationship that would be more true to the forbidden love nature of the book.

In the movie, her rich husband Edgar is non-white, so no matter what race actor had played Heathcliffe, the racial component that PP book fans are looking for would not be there.

Presumably the filmmaker is not interested in telling that part of the story. Audiences get to think they messed up, which maybe they did, but it was an intentional choice to avoid that part of the story.

[Anonymous]

Very few posters have talked about the actual movie. Return to topic, people!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Very few posters have talked about the actual movie. Return to topic, people!

Agree, and no one is being realistic. They’re not going to cast some random actor no one has heard of just so they can be historically accurate and have the movie make $6 million and maybe get a best cinematography nomination and have no one seen it.

This is the team that got over 1 billion for Barbie. They want people in seats and that’s what they got. This movie is doing huge numbers because of Jacob and Margot. If people don’t want to see it don’t see it but don’t lecture Hollywood on how to make box office which is what they are doing.

[Anonymous]

For the race baiters they also didn’t write Edgar in to be Indian but no problem with that casting right?

[Anonymous]

I read the book in my teens and remember just like this director getting sucked into their love vortex and when that was over the end was very unsatisfying. I think this was a good end point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Heathcliff was not white in the novel? I didn’t realize that.

Him not being white is the main plot. I'm guessing you were really clueless or your English teacher was terrible.

He was a gypsy.

With that long dark hair in most of the movie he was definitely gypsy looking

[Anonymous]

It bothered me that the brother wasn't in the movie. The movie made it seem like Katherine was the only person who who was really cruel to him since the dad had rescued him but in the story the brother was enormously cruel to Heathcliff and was a major reason why Heathcliff was poor and revengeful.

[Anonymous]

OP, to answer your original question I had planned to see it but didn’t. I read a number of different parents guides, IMDB, etc since my 16yr old DD and I were gong to read the book and watch the movie together. Total turnoff. BDSM, some fairly mature sex-implied scenes (masturbation, oral sex). Animal cruelty. Child abuse.

Sounds like it’s super steamy and appealing to the right audience, but the descriptions totally turned us both off to it.