#292
The briefest of "Wuthering Heights" takes
I was going to write a little essay about how my high school building no longer exists (as a school anyway, the building is being sold, though it recently flooded due to burst pipes so…who knows) and about the spaces in that building that actually meant something to me, but it wasn’t really working. I’ll save it for another time. As a spoiler, I’ll tell you that one space I was not very attached to was the hallway behind the main gym, aka The Pit, where until my sophomore year students could smoke indoors. America in the late 80s was wild! We were also allowed to leave the building for lunch, which mainly meant piling eight people into a Dodge Spirit and breaking the speed limit to stand in line at Taco Bell.
Anyway, I am sitting here tip tapping on my keyboard, long past my self-imposed deadline to send this newsletter, which was noon Wednesday. I took a break to shower and put on grown-up clothes for a Teams interview, but it got rescheduled. The dogs are having an early-afternoon version of Independent Rest and are waiting impatiently for me to serve them luncheon, my husband is on a work call, and the most recent three or four inches of snow is melting sadly and unevenly outside. I don’t know what the winter equivalent of dog days of summer are, but verily, we are in them.
I went to see “Wuthering Heights” with my friend Camilla earlier this week, and, devastating news for its haters, I didn’t not like it. There were definitely a few times we burst out laughing when we shouldn’t have, mostly having to do with Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff licking stuff (the wall, Margot Robbie’s face…he’s very tongue-forward in a way that is not hot). I have to imagine this was supposed to evoke horniness but instead it evoked this:
I don’t disagree with the film’s many, many, many critics but as I told my friend Christine, people who don’t know anything about the book or are not very attached to the book will probably like it fine. People who do not care much for Emerald Fennell’s work will probably not like it, although I generally don’t and I do not regret seeing it.
If you watched Poldark, there are a lot of similar “woman walking sadly across the moors, singing about her man gone missing at sea and her wee bairn who has been carried off by diphtheria” type vibes. So if you like that sort of thing, you have a lot to look forward to. Also, for two people constrained by social class and the manners and mores of the day, the star-crossed lovers seem to find an awful lot of time – not to mention empty carriages, leafy bowers, and barn lofts – in which to bone. I know! Suspension of disbelief. But it is jarring given that at one point Nelly huffs that Cathy cannot just go and visit Mr. Linton, what is she, a common prostitute??!?!
Finally, no offense to Alison Oliver’s artistic choices but if you can see Isabella Linton in this movie and not ALSO see Dawn Wiener, you’re a better person than I am.
Today I cleaned out our guest room closet, which was not really that bad, just full of random shit that actually belongs in other closets elsewhere in the house. I tossed a great many wire coat hangers and dry cleaning bags and went through a box of things my parents brought me from their house, including a very weird college scrapbook in which I’d saved things like a TGIFriday’s receipt from 1993 (fettucine alfredo and a soda, $8.19 plus tip) (truly, what sort of psychopath orders fettucine alfredo at TGIFriday’s???) and the map to a fraternity homecoming party that I can’t remember whether or not I went to.
I guess young people send texts about this stuff now, but in the early-to-mid 1990s you simply rolled up to Kinko’s and made a bunch of copies about your beer bash:
First off the bit about not being able to “party at our own house” is true in a sense, but, I lived across the street from that house my senior year and definitely went to parties there. For reasons having to do with who actually owned Greek houses and whether or not they were on campus, fraternities and sororities were not supposed to have boisterous parties in them, but in practice this just meant nobody was allowed to drink or turn the lights on in the first floor. Us college-educated true geniuses were drinking in the basement, duh.