Girl Detective

Because I am an obsessive nerd, I am preparing for my book discussion of Wuthering Heights by watching as many of its film/tv adaptations as I’m able. Also because I’m an obsessive nerd, I’m trying to watch them in order, guessing that later adapters were influenced by earlier ones.

I began with what is the earliest widely available, and perhaps best known, adaptation, Wuthering Heights (1939) directed by William Wyler, with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, and Merle Oberon as Cathy 1. The film doesn’t include the second generation, though “Mrs. Heathcliff” does appear in the opening scenes, sitting sullenly by the fire when Lockwood foists himself on Wuthering Heights.

Tagline: A servant in the house of Wuthering Heights tells a traveler the unfortunate tale of lovers Cathy and Heathcliff.

This adaptation has the same problem as many subsequent ones. The book shows the characters at three major stages: childhood, early teens, and late teens. Heathcliff and Cathy are approximately the same age. Cathy dies giving birth to little Cathy when she is only 19. Yet Olivier was 32 and Oberon 28 when the film was released, and they play Cathy and Heathcliff for the early/late teen parts. The iconic photo of them on the moors shows two adults, rather then the two approximately 15 year olds. The introduction to the Oxford World’s Classic edition of WH I read says that the scene it depicts isn’t in the book. I differ and argue that it does depict from the book, only with actors so much older that it skews the effect.

Here’s what didn’t work for me, things that tend to coincide with things that depart from the book. The actors in general were older than in the book, especially Lockwood (who is supposed to be a young city dandy) and Nellie (supposed to be the same age as Hindley). The movie retreats from the gruesome, violent image of Lockwood dragging the ghost’s wrist over broken glass, which I think helps set up the story as a ghost and horror tale as well as a love story. Heathcliff before he runs away is handsome and well-spoken, barely scruffed up.

What did work: I liked that they used the framing device of Lockwood and Nellie, and don’t mind that they omitted the second generation. Though it’s necessary to the book, a movie two hours or less has sacrifices to make, and if you’re only going to tell the story of Cathy and Heathcliff, then do it and do it well. To contrast, I felt the 1992 Kosminky adaptation with Binoche and Fiennes tried to cram too much in.

Olivier when he returns as Heathcliff is mesmerizing and handsome and compelling. I liked Oberon’s haughty spirit and ferocity as Cathy. This may have been because she despised Olivier. According to the IMDB trivia:

Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier apparently detested each other. Legend has it that when William Wyler yelled “Cut!” after a particularly romantic scene, Oberon shouted back to her director about her co-star “Tell him to stop spitting at me!”

I also liked Niven as Edgar Linton. I thought he was both effete yet handsome and strong enough of an actor to carry off what is often a thankless role.

The more adaptations I watch, the more I like this one. It’s not perfect, none of them are, but it’s reasonably faithful to part of the book especially the wild spirit of it, the acting is strong, the look is distinct, and in general it’s a enjoyable and well-made film to watch.

For more Wuthering Heights goodness, including a good compare/contrast of many of the adaptations, visit The Readers Guide to Wuthering Heights UK.

And for all the Bronte news you can shake a stick at, visit Bronte Blog.

My book group Gods & Monsters is discussing Wuthering Heights this Sunday. In preparation for it, I’ve re-read the book and gathered all the adaptations that I can get, streaming or from the library. Last year I did the same for Jane Eyre, and finally blogged about the seven adaptations I watched.

Wuthering Heights, a more complex narrative, has even more adaptations! There have been eleven major ones, of which I’m hoping to watch nine, because two are proving problematic.

The 1953 film, Abismos de Pasion directed by Luis Bunuel, is not available on DVD in my library system or my usual streaming options. Two of Six sections of it are available on Youtube, but in Spanish without subtitles. Given how well I know the book, watching probably wouldn’t be a problem, but for now, given there are nine other adaptations easier to watch, that feels like a bridge too far. At least one writer/reviewer out there favors the Bunuel, but I wonder if that’s affectation and/or knowing that others can’t quibble because it’s so hard to find.

The 1978 miniseries with Ken Hutchinson as Heathcliff and Kay Adshead as Cathy 1, was hard to find, but I used some of my librarian connections to procure a copy of the DVD from Chicago instead of buying it from amazon. When I went to watch it last night, it’s not coded for the US, so I may not be able to watch it. Given that it’s over 4 hours, I can’t say I’m devastated, but still.

I’ll try to post one by one about each movie, labeling them with year and Cathy/Heathcliff actors and then do a gathering post at the end.

I know Steve, so I’m biased, but as I did with Carrie Mesrobian’s Sex and Violence (the books are both published by Carolrhoda Lab), I very much liked and admired his book Brooklyn Burning.

Our narrator is Kid, who hops back and forth between last summer and this one. Kid, whose gender is never spelled out as is true for some other characters in the book, had a crush last year on Felix, and something bad happened. Earlier in the present year, a fire destroyed a warehouse, and the police suspect Kid did it. As Kid meets Scout, the two summers intertwine as we learn why Kid began living on the street and what really happened to Felix, and with the fire.

Then I looked up. I didn’t notice that your ears stick out, just a little, so you look like a pixie sometimes, or an elf. I didn’t notice that the corners of you mouth always seem like they’re trying to smile, while the rest of your mouth wants to pout. I didn’t notice the little bump on your nose, near the bridge but slightly to the right-the bump I’d trace with my finger over and over, not soon enough. I didn’t notice your long hands and rough finger-tips, or the dozens-is it hundreds?-of bracelets on your left wrist, made of busted guitar strings.

I noticed your eyes, because they looked wet; maybe it was a trick of the light-the fluorescent and neon lights falling over your face from the bodega next door. But I didn’t think about love, and I didn’t see right down to your heart. But I must have stared-did I?-because there was your spirit, right there before me, and when you found my eyes I knew I’d pulled that spirit back from someplace amazing, not Greenpoint, not the summer sidewalk in front of Fish’s bar, smelling of old alcohol and piss.

But it must have been a trick of the light, because when you stood up, you were smiling, and your bright eyes looked alive and right there, with me, on Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, Earth.

This is a love letter to Brooklyn while also being a gender-open love story. I really enjoyed meeting Kid’s family of choice over the book, too.

I know the author, so I’m biased, but I really did both like and admire Carrie Mesrobian’s first novel, Sex and Violence.

Evan is 17 and something of a pick-up artist as he moves around the country with his professor dad. At a boarding school in the south, he starts fooling around with a girl on the sly. When some of the guys find out about it, they beat him badly, making him question his former coping methods.

… I believe strongly in condoms. They avert babies and disease. They make you seem responsible, not slutty. They make the girl relax too, because you’re taking care of the risky part. Like you’re a professional. Roll it on, squeeze the tip, turn back to her, ready, set go. Like I’d just done a little disappearing act on myself and became something confident and wonderful. You can’t see through my latex disguise! You will love this so let’s get down! You don’t want to know how many times this worked in my favor.

God I feel like a fucking asshole sometimes. All the time, really.

His dad moves them both up to a lakeside community in Minnesota, and Evan has to figure out something new: how to make friends.

The book centers on Evan’s trauma, but includes many other aspects like work, figuring out his father, family history, and living in a small community. Together, these make for a satisfyingly complex read as Evan tries to get his act together. The book itself is also a lovely object, a good size for reading, with the cover image of water repeated on certain pages inside, as is a tiled pattern, a reference to Evan’s first attack.

I CANNOT believe I didn’t blog about all the Jane Eyre adaptations I watched a year ago when I read Jane Eyre for my book group Gods & Monsters. I wrote about all the Jane-related book reading I did here and thought I wrote about the movies. In fact, I so don’t believe it I need to go check again…

OMG what kind of blogger am I that I watched seven (7!) adaptations of Jane Eyre last year and never wrote to tell you about them? Well, I better get started. Alas, the binge watching of seven adaptations and the passage of a year haven’t left me with sparkling details but I’ll do my best. If I had it to do again, I’d make notes as I went comparing things like the falling-off-the-horse scene, the burning bed scene, the attic scene, Pilot the dog, the relative ages and attractiveness of the characters (Joan Fontaine and Susannah York were ridiculous as Jane, both too pretty and too old). I wish I could remember which Jane was whiny, which pouty, which weepy, etc. This really does beg for a spreadsheet. Or is that TOO much nerdish obsessing? Reader, with Jane Eyre, is there such a thing?

1943: screenplay by John Houseman and Aldous Huxley, starring Orson Welles (Mr. Rochester), Joan Fontaine (Jane), Agnes Moorehead (Mrs. Reed), and a VERY FAMOUS ACTRESS in her first, uncredited role. This one is entertaining to see Welles chew scenery and barely fall from his horse at all, but Fontaine is a disappointingly wimpy Jane.

1970: starring George C. Scott and Susannah York. Music by John Williams, which was painful to listen to. Guess he needed those next 7 years to become awesome for Star Wars. York way too old and glam to play Jane, but George C was surprisingly decent, probably the least conventionally handsome of all the Rochesters. If I remember correctly, he was also the most physically scarred at the end–I think he was missing a hand. Some Rochesters barely looked any different.

1983: 6 hours! with Zelah Clarke and Timothy Dalton. Zelah had the right look, but was too old for the part, and she was on the wimpy side. My favorite part was the scene after the almost wedding where she leaves her bedroom and Rochester is in the doorway. This adaptation was long and unthrilling in other ways, but that particular scene was outstandingly hot. Again, sorry, can’t recall, but if any of them had Rochester cross dressing as the gypsy, it was this one. Not sure it did, though.

1996: directed by Franco Zeffirelli, starring William Hurt (Mr. Rochester), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Jane). I liked Gainsbourg as Jane, but detested Hurt as Rochester; he’s blond and American and just wrong.

1997: Ciarán Hinds and Samantha Morton. The age difference, and Hinds not being conventionally handsome, and Morton as young and plain all worked in this one but I remember little of it. Hinds might have been the most bi-polar of the Rochesters.

2006: 4 hour BBC miniseries of Ruth Wilson (currently in The Affair) and Toby Stephens (son of Maggie Smith!). A solid production, but the most memorable part of it for me was the ending: there was a huge family picture, with a miniature painting of St. John added like they do in reunion photos, plus Grace Poole was shown holding the baby. They redeemed surly drunk Grace Poole!

2011: directed by Cary Fukunaga, starring Mia Wasikowska (Jane Eyre), Michael Fassbender (Rochester) and Judi Dench as (Mrs. Fairfax). This was my favorite. Fassbender might be too handsome for Rochester, but he got the crazy just right. Wasikowska was pale and slight and young and very like Jane: strong willed and impressive. This was perhaps the only one that didn’t open with Jane as a girl, but rather with her wandering the moors, then jumps around in time. I didn’t care for Jamie Bell as St. John–not handsome enough, and very easy to resist in this version.

So that was the second part of last year’s Vast Eyre-Bender (pun courtesy of friend Vince). 7 adaptations and about 20 hours.

This year, the book group is reading Wuthering Heights for November. And I’ve been nerdishly obsessing about adaptations. Guess how many are possible to lay hands on? ELEVEN.

The list goes to ELEVEN.

Not sure I’ve got that kind of stamina. The discussion’s on 11/30/14. We’ll see.

The 4th volume of the current Wonder Woman series, War, continues strongly. It’s full of gods and monsters, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. This volume spans worlds and mythologies jumping from Olympus to Earth to New Genesis. There’s a series of faceoffs with the Big Bad, the Firstborn, and an impressive ending that makes me eager for the next set of stories. Good story, good art, one of my favorite comics right now, and one of the few superhero books I read (along with Marvel’s Hawkeye.) If you want to know where to start, go to Volume 1 of the current run: Blood.

Finder: Third World by Carla Speed McNeil is in full color, and it’s BEAUTIFUL. I love this series, and will soon have been reading it for decades. This one’s a series of connected short stories about Jaeger, and we get more tantalizing bits about his past. Want to know where to start? Talisman is a great place.

The Ulysses group readalong is happening! Read and tweet from February to Bloomsday (June 16) 2015, and I’ll be blogging about it here.

We’ll tweet with the hashtag #TCUlysses

Twin Cities readers can celebrate when we’re done with a meetup at Anchor Fish and Chips. (I wouldn’t be opposed to weekly meetings there, either, though my cholesterol might.)

2/9/15 Start Ulysses which has 18 parts of various lengths

2/16/15 discuss and tweet sections 1, 2= 32 pp
2/23/15 discuss and tweet sections 3, 4=29 pp
3/2/15 discuss and tweet sections 5, 6=40 pp
3/9/15 discuss and tweet section 7=29pp
3/16/15 discuss and tweet section 8=28pp
3/23/15 discuss and tweet section 9=30pp
3/30 section 10=31 pp
4/6 section 11=31pp
4/13 section 12=45pp
4/20 section 13=31pp
4/27 section 14=37pp

5/4-5/18/15 read, then discuss and tweet section 15 (150 pages in my ed.)

5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16=44pp

6/1-6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17 (65 pp in my edition)

6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18=37pp

6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Group meetup and celebration to follow at the Anchor Fish & Chips in NE Minneapolis.

I’ve never even attempted this behemoth–too intimidating. But I’m raring to give it a go, and looking forward to the support of a group while reading!

A writing friend recommended Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever to me after she read something I’d written that was in the same style.

I bet my writer friends can relate to when you read something by someone really good, realize you’ll never be that good, and resist the urge to crawl into bed and never write again. That’s kind of the feeling I had while reading Robison’s book, which has subtitles, and beautiful writing, and is disjointed but works as a whole, and is overall damn impressive and damn humbling.

Our unreliable narrator is Money, a Hollywood screenwriter who has several exes, a boyfriend named Dix who lives in New Orleans, two adult children who have significant troubles, and much, much more. Money is on the hook to write a script about Bigfoot, and things aren’t going well, at work or at home.

You Can Fly But Your Body Can’t

My first seat was in first class between Penny and Belinda. Before I poured Rémy Martin down my throat and had to come see what the folks back here think of things.

316

‘Cool out, you know, I didn’t mean it, I don’t really hate you,’ I hear someone say.
While, over the intercom, the pilot jabbers. He’s explaining that some dysfunction, once we’re on the ground, can be easily fixed with a pin. I don’t know, at that point, how much any of us will care. Maybe I’m drunk, but seems like they could give the plane to the Arabs once we’ve all made our connecting flights.

317

The beer nuts just served to me in a cello packet are the most delicious food I’ve ever tasted in my life. Back at Dallas-Fort Worth I put an Otis Redding CD into my player and I doubt I’ll ever have a reason to take it out. Through the window, trigonometry, under a silky pink sky.

This is a book I never would have found without a friend’s recommendation, and I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but most definitely to writer friends and short-story fans.

And because I don’t have enough book groups, HA!, I am going to another one tonight with my elder, 11yo Drake to discuss Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo.

(Let’s see: Books and Bars, my women’s book group, Gods & Monsters, Beer and Comics, Book Scouts (a twitter group, we’ll be reading Ulysses and Infinite Jest next year), Sandman readalong that starts next month and this new one, which is parent/child. Yep, 7 reading groups. INSANE.)

Flora and Ulysses is Kate DiCamillo’s the author’s second Newbery Award winning book; the first was The Tale of Despereaux. The subtitle is “The Illuminated Adventures” and points to the nostalgic, timeless era the book is set in. It’s a mix of chapters, illustrations, and comic-book storytelling. A squirrel encounters a voracious all-terrain vacuum cleaner, and is unexpectedly changed. Flora, who loves comic books, names the squirrel Ulysses and hopes he will fight villains. Instead, the squirrel’s superpowers are less showy: he writes poetry. Oh, all right, he can also fly.

Flora is a self-proclaimed cynic but Ulysses’ transformation begins to turn that around. She is a fan of a fictional comic book Incandesto!, and often quotes from it:

Holy unanticipated occurrences!

which is a lovely call back to Golden Age comics. In many ways, this reminded me of a middle-grade version of Michael Chabon’s love letter to that era, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Flora and Ulysses often made me laugh, but like Kate’s other books, it is also consistently sad. Flora’s parents are divorced, her mother is a romance writer who discourages Flora from reading comic books, her father is lonely, sad, and socially inept, a boy she meets is temporarily blind and has been banished from his home, Flora’s mother wants to literally kill Ulysses.

There are many reviews on Good Reads that complain about these aspects of the book, that they’re negative, not realistic, don’t send the right message, or aren’t clear enough in their story.

DiCamillo’s books for older readers have always contained sad truths about the relationship between children and adults. She is open in her author talks about how she includes this in her books so as not to pretend to children that ugliness and difficulty don’t exist.

What I appreciated about Flora and Ulysses, in addition to how it made me laugh, was how it was about difficult ideas, like how villains aren’t as obvious as they are in real life, how people we love can act villainous sometimes, and what a risk it is to love others. The book contains difficult ideas that are true, but also wondrous and lovely things that are true, all wrapped in a story with clever phrases and repetition to remind the reader that we’re in a story, not real life. There is a mythic, fairy-tale element to the story that I think the people who criticize it for not being realistic are, perhaps, missing.