히스클리프를 위하여?: 안드레아 아놀드 감독의 <폭풍의 언덕>(2011) (For Heathcliff?: Andrea Arnold’s Adaptation Film of Wuthering Heights (2011))

서지정보

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초록

This essay examines the latest film version of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, which was directed by Andrea Arnold and released in 2011. The most notable and visible aspect of Arnold’s Wuthering Heights lies in its casting of a black for the Heathcliff role. Heathcliff as a colored person is strongly hinted in Bronte’s novel as he is called a “gypsy” or found in Liverpool, England’s largest slave-trading port at that time. While recent post-colonial criticism on Bronte’s novel focuses on Heathcliff’s racial otherness and the resistant and dangerous energy embodied in this dark figure against the British empire, Arnold’s film seems to be hardly interested in the historically rebellious aspect of Heathcliff’s dark skin. It rather concentrates on the private aspect of his blackness with a focus on how his darkness contributes to the thick and intimate relationship between Cathy and himself.
The most successful features of Arnold’s Wuthering Heights consist in the scenes of wild, animalistic, and raw nature around Wuthering Heights, the relentless omission of emotion-producing score that is replaced by the sound of nature and human silence, or the convincing description of the childhood of Cathy and Heathcliff, particularly how they come to regard each other as his or her double. The latter part of the film where Heathcliff as a rich gentleman and Cathy as a lady of Mrs. Linton appear, however, is insipid and bathetic for several reasons. First, while Heathcliff in Bronte’s novel is notoriously enigmatic, opaque, hence unreadable, Arnold takes his view as the point of view of the film with abortive efforts to force the audience to sympathize with the man who is often described as a ‘gothic villain.’ Secondly, the film Wuthering Heights depicts Cathy just as an object of a gaze of Heathcliff and of the audience, which leads the failure of the audience’s understanding of the heroine and hence of the whole film. Thirdly, Arnold (mis)represents the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff as the cliche of the heterosexual love when it is not exactly so in Bronte’s novel.

영어초록

This essay examines the latest film version of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, which was directed by Andrea Arnold and released in 2011. The most notable and visible aspect of Arnold’s Wuthering Heights lies in its casting of a black for the Heathcliff role. Heathcliff as a colored person is strongly hinted in Bronte’s novel as he is called a “gypsy” or found in Liverpool, England’s largest slave-trading port at that time. While recent post-colonial criticism on Bronte’s novel focuses on Heathcliff’s racial otherness and the resistant and dangerous energy embodied in this dark figure against the British empire, Arnold’s film seems to be hardly interested in the historically rebellious aspect of Heathcliff’s dark skin. It rather concentrates on the private aspect of his blackness with a focus on how his darkness contributes to the thick and intimate relationship between Cathy and himself.
The most successful features of Arnold’s Wuthering Heights consist in the scenes of wild, animalistic, and raw nature around Wuthering Heights, the relentless omission of emotion-producing score that is replaced by the sound of nature and human silence, or the convincing description of the childhood of Cathy and Heathcliff, particularly how they come to regard each other as his or her double. The latter part of the film where Heathcliff as a rich gentleman and Cathy as a lady of Mrs. Linton appear, however, is insipid and bathetic for several reasons. First, while Heathcliff in Bronte’s novel is notoriously enigmatic, opaque, hence unreadable, Arnold takes his view as the point of view of the film with abortive efforts to force the audience to sympathize with the man who is often described as a ‘gothic villain.’ Secondly, the film Wuthering Heights depicts Cathy just as an object of a gaze of Heathcliff and of the audience, which leads the failure of the audience’s understanding of the heroine and hence of the whole film. Thirdly, Arnold (mis)represents the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff as the cliche of the heterosexual love when it is not exactly so in Bronte’s novel.

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