Bad romance / Patience rewarded
Today: Anna Merlan, author of REPUBLIC OF LIES: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power; and Trevor Alixopulos, who draws comics and illustrations and lives in California.
Issue No. 508
Eyre Apparent
Anna Merlan
Serenity Mark-down
Trevor Alixopulos
Eyre Apparent
by Anna Merlan
Of course I will watch the new Wuthering Heights, featuring the chillingly sculpted, thoroughly 21st-century faces and bodies of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi looming closer and closer to one another like two Pilates-toned megaplanets. But I’ll watch it as nature intended: six months after it came out, eating grapes for dinner, propped up on the couch under a fuzzy blanket and half looking at my phone. This adaptation doesn’t deserve more attention than that, for one simple reason that keeps recurring in TV and film: everyone is too hot now.
This is a common issue in nearly every splashy recent TV and movie adaptation of Victorian literature: everyone has had too much lip filler and core work and facial fat surgically removed and repositioned in ways that are both ahistorical and unimaginative. So too with the new Wuthering Heights: the unignorable fact is, as the saying goes, that both Robbie and Elordi have faces that have seen an iPhone. Elordi was too hot even in the role of Frankenstein’s monster. Their artificially glossy physical perfections make it impossible to enter into a fictive dream with them; these people appear to be acting in advertisements, not dramas.
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