Two of the biggest movies around at the moment, both directed and starring strong-willed women, are “Wuthering Heights” (Emerald Fennell) and The Bride! (Maggie Gylennhaal) .
The first title comes with quotation marks, the second is rounded off with an exclamation point.
What can we deduce from these very deliberate uses of punctuation?
The scare quotes on the first comes as a warning that Emily Brontë’s 19th century tale of love and lust on the Yorkshire Moors is used only as a rough guide to the plot of film. There is no pretense that the original setting and storyline will be faithfully rendered. The boddice ripping frenzy captures the spirit of the novel but rides roughshod over the more nuanced details. Authenticity can go hang.
On this basis, Jacob Elordi could (and to my mind should) have saved himself the trouble of applying a Northern lilt to the updated version of Heathcliff. In the book he is dark-skinned man, in the film he is a white Australian actor who spends large parts of the film getting soaked to the skin due to the inclement weather. His dripping clothes and brooding character are sufficient to turn the heads and arouse the desires of Cathy Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver). Emerald Fennell cuts the chase to focus primarily on a plethera the romping sex scenes It may not satisfy the purists but by placing female sexuality at the heart of the tale it serves as a deliberate, though clunky, rejection of the standard patriarchal themes.
Quotation marks are relatively unusual in film titles but exclamation marks are quite common. The top three on IMDb are listed as ,Airplane! (1980) , Mamma Mia! (2008) and Moulin Rouge! (2001) Less restrained examples are Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). In a genre and style more in tune with Maggie Gylennhaal’s feminization of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story, Daniel Haller’s Die,Monster,Die! staring Boris Karloff has the added showiness of incorporating two commas in the title.
In The Bride!, Jessie Buckley wants everyone to know that she is a reconstructed woman in her own right. She refuses be defined as a mere appendage to Christian Bale’s male monster. “I would prefer not to” is the line quoted interminably from Herman Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener to emphasise her independent spirit. She inspires other women to take up her cause (#MeToo). The exclamation mark in the title is therefore used for CAPS LOCK effect. Ignore it at your peril!
In addition to the foregrounding of punctuation, these two films announce a refusal to be bound by genre conventions. They apply romantic tropes with a very broad brush and with an excess of visual flourishes. They are like extended instagram feeds where nuanced character studies are largely discarded as though fearing that that a viewer’s attention might waver and allow space for ‘difficult’ questions like: What is the actual point of this film?
Personally, I find the hyperactive tone exhausting but realise I am not part of the target audience. Both movies are box office winners so achieve the primary goal of making money and seem disinterested in setting any higher goals. I suppose you could say: “That’s Entertainment!”
