The Romantasification of the Western Canon
On Wuthering Heights (2026), Brideshead Revisited (2008), and Hamnet (2025).
It’s over. The Western Canon is cooked. People simply do not read “the classics.” As I discussed in “Hypotheses Formed After Reading 1,000 Goodreads Reviews,” men have largely abandoned reading altogether, and the “reading public” now mostly consists of lady-gooners with an insatiable lust for Romantasy. Hamlet is dull if you imagine the Dark Prince conventionally (i.e. as straight, white, and male), but thankfully the reading experience greatly improves once you realize he’s actually a bratty twink. So go ahead: ship “Hamratio” to your heart’s content (and “Hamaertes” too, if you’re really spicy). Highbrow romantasy — much beloved by BookTok — is actively rewriting our collective understanding of great literature. The awkward, archaic stories of the Great Conversation are being displaced by sleek para-erotica which touch on the themes of human life that really matter (e.g. trauma, consent, and being a little witchy). The Song of Achilles simply mogs the Iliad1.
Nowhere is this cultural devolution more obvious than in the cinema. The film industry has always shamelessly plundered classic literature, but recent efforts at “adaptation” have been particularly repugnant. Tropes from romantasy are now being imported en masse into literary cinema, displacing everything challenging. At this point, it wouldn’t be beyond the pale to adapt The Song of Achilles for the screen and simply call it the Iliad.
Wuthering Heights is one of the nastiest novels ever written. It is an anti-romance. Love is not redemptive, and the capacity for love is depicted as coequal to the capacity for cruelty. You will not enjoy reading the novel if you expect anyone to get any better. I think Wuthering Heights is best enjoyed after reviewing the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld:
1: What we term virtue is often but a mass of various actions and divers interests, which fortune, or our own industry, manage to arrange; and it is not always from valour or from chastity that men are brave, and women chaste.
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4: Self love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world.
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11: Passions often produce their contraries: avarice sometimes leads to prodigality, and prodigality to avarice; we are often obstinate through weakness and daring though timidity.
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31: If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.
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86: Our distrust of another justifies his deceit.
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90: In the intercourse of life, we please more by our faults than by our good qualities.
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146: Usually we only praise to be praised.
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241: Flirtation is at the bottom of woman’s nature, although all do not practise it, some being restrained by fear, others by sense.
These are the psychological laws regulating the novel. Emily Brontë tips every paragraph with poison. Every time a character betrays a glimpse of charity, kindness, or spiritual wisdom, Brontë swiftly orients them back to elemental savagery. Take for instance these sublime thoughts of Catherine Earnshaw’s, which she unloads on her maid Nelly:
“If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable.”
“Because you are not fit to go there,” I answered. “All sinners would be miserable in heaven.”
“But it is not for that. I dreamt once that I was there.”
“I tell you I won’t hearken to your dreams, Miss Catherine! I’ll go to bed,” I interrupted again.
She laughed, and held me down; for I made a motion to leave my chair.
“This is nothing,” cried she: “I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”
This would be deeply touching if it weren’t immediately followed up with self-serving and delusional nonsense:
“…Edgar must shake off his antipathy, and tolerate him, at least. He will, when he learns my true feelings towards him. Nelly, I see now you think me a selfish wretch; but did it never strike you that if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars? whereas, if I marry Linton I can aid Heathcliff to rise, and place him out of my brother’s power.”
“With your husband’s money, Miss Catherine?” I asked. “You’ll find him not so pliable as you calculate upon: and, though I’m hardly a judge, I think that’s the worst motive you’ve given yet for being the wife of young Linton.”
“It is not,” retorted she; “it is the best! The others were the satisfaction of my whims: and for Edgar’s sake, too, to satisfy him. This is for the sake of one who comprehends in his person my feelings to Edgar and myself…”
You may get baited by Catherine’s passion into being swept up in a romantic mood, but reading the novel in full will definitively cure you of that. Nelly will go on to witness Isabella Linton and young Cathy Linton describe their own infatuations (with Heathcliff and Linton Heathcliff respectively) in terms just as strong and just as delulu. These girls are in love for love’s sake. Often they completely misunderstand whom — and what — they are attempting to love (clearly illustrating another witticism from La Rochefoucauld: “259: The pleasure of love is in loving, we are happier in the passion we feel than in that we inspire”). For instance, here is a scene where Catherine (here, “Mrs. Linton”) exposes both her own viciousness and the naivete of Isabella Linton, who finds herself infatuated with Heathcliff:
“You are an impertinent little monkey!” exclaimed Mrs. Linton, in surprise. “But I’ll not believe this idiocy! It is impossible that you can covet the admiration of Heathcliff — that you consider him an agreeable person! I hope I have misunderstood you, Isabella?”
“No, you have not,” said the infatuated girl. “I love him more than ever you loved Edgar, and he might love me, if you would let him!”
“I wouldn’t be you for a kingdom, then!” Catherine declared, emphatically: and she seemed to speak sincerely. “Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is: an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I’d as soon put that little canary into the park on a winter’s day, as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He’s not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him, ‘Let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them;’ I say, ‘Let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged:’ and he’d crush you like a sparrow’s egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge. I know he couldn’t love a Linton; and yet he’d be quite capable of marrying your fortune and expectations: avarice is growing with him a besetting sin. There’s my picture: and I’m his friend—so much so, that had he thought seriously to catch you, I should, perhaps, have held my tongue, and let you fall into his trap.”
Miss Linton regarded her sister-in-law with indignation.
“For shame! for shame!” she repeated, angrily. “You are worse than twenty foes, you poisonous friend!”
Isabella will soon find herself running away from Wuthering Heights, with Heathcliff slicing her ear open on the way out with a knife thrown at her head.
A generation later, Cathy Linton will convince herself she is in love after trading trashy love letters with Linton Heathcliff (Heathcliff’s biological son). This episode also reveals the malice of Nelly, who takes schoolmarmish and sadistic pleasure in seeing the sinners around her falter:
[Cathy] sprang at her precious epistles, but I held them above my head; and then she poured out further frantic entreaties that I would burn them — do anything rather than show them. And being really fully as much inclined to laugh as scold — for I esteemed it all girlish vanity — I at length relented in a measure, and asked, — “If I consent to burn them, will you promise faithfully neither to send nor receive a letter again, nor a book (for I perceive you have sent him books), nor locks of hair, nor rings, nor playthings?”
Brontë’s talent for expressing cruelty is unparalleled. To me, these are the resonant images of Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff’s dogs encircling and gnashing at Mr. Lockwood without provocation; Heathcliff smashing his head open on a tree trunk after Catherine dies; an impoverished Hindley Earnshaw wielding a pistol-knife, probing the lock on Heathcliff’s bedroom every night to assay the chance for murder; the sickly and pathetic Linton Heathcliff lapping up milk while mocking his cousin Hareton for his enforced illiteracy; the grotesque, wolflike grin on Heathcliff’s corpse, mocking God; a weeping Hareton kissing Heathcliff’s cadaver.
I love this novel intensely. Its characters are bizarre pseudo-humans who could only have come from the mind of a true misanthrope. What Heathcliff is for many teenage girls, Emily Brontë is for me. She compared unfavorably to her gentler sisters. Everyone she met hated her, since she almost always spoke in monosyllables, preferred the company of dogs to humans, and has a vestigial sense of humor. It is popular now to diagnose her with autism. A fellow student once said:
I simply disliked her from the first; her tallish, ungainly, ill-dressed figure ... always answering our jokes with 'I wish to be as God made me'.
Irritating. She was improbably gothic (it’s possible she died of tuberculosis contracted from tainted water runoff from a graveyard). I could have fixed her.
She was universally misunderstood during her life, and now her work is consistently misrepresented. This, frankly, offends me. Most film adaptations of Wuthering Heights are trash. They try to extract a clean romance out of the anti-romance. This is typically achieved by removing two-thirds of the novel: Lockwood, Hareton Earnshaw, Cathy Earnshaw, Linton Heathcliff all get the chop. Those characters and their storylines appeal poorly to the erotic narcissist within us who demands to see Catherine and Heathcliff huffing and pawing at each other on the moors.
This sad tradition has reached its apotheosis in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (2026), which is the 21st century’s worst film. From hereon out, we will refer to this product as “Emerald Fennell’s Movie”, or “EFM” for short. This is EFM:
Pathos is when you’ve been a naughty slut who needs to be punished. Real Heathcliff came close to beating this girl to death; EFM Heathcliff is a consent-respecter who owns alotta chains and harnesses, who could be tempted into putting you in them ;). Rape has been replaced with rape-play.
Emerald Fennell said she wanted to "recreate the feeling of a teenage girl reading this book for the first time." Apparently, when teenage girls read Wuthering Heights for the first time they feel Catherine Earnshaw explosively jacking her shit on a windy heath and Heathcliff interrupting her to suck the pussy juice off her fingers.
Emerald Fennell loves a squelch. EFM is very wet. There are many shots of: Heathcliff fingering egg yolks, Cathy fingering a fish, sourdough being slapped around, slugs writhing, dogs shitting, and vomit being sopped up with tiny rags. It’s sort of deep, because if you really think about it, learning to love your body means seeing the grotesque and the erotic as one and the same. EFM front loads this theme hard: the movie opens with the sound of a man squeaking and moaning (curious); it turns out, the man isn’t cooming, he’s actually being hanged in the town square in front of hundreds of people; he dies with an erection (thought-provoking); a group of boys laugh at the man’s erection; a nun scolds them, and then immediately starts cumming hands-free from watching the man die (wow); finally, a redheaded theater-kid burlesque-orgy-type fellow stomps onto the gallows and shouts, “It’s fooking hanging day!!”; everyone screams and claps and starts doing hand-stuff with each other (they were just like us back then fr).
EFM proceeds to go from strength to strength. It takes about seventy minutes for a single scene or line from Wuthering Heights to appear. In fact, there are almost no scenes in the film which correspond to anything in the novel (which is good, because the source material is well-known for being weird and boring). Many improvements are made to streamline the story: Hindley Earnshaw is removed and Edgar Linton is turned into a 100% certified nice guy (this is very elegant because it removes all the bullying from Heathcliff’s childhood, resulting in EFM Heathcliff being quite a nice fella who never thinks to usurp and destroy the estates of the Earnshaws and the Lintons); Isabella Linton is turned into a toddler-girl who loves dolls and wearing glasses for comic-relief purposes; Joseph is hot and rails Zillah doggystyle while she bites down on a horse bit (nice); Catherine marries into the Linton family and moves to Thrushcross Grange, which has been turned into a candyland diorama world suffused with a lot of elusive, Lynchian imagery (like how the wallpaper resembles Catherine’s skin); Heathcliff leaves and comes back a year later looking very hot with a metal tooth in his mouth; there’s a ten-minute montage of Heathcliff munching on Catherine’s Georgian box in a variety of funny locations; Isabella elopes with Heathcliff and they do the dog-stuff I talked about earlier, but it turns out it’s all part of a bizarre stratagem they cooked up together to win back Catherine’s affection; Catherine has a miscarriage (emotional); Catherine dies (bummer). The end.
I’ve been told that the above goonanigans (stumbling on someone jilling in a field, etc.) are certified Romance Lit Tropes, and that such tropes appear because they Work, and that therefore EFM is a good and interesting movie. I’ve also received the following objection: do I really think people aren’t allowed to reinterpret literature in new and challenging ways? My answer is: Yes. Stop that. Stop interpreting classics and go away. Do your Oscar-bait in a different way, and find different source material to jerk it to. Being an Emily-Brontë-understander is a load-bearing component of my sexual psychology, and you’re ruining it for me, Emerald Fennell.
I understand that and how and why this movie is constructed to interface with female sexual fantasies (I have diligently reviewed all the relevant Aella-data). It is hard to say what I need to say here without sounding like I hate women, but: ladies, sometimes your feelings are cringe, shallow, and retarded, and you need to both think and feel more deeply. Wuthering Heights is a frustrating, baffling, and overwhelmingly soulful work of human excellence, and it is an affront to your dignity to allow it to be usurped by slop.
Evelyn Waugh (1903 - 1966) was quite a vicious individual. His son Auberon told a now well-known story about how in 1946 the British government issued one banana to every child in the country, and he and his sisters (who had never tasted this exotic treat) were made to sit down and watch their father consume all three of their bananas covered in similarly-scarce sugar and heavy cream. It’s a shame we can’t consign such a person to the trash bin of history, for Waugh was one of the funniest writers who ever lived. Decline and Fall (1928) is a superlative comic novel — though a dismal and cartoon one. Brideshead Revisited (1945), by contrast, is perfection: equal parts lush, humane, and vicious. Brideshead is an apologia for everything beautiful:
Oxford, in those days, was a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days — such as that day — when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth.
It is a novel suffused with homoeroticism: the agnostic Charles Ryder and the doomed Catholic Sebastian Flyte sunbathe together nude; they allow Anthony Blanche (the dark prince of homo-aesthetes) to attempt to seduce them; Charles is accused by his father of being lost to Queer street (“Let us say you are in Queer Street and leave it at that”); he’s warned by Cara of the dangers of carrying on too long with Sebastian (“I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too long.”); and most importantly, invisible to the readers, these two lovers indulge in many underspecified activities with “naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins.” Sounds pretty gay to me. And yet, as with Yukio Mishima, whose widow claimed that her husband was just a really fun, really straight guy who loved to party, there is a long line of Jesuitical readers of Brideshead who insist that Charles and Sebastian’s friendship was merely “Platonic.” If you can believe that, you can believe anything.
Brideshead is a Catholic novel, often artlessly so. Its messaging is not subtle. Above all else, its theme is the Augustinian concept of “prevenient grace”, or the way God’s grace draws us to Him before we know how to cooperate with, or even recognize, it. God is the angler. Lady Marchmain attempts to teach her children this wisdom from the Sacred Tradition by reading G.K. Chesterton to them:
“…I wonder if you remember the story Mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk — I mean the bad evening. Father Brown said something like 'I caught him' (the thief) 'with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.’”
Prevenient grace operates on every major character in the novel. Sometimes the path to God is simple: Nanny Hawkins is so virtuous she can barely even perceive sin; Cordelia is naturally pious and is happy to spend her life running around Spain assisting the Francoists; the priests in the novel are simpletons who do their duty and spend the rest of their scant cognitive powers pondering cricket. Sometimes the path is orthodox: Lord Brideshead’s mind is naturally Jesuit-shaped, but he is forced to figure out how to live a righteous life outside the priesthood; Lady Marchmain, long-suffering but also self-victimizing, is called on to fix her ailing loved ones, but her doing so condemns her to the company of sycophants and spies. Sometimes the path is tortured and mysterious: it took Lord Marchmain a full lifetime of Byronic rebellion to become ready to ask God for forgiveness; and it took a novel’s worth of pain to get Charles Ryder to abandon his convenient agnosticism.
God set aside the greatest suffering for Sebastian. The loving, buoyant manchild is annihilated by alcohol — stuck full of barbed arrows “like a p-p-pin-cushion” — all so that in the end he can be reconstituted into a holy fool. Cordelia informs us what Sebastian is to become:
“Poor Sebastian!” I said. “It’s too pitiful. How will it end?”
“I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I’ve seen others like him, and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He’ll live on, half in, half out of the community, a familiar figure pottering round with his broom and his bunch of keys. He’ll be a great favourite with the old fathers, something of a joke to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking; he’ll disappear for two or three days every month or so, and they’ll all nod and smile and say in their various accents, ‘Old Sebastian’s on the spree again,’ and then he’ll come back dishevelled and shamefaced and be more devout for a day or two in the chapel. He’ll probably have little hiding places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and then on the sly. They’ll bring him forward to act as guide, whenever they have an English-speaking visitor; and he will be completely charming, so that before they go they’ll ask about him and perhaps be given a hint that he has high connections at home. If he lives long enough, generations of missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old character who was somehow part of the Hope of their student days, and remember him in their masses. He’ll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he’ll be found in the chapel at odd times and missed when he’s expected. Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he’ll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It’s not such a bad way of getting through one’s life.”
Only Anthony Blanche, the ultimate invert (whose poisonous gossip is never wrong in essence, by the way), is never called to God in any of these ways.
The source of greatest pathos in the novel is how people on different paths of prevenient grace attempt and fail to interfere with each other. Sebastian cannot be helped by Nanny Hawkins, nor his scheming mother, nor his pious siblings, nor Father Phipps, nor the loathsome Mr. Samgrass, and especially not his lover Charles Ryder, who thinks in his lazy, agnostic way that Sebastian’s dipsomania can be cured by some vague combination of the latest breakthroughs in addiction-science and a permissive regime of indulgent, friendly coddling. Sebastian attempts to revert to his childhood, and runs as hard as he can away from his family because he senses in their schemes a trace of God’s intention for him. But there is no shaking God. Charles and Sebastian contra mundum could have worked if all they were up against was the world, but Charles and Sebastian contra Deum had no chance of success.
Now, I find the novel’s piety overdone and excessively sentimental. Particularly so as we get to the second-half of the book, where readers are subjected to this sort of pious treacle:
“Can’t they even let him die in peace?”
“They mean something so different by ‘peace.’”
I join other atheist Brideshead-enjoyers in finding both the death-bed conversion scene and novel’s conclusion eye-rolling. George Orwell said it demonstrated that “[o]ne cannot really be Catholic and grown-up.” Christopher Hitchens expanded on this:
In at least two cases — [Waugh’s] support for the Croatian Fascist party during his wartime stint in the Balkans, and his animosity toward Jews — there was a direct connection between his spleen and his faith. And in at least two of the novels, Helena (which is based on the life of the early Christian empress of that name) and Brideshead, the narrative is made ridiculous by a sentimental and credulous approach to miracles or the supernatural. This is what Orwell meant by the incompatibility of faith with maturity.2
For the purposes of adaptation, however, it doesn’t matter how we atheists personally feel about these themes. They are part of Brideshead, and if you don’t want to take them seriously you shouldn’t adapt this fucking book. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop Julian Jarrold, director of Brideshead Revisited (2008). He removed all the Chestertonian irony from the story, and replaced it with queer-slop. The salvific logic of the novel has been inverted: Charles gets tired of being gay with Sebastian, chooses to be with his sister Julia Flyte, and in so doing causes Sebastian to destroy himself with alcohol (whereas in the novel, the causality goes overwhelmingly in the other direction). The blame for Sebastian’s demise is laid squarely at the feet of Religion. The film ends, moronically, not with Charles Ryder praying at Brideshead Chapel, but instead with him hesitating to put out its last candle. No Catholicism for Ryder! A sensible agnostic he shall remain.
Maybe some of this would have been tolerable had some of Waugh’s language been preserved. Unfortunately, Julian Jarrold scrapped nearly all of Waugh’s buoyant prose and replaced it with odious slop. There is almost no humor: Anthony Blanche is almost entirely cut; Ryder the Elder’s malicious trolling is cut, and the character is replaced wholesale with a doddering imposter who is depicted staring morosely into soup. The principle of replacing literature with romantasy babble is upheld:
A rather important part of Charles Ryder’s character is his being an insufferable snob, a young fogey with unfashionable tastes, a failed artist, an imitator. He is, however, capable of articulating his vision of beauty with wit and originality. Here is the real Ryder describing how living at Brideshead Castle taught him to love the baroque:
Since the days when, as a schoolboy, I used to bicycle round the neighbouring parishes, rubbing brasses and photographing fonts, I have nursed a love of architecture, but though in opinion I had made that easy leap, characteristic of my generation, from the puritanism of Ruskin to the puritanism of Roger Fry, my sentiments at heart were insular and mediaeval.
This was my conversion to the baroque. Here under that high and insolent dome, under those tricky ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring.
In the film, Ryder is hit with the midwit ray and consequently speaks exclusively in banalities:
“A camera is a mechanical device which records a moment in time, but not what that moment means, or the emotions that it evokes. Whereas a painting, however imperfect it may be, is an expression of feeling, an expression of love, not just a copy of something.”
We’ve all said worse things at nineteen, but come on.
In order to turn Religion into the enemy, Lady Marchmain is flattened into caricature. She’s now a bigot and a fanatic who bullies “non-believers.” She’s also now a vicious snob who enjoys humiliating people for living in middle-class neighborhoods like Paddington.
She obsessively tries to control her son’s sexuality. (In the novel, she never once indicates she is disgusted by her son’s homosexuality, and her first instinct on meeting Charles is not to drive him off, but rather is to try to convert him to Catholicism.)
And it’s all the fault of Religion:
As an aside, I am baffled by how all the women, regardless of age, are dressed like flappers (it’s the 1920s, wow!)3.
Charles Ryder is turned into a sneaky little cheat. Halfway through the movie, he gets tired of Sebastian and switches to his sister Julia.
Sebastian crashes out due to this. But he doesn’t blame Charles — it’s actually all Lady Marchmain’s fault, somehow.
No trace of prevenient grace anywhere. It is currently hard to tell a Catholic story, and easy to tell a story about homophobia and bigotry. Queer stories do not need to be told this way.
It is not amusing to make fun of Hamnet (2025). It is a story about motherhood, womanhood, womb-spirituality, miscarriage, and loss. It does not feel good, as a man, to belittle this film. Like Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), it is primarily concerned with the haecceity of women. Obviously, things happen in Hamnet, but it is not a film of events. Above all else, it is about Agnes Hathaway’s qualia: her anxieties and sorrows, the feeling of daughterhood, of motherhood, of giving birth, of fearing your children will die, of actually seeing them die… To slowly track a woman’s life, and to sit with her in her moods, undistracted by the noise of plot, is a surprisingly rare register in film. Consequently, it is not surprising so many women find Hamnet greatly moving. Unfortunately, unlike the great Jeanne Dielman, Hamnet is filled with romantasy melodrama, and is an embarrassment.
The dialogue is stiff and dull. There is a very depressing scene where young Shakespeare tells Agnes the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, but using language that is canned and uninspired — a Wikipedia-level summary of the tale cheaply elevated by having Shakespeare’s immortal line “[a]nd the rest is silence” thrown into the middle.
This is the same problem suffered by The King (2019), a “creative” adaptation of the Henriad, which is just like watching Shakespeare, except with all the fun, virtuosity, and good language removed. With Hamnet too, all Shakespeare’s greatness is removed and is replaced by lame tropes.
The last thirty minutes of the film have the worst Hamlet performance I’ve ever seen outside of high school theater. Director Chloé Zhao told the New Yorker she can barely understand Shakespeare’s words, and it shows.
Zhao: …I only understand a third of it technically because I just don’t understand what those words mean. At the beginning, Paul [Mescal] has said to me — Look, I can study it and translate every word and understand what it all means. Paul said to me, “Listen, if Shakespeare is performed right, you don’t have to understand what they’re saying. You feel it in the body. The language is written like that.”4
This is an atrocious thing for a director to say. And, no, you actually do need to understand words to understand Shakespeare, if an actor is doing more than delivering bathos. Yes, you can show you are sad by saying a line sadly, and show you are angry by saying a line angrily, but if your lead actor is relying on dumb shows and noise I had as lief the town-crier spoke the lines.
This is how Noah Jupe does Hamlet in the film5:
It is a beautiful conceit, to resurrect the dead through art. Watching this movie, however, really clarifies to me the limits of interpreting Hamlet as an avatar of Shakespeare’s dead son. Does Agnes Hathaway stand around, crying happy tears, while Hamlet spits venom at womankind, and at Gertrude in particular? Ignore that, I guess, and let the tears flow. It would be convenient if there were no Hamlet, and there were only Hamnet.
I’m not actually saying that directors are not allowed to do bold reinterpretations of classic literature. I am saying that new material should attempt to be as thoughtful as the removed material. Peter Brook’s King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company (which toured in 1962, and was filmed in 1971) is a bold reinterpretation of Shakespeare, and it was voted the greatest R.S.C. production of all time. EFM is a bold reinterpretation of Wuthering Heights, and it removed much and replaced it with nothing of value.
I’m not saying that films should not have a lot of sex in them. I am saying that there is a big difference between actual eroticism and theater-kid eroticism. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet is a film about sex, and it is profound. EFM is a film about sex, and it is about playing dress-up and getting squelched.
From The Song of Achilles: “I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.” Homer could never.
Thanks to Tomás Bjartur for this keen observation.
Apologies for the shitty screenshots. I rented this movie once and I don’t want to pay for it again.