A new look at the world’s most famous twisted love story, Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, is hitting the screens just before Valentine’s Day this year with Margot Robbie in one of her darkest roles yet. Nina Romain looks at the traditionally most romantic day of the year on the silver screen, and where the fine line is between charming enthusiasm or glamourised stalking…and how to avoid being trapped in the “space stalker” genre.
One of Heathcliff’s more obsessive lines about his former lover, Catherine Earnshaw, after her death, is: “The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist and I have lost her!” If love can break your heart on the big screen, how about a look at former stories where love tips over into obsession?
Passengers (2016), starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, starts with Everyman Jim Preston (Pratt) in hibernation on a spacecraft trip to a new planet, where everyone will be woken in 120 years to start a new life.
When Jim is woken up far too early in the trip due to a technical malfunction and realises the rest of the crew have not and he faces another 90 years alone, he survives a year of slowly going mad from loneliness. To avoid loneliness, he wakes up an attractive young journalist called Aurora Lane (Lawrence) after staring with disturbing intensity at her sleeping form in the hibernation pod.
When she regains consciousness, Jim lets her believe this was due to an error in the ship’s mechanical systems. He creates handcrafted presents for her by watching her video recordings to realise what she “really” wants. From there he presents Aurora with roses, handwritten letters, and uses other lovebombing tactics until she agrees to go on a date with him. She believes she is falling in love with him, sighing besottedly (and completely inaccurately): “There’s no secrets between me and Jim”.
Passengers has been mentioned as being the perfect horror if shot from Aurora’s perspective, when she finds out Jim has in reality obviously doomed her to spend the rest of her life trapped on a deserted spacecraft with him. Despite his protests of: “I fell in love with you and the way your mind works…” when she realises what Jim has done she physically attacks him, angrily shouting “stay away from me” as he creepily watches her on the ship’s CCTV system. A decade later, Passengers is probably responsible for creating an interesting genre of “space stalker” movies.
More conventional romcoms also raise questions about the fine line between romantic pursuing and stalking. In timetravelling romcom About Time (2013) the hero Tim Lake fancies a woman called Mary so decides to wait in a museum event on her favourite topic until he finally sees her attending. This stalking tactic works when he finally sees her visiting and can introduce himself, rather than getting asked to leave by security.
When he then discovers she has a boyfriend, Tim goes back in time to “remove” the competition by finding out where they originally met. Tim then time travels back yet again to arrive before the potential boyfriend to ensure he removes this rival. By doing this, Tim removes Mary’s free will, as he removes a potential boyfriend; in a sense he traps her into being in a relationship with him.
A similar comedy, Groundhog Day, sees the hero Phil reliving the same day with his boss Rita. He memorises her likes and dislikes so he can provide her with an artificially-perfect day by supposedly creating a “perfect” day-long date with her in an attempt to get her to sleep with him. In one example, he asks Rita what her degree was, and when she replies the slightly-less-than-useful subject of French Renaissance poetry, he laughs raucously and offends her. Armed with this knowledge, the second time he flatteringly quotes some French poetry at her and later attempts to get her to stay overnight at the hotel by declaring he has some to read to her, adding cheerfully: “C’est fantastique!” This is portrayed as enthusiasm to get Rita to like him rather than creepy.
Unlike About Time’s unsuspecting heroine, however, Rita sees through his cute routine. She does at one point seem to guess, trapped in the same day, that he has been “talking to [her] friends”, and that is why he knows her likes and dislikes, when he notes “no white chocolate, no fudge”. However, the truth is slightly more disturbing than that.
From 1847’s tale of obsession and destructive love to an updated version of stalking in space, it seems Wuthering Heights’ tale of obsessive love is not finished yet.
