Ralph Fiennes IS Heathcliff !!!

Thank you for saying what I've been trying to tell people for ages:

Wuthering Heights is NOT a romance. It's certainly not in the conventional, modern sense. It CAN'T be. Its characters are too flawed and untrustworthy, its settings and events are too dire and bleak, and that ending! Wow...

It's a "romance" about very unromantic people. People can love what Catherine and Heathcliff have at their peril. I think most who read this novel, though, and can finish (not just those who throw the book at a wall, give up, and go back to Jane Eyre) are at least wise enough to admire what they have without wanting exactly what they have. That would be true madness.

Catherine and Hareton are the only remotely bright lights in that whole dark mess. Everyone else is self-important, mad, selfish, weak-willed, all too willing to harm or betray others for their own gain, and are out of touch with reality.

But, yeah, I don't think there's been a single accurate film or TV adaptation, yet.

This is the Happy House
We're happy here, in the Happy House...

Ok, let me repeat the message that I wrote on another thread:

I don't think Heathcliff is a psychopath. He truly behaves like a sociopath but he starts to do so only when he learns that his soul mate is planning to betray their love and surrender to a more conventional life. Cathy was the only person that understood him and was kind to him, apart from her deceased father, and she's obviously the only one he cares for on this earth. So this is what triggers off the tragedy: it's only when he learns that Cathy is willing to sacrifice their love in order to do what was expected from her that he starts to plan his revenge. Heathcliff's revenge on Cathy's brother is only logical, since he deprived him of every right when he was a child, making him thus unable to be a good match for Cathy socially speaking. And of course later on he decides to take revenge on the Lintons for the obvious reasons.

By the way, I don't think Cathy is a sociopath either, as some people said on other threads, she's just someone who surrenders to social pressures and at some point tries to deceive herself into thinking that it's possible to conciliate a conventional life with her love for her soul mate... she's in fact quite naive and this is what leads her towards disaster. Concerning their love for each other, yes, I do agree that it's a very unhealthy and obssesive one, but I think this is only because they're trapped in a really restrictive conventional world who wouldn't let them be (look at Nelly for instance, she's always messing things up, by telling things she shouldn't tell anyone and viceversa). Both of them are misfits, and Cathy's decision to betray her own nature is what makes her become a clinical case in the end. She's unhappy and miserable since she doesn't belong in the Lintons!

As I said before, I can't see Heathcliff as as psycopath either. It's true that he's abusive and extremely cruel to people, however, at some point in the book you can see some events from his own viewpoint and it's pretty evident to me that most of the time he's not even interested in what's going on around him because his only preoccupation is Cathy and her ghost. I mean, it's true that he keeps on being mean to everyone, since he uses them as tools to achieve his goals, however I find that he kind of loses his mind after Cathy's death to the point that most of the time he's not even aware of what people are saying or doing around thim. And this is not typical of a psychopath, on the contrary, they do pay attention to people in order to make them suffer as much as possible.

Oh definitely, the perfect actor to portray Heathcliff should be a Romany actor (and no, when I say Romany, I don't mean someone specifically from Romania. Romany is the proper name for someone of Gypsy background).




I am Judge! Jury! and Executioner!