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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?