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

Exactly. Same with the casting of Hamilton which the race baiters absolutely adored - even though that was the very definition of historically inaccurate.

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.

He was dark by 19th century English standards, which means eastern or southern European - still white.

Agree. This is how it's been generally interpreted through time. Examples of previous Heathcliffs: Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Ralph Fiennes. Tom Hardy, Timothy Dalton.

+1
DP

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Two things I’ve read about the movie turned me off from seeing it.

1. The recent interview where the director explained why she made Heathcliff white. She removed race as a theme entirely because that’s how she saw him when she read it as a teenager? Rolled my eyes so hard.

2. Walls made of skin? Eww. Not my thing.

Of course she pictured him as white, because she is white. White people always center themselves. Kind of like how in most churches Jesus is blond and blue eyed.

I have never seen a blond/blue eyed Jesus. Do you just make things up as you go through life? Most churches?

I'm not watching this. Emerald Fennell isn't going to fool me again. Her movies are all style and no substance.

Anonymous wrote:Two things I’ve read about the movie turned me off from seeing it.

1. The recent interview where the director explained why she made Heathcliff white. She removed race as a theme entirely because that’s how she saw him when she read it as a teenager? Rolled my eyes so hard.

2. Walls made of skin? Eww. Not my thing.

Of course she pictured him as white, because she is white. White people always center themselves. Kind of like how in most churches Jesus is blond and blue eyed.

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 here. You clearly have not read the book. Don't lie: I can tell you didn't. "Googling it" for summaries or other people's interpretations is not the same as reading the novel, ESPECIALLY because Bronte DOES very much leave his race ambiguous. As the previous poster explained, the Roma of Europe aren't white. I've seen them both in Eastern Europe and in the UK, and will note that the Roma I saw in Eastern Europe were distinctly brown/not white, while the ones we saw in the UK were lighter, so maybe mixed. But in any case, the "gypsy"/Roma people would have been familiar to Emily Bronte, and they probably were the inspiration for Heathcliff. They aren't white: they are brown, they are POC. But to the super pasty white English of the Northern English countryside, they were blatantly non-white, in a way that would stand out jarringly in one of these isolated rural communities.

Anonymous wrote:The book made his race the reason they couldn't be a match. The movie reduces it to class.

I think it was a miss. When a book from the 1800s can be more insightful about race than a movie in 2026, that's kind of wild.

No, it didn't. It was a lot more nuanced/complicated than that.

He received no education, and not even a name: he was just "Heathcliff." He had no money, no future, and was treated as a hired hand, the help, after his protector (kind of) Earnshaw died and Hindley put him out to sleep with the servants and perform farm work. As Catherine told Nelly Dean, it would "degrade" her to marry Heathcliff IN COMPARISON with Edgar Linton, who was: a landowner/heir, wealthy, educated, socially acceptable because of those things. Cathy had no choice but to marry the wealthy landowner. None. There was no future for her and Heathcliff together at that point in the Victorian era because they would have been homeless with no way of earning money/supporting themselves. He had all the skills of a handyman, a farmhand who could not support a wife or even have his own shack.

Was his race part of that? Yeah, maybe. But if Earnshaw had truly given him his name, making him an adopted son, Heathcliff Earnshaw, not just Heathcliff the farm boy, and sent him to be educated as he did his son Hindley, AND given him an inheritance and set him up in business, then he COULD in theory have married Cathy. Hindley wouldn't have cared.

In the Victorian era in England, ESPECIALLY in port regions, such as Liverpool, interracial marriages DID happen. Heathcliff, if Earnshaw had cared enough to ensure his future beyond farm boy status, could have set up a little business or shop in Liverpool, then taken Cathy there and married her after Earnshaw died (or maybe before that). They would have lived an unremarkable life in a port community where other interracial marriages were common enough not to be particularly noteworthy.

There are many legitimate academic sources you can find on this, or just google quickly. Here's just an article you can scan: https://treventour1995.medium.com/shondalands-bridgerton-the-black-history-you-don-t-learn-at-school-d3f39df2aefb

I have a B.A in English Lit and I loved this movie. It’s reallly well done and beautifully executed. Margot Robbie brings Cathy alive from the pages. It is an artistic interpretation of the 1/3 of the novel. I’m not going to nitpick based on if it’s a faithful adaptation of the novel because it does not claim to be.

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.

DP here. I have a Masters degree in English Literature and my MA thesis involved Wuthering Heights.

Heathcliff's race is NOT "the main plot." You clearly didn't read the novel, nor do you even know what "plot" means.

Also, your first sentence is not a sentence at all.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Anyone non-white means "some random abroad no one has heard of"?

Agree their focus was a big hit and these and big names. Which is fine and also fine for some to be turned off.

I absolutely did not say anyone non white is a random actor. You are complete being disingenuous there. I simply struggle to come up with a male actor in their late 20s, white or nonwhite, getting the kind of fame Jacob Elordi is getting and same with Margot Robbie- when people complain she is too old for the role, name a mid to late 20s actress who as a stunning, well known, and acclaimed or her acting ability. These are both academy award nominated actors. My point was they could’ve gone with an unknown, in which case yes, a random actor, but they chose not to do that.

These are the two best people for the job at this time. totally agree that will turn off some because of the whitewashing but if the goal is getting the most mainstream audience to buy tickets that has paid off given the opening weekend they have.

Anonymous wrote:TIL that people here don't know about the East India company or the movement of people to England from India.

Where did you all go to school that you think Heathcliff is from Europe? LOL.

And at the time this book was written, the Irish were not called gypsies. That's a much more recent thing. I'm guessing there are some younger people here who aren't aware.

The funniest lines from reviews that I've read...

Emerald Fennell cranks up the campery as she reinvents Emily Brontë’s tale of Cathy and Heathcliff on the windswept Yorkshire moor as a 20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness, with bodices ripped to shreds and a saucy slap of BDSM.

Adaptation or not, it’s an astonishingly hollow work.

Some of this, it can be argued, was already signalled by the film’s casting and the choice to obliterate any mention of race, colonialism, or ostracisation in the telling of pseudo-siblings Cathy and Heathcliff’s destructive codependence.

“Wuthering Heights” is so affronted by the notion that Heathcliff might be anything other than a dreamboat that it builds a world around him that’s more suited to a fairytale than a Gothic masterwork.

And the supposedly “wild” Heathcliff never does anything to Cathy that couldn’t be spotted in the average Bridgerton episode. Mostly, he sticks his fingers in her mouth. Robbie and Elordi don’t entirely lack chemistry, but their characters do feel so thinned out that their performances are pushed almost to the border of pantomime. She’s wilful and spiky. He’s rough but gentle. That’s about it.

There are conspicuous longueurs and characterisations that barely reflect the complexity of an Instagram reel let alone the greatest gothic novel in English literature.

The production design is ramshackle — a bit of brutalism here, a bit of Tim Burton there, some location shooting and lots of ugly CGI. And the ending is hobbled by a shamefully trite “best bits” megamix.

Still, Oliver’s Isabella is a hoot and a bright light. She even winks to the camera as if she’s in on the joke — as if she knows it’s awful.

Fennell has made no bones about how her "interpretation" of Brontë's novel is based on her feelings for the book after reading it at 14. However, after cutting away nearly all the story's characters and only adapting about half of the book, I have to wonder if Fennell has ever actually read the novel she's based her passion project on.

I am tired of consuming art by people whose understanding of class struggle is limited to the paranoid notion that the rest of us are all plotting to topple them.

To me, studying it under a brilliant English teacher in a rough comprehensive, the class and racial dynamics of the novel were simply impossible to ignore.

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 mean, some of the Irish were considered gypsies back in the day. And the black Irish were white people with dark hair, dark eyes (sometimes), and skin that tanned rather than burned.

Heathcliff was totally a white guy in the book…he was just dark haired, tan, and a gypsy.

NP. Yes! All these people saying the book was just focused on his race/he was non-white? No. He was a foundling, a different class, a Gypsy, etc. And yes, I’ve read the book.

TIL that people here don't know about the East India company or the movement of people to England from India.

Where did you all go to school that you think Heathcliff is from Europe? LOL.

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Anyone non-white means "some random abroad no one has heard of"?

Agree their focus was a big hit and these and big names. Which is fine and also fine for some to be turned off.