I recently rewatched Andrea Arnold's hypnotic and grindingly heartbreaking adaptation of Emily Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights'. It is so difficult to capture intense desire and intense love in cinema without some kind of verbal or dramatic exposition of a character's inner state. Yet, in '
Wuthering Heights', the cinematography of Robbie Ryan and Arnold's intimate visual storytelling takes us into the wide eyed world of a deep, dizzying and ultimately bitter state of love and desire.
What makes the film and, of course, the original novel extraordinary, is the duration of this state. The intense blinding experience of first love is drawn out over decades. The childlike secrecy of a new love becomes the obsessive love of men and women torn apart, internally and externally, both by the infinite limits of their own love and the impossibility of this love in a world defined by limitations.
I love this cinematic meeting point of the absolute freedom of love and desire and the total destruction implicit in such an impossible emotional state. We all experience it. Sometimes it enslaves us, sometimes it empowers us. We are either invincible or on our knees. Soaring or paralysed. It is
the stuff of life and
the stuff of art.
In "Wuthering Heights", Cathy says: "My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of
little visible delight, but necessary… I am Heathcliff." In Arnold's film she literally licks his wounds and scars, she pushes his face into the mud with her boot and she adores him with every glance. She is inside him. He is inside her. It is madness. Torture. It is love and sex and desire at once. The muscular haunches of a horse. The pages of a book. An insect on the cold muddy stones. Cruelty. Transcendence. It is brutal and beautiful, physical and elemental, raw and delicate and impossible to resist and impossible to withstand.
And in thinking of this film, and in thinking of sex and desire and love and madness and cinema and literature as I usually am, I was reminded of these words spoken by everyone's favourite mad Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek:
"I'm extremely romantic here. You know what is my fear? This postmodern,
permissive, pragmatic etiquette towards sex. It's horrible. They claim
sex is healthy; it's good for the heart, for blood circulation, it
relaxes you. They even go into how kissing is also good because it
develops the muscles here – this is horrible, my God!... It's
no longer that absolute passion. I like this idea of sex as part of
love, you know: 'I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck
you for ever.' There is something nice, transcendent, about it. I remain
incurably romantic."
For me, for all the madness I know love and desire induces, endures and entices, I know that I need the films of my life to be more "Wuthering Heights" and less of "The Notebook". More mothers sold into slavery and less sanitised physicality. So, from me: a gentle and humble bow to Andrea Arnold and her beautiful films.
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