After reading the 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, and watching the movies, William Wyler's 1939 Wuthering Heights and Luis Buñuel's 1954 Los Abismos de Pasion, I started pondering on how these all were full of dark emotions. It seems in American pop culture emotions have played an important part on the new generation. Teenagers and adults seem to be more emotionally expressive, and this book is emotionally expressive for its time. Emotions have become acceptable in culture; this is justified and progressive in culture development. I feel I could make a new movie and exploit these emotions. Who would star in a twentieth-first Wuthering Heights movie?
Catherine Earnshaw, a lady full of life a looking for love in all the wrong places. I choose Gena Rowlands (The Notebook) because of her awesome reactions to love in movies. I would make her be less extreme with her emotions than Merle Oberon or Irasema Dilian (Catalina) because I would want the audience to dig deeper into the movie by thinking for themselves and guess what she is feeling.
Edgar, a man full of pride and riches, will be played by Matthew McConaughey. I would make him become more of a pompous prick, in that I would make him more controlling over Catherine and more materialistic. I feel that Edgar in the movies was portrayed as too much as a nice guy by David Niven and Ernesto Alonzo (Eduardo), and he let people walk over him too much. He would also be very protective of Catherine, and before her death I would have him kill Heathcliff, so I could show much Catherine truly loved her Heathcliff.
Thirdly, I would choose Jack Black to play Hindley because of his comic relief. I want this new movie to be plenty dark and full of emotions, but I do not want it to be too dark. Jack would provide a more sense of hilarity that Hugh Williams in the American movie did not provide, granted that the Mexican movie actor Luis Aceves Castenada (Ricardo) was very funny. I would turn Hindley's drunkenness up a notch and make him quite obnoxious.
Finally, for the man to play Heathcliff I would choose Jake Gyllenhaal (Jar Head). I would choose Jake over Laurence Olivier and Jorge Mistral (Alejandro) because of his dark acting in movies such as Donnie Darko. I believe he would also make a very passionate and destructive Heathcliff. I would want him to steal the camera throughout the whole movie. Manipulating the audience to feel sorry for him because of his situation with Catherine, I would make him the hero.
In conclusion, I believe a modern rendition of Brontë's book and these two older movies would be very successful in America. I feel if would be even more successful than the first ones. Due to the popularity of gothic emotions in the American pop culture and acceptance this movie could make for a best Wuthering Heights movie in the twentieth-first century.