In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the lovelorn Ophelia famously drowns. The prince of Denmark has cruelly spurned her, her father has died, and she’s stricken with grief. If only she had realized Taylor Swift’s vision for her: In the song “The Fate of Ophelia,” the pop star imagines that she has instead been saved by a new suitor. Her version of the tragic figure, Swift sings, is “no longer drowning and deceived, all because you came for me.”

Hollywood has been making me think of Swift’s track quite a bit lately. The sparkly earworm deploys one of her favorite tricks: messing around with a literary classic for lyrical fodder. Cinema has been going through its own “Fate of Ophelia” era these past few months, with a litany of new adaptations that dramatically alter their source material. The writer-director Emerald Fennell turned Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s Gothic novel about obsession and social status, into erotic fanfiction. [...]

Updating a classic isn’t inherently a bad idea; Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, a dutiful adaptation of Shelley’s 1818 novel, just won three Oscars, and Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has enjoyed an excellent box-office run. Yet most of these projects have been as superficial as Swift’s single, in which Ophelia survives just by pledging “allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes”—a cheeky reference to Swift’s fiancé, to be sure, but Ophelia’s problem was never really about the vibes. That reductiveness, though, works far better in a four-minute pop song than in a feature-length film. Call it the rise of CliffsNotes Cinema—watered-down transformations that offer glossy but thin summaries of the originals and strip away the challenging material that helped turn them into cultural mainstays in the first place. These movies make the provocative palatable: Uncomfortable relationships and nuanced characterizations—essentially, what made the stories endure—get lost in the fog of showy filmmaking. [...]

This type of nuance all but disappears in CliffsNotes Cinema, which often looks incredible—I’m certainly taken with the costumes in Wuthering Heights, as well as with the soaring sets in Frankenstein —but robs its audience of the chance to analyze anything for themselves. That’s largely because these movies dull the sharpest edges of their source material, aiming for obvious takeaways regardless of how nonsensically they’re rendered. Despite never giving its titular character an opportunity to explore her original identity, The Bride! gleefully insists that she has become an avatar for female empowerment. Rather than explore the book’s larger point that class is an inescapable burden, Wuthering Heights makes its central conflict about whether its protagonists can be together. These films argue that their characters act on raw emotions: lust, fury, sadness. Yet these feelings fail to linger in the audience. Unlike a Taylor Swift song that gets stuck in your head, they just fade away. (Shirley Li)

   

 A new high school production of Jane Eyre opens tomorrow, April 23:

Jane Eyre

Adapted by Katie Alley

Bearden High School Theatre, Knoxcille, Tennessee, US

April 23-April 26

 Bearden High School Theatre proudly presents Jane Eyre, a sweeping stage adaptation originally devised in 2005 by director Katie Alley, featuring an original score. 

Join us April 23-26, 2026, and transport into Jane’s world as she journeys through hardship at Gateshead and Lowood to love, mystery, and self-discovery at Thornfield Hall. 

   

Brontë expert, author and scholar Deborah Lutz is flying in from the USA to share her new biography with Scarborough audiences at Queen Street on the Friday at 10am..

Her This Dark Night is the first full biography of Emily Brontë in more than 20 years. Emily was 27 when she started writing Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead.

Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the three Brontë sisters, she has always been hard to know, especially given the destruction of her papers.

Deborah is one of the few people who has felt and examined much of the Brontë’s surviving material including letters, desks, chairs and books and all of the tiny poetry manuscripts and notebooks.

These include the hand-written manuscript of Emily’s poems rediscovered in 2021 at Honresfield House near the Brontë family home, Haworth Parsonage.

At the opening event, Deborah will reveal the politics and events of the era as well as the delights and tragedies of the Bronte family’s life, including Emily’s sisters Anne and Charlotte, which directly inspired much of Emily’s writing.

It’s a fresh take on her short but momentous life which shows why so many of us are still fascinated by the Brontë family.

Deborah will be in discussion with festival patron and former head of BBC Radio Helen Boaden.

The Emily Brontë theme continues with Essie Fox, the Sunday Times best-selling author of seven historical novels, including The Somnambulist which was shortlisted for the National Book Awards. She is the host of the podcast Talking the Gothic.

She will be talking about her reimagining of Wuthering Heights at Queen Street on the Friday at 12.30pm. Essie Fox’s new novel Catherine, told through the narrative voice of Catherine Earnshaw, is already being hailed as a classic in its own right.

Heather French, festival organiser, said: “Essie’s retelling of Wuthering Heights is haunting and atmospheric, and I was glued to it.

"It’s also topical as we’re now seeing a renewed cultural fascination with all things gothic – in books, films and fashion. I’m really looking forward to these two Brontë-themed events and of course we have very strong Brontë connections here in Scarborough."

Anne Brontë stayed in Scarborough and is buried in St Mary’s Churchyard. (Sue Wilkinson)