Steve Rose raises the question of whether Andrea Arnold's new Wuthering Heights is "post-racial" and the idea that "it is a sign that we are moving towards a 'colour-blind' entertainment environment of equal opportunities", citing Arnold's casting of two actors of African-Caribbean descent to play Heathcliff (Bend it like Heathcliff, 14 November). Rose acknowledges that Emily Brontë leaves Heathcliff's ethnicity open to debate, variously describing him as "a Lascar" and a "dark-skinned gipsy in aspect". But this makes Arnold's casting the opposite of race-lifting, defined as "the changing of a fictional character's race for a derivative work", in that it is accurate to the text.
Rose does not elucidate fully the radical resonance of Arnold's Wuthering Heights in contrast to the race-lifting practices he describes, such as the "whitewashing" of the Asian and indigenous American characters in the film of The Last Airbender. Although, as Rose points out, this strategy was successfully challenged by a fan petition, the change made to the film, casting Dev Patel as a villain, was cosmetic.
As a film critic, I have been struck by the skin-deep tokenism by which Hollywood cinema wishes to conjure up a "post-racial" world. Performers with an array of skin tones are cast as secondary characters who may serve to counsel, counterpoint or liberate the white protagonists, but have no discernible history of their own – and certainly no antagonism towards the white characters. Spike Lee popularised the term "the magical negro" to describe this persistent, consoling fantasy of the character of colour's role in a "post-racial" world.
In Arnold's film Heathcliff's blackness is neither decorative diversity nor affirmative action: we are shown him being cussed, beaten and forced to break rocks – a startling image that locates the impact of slavery at the centre of the English literary canon.
This is emphasised by making Heathcliff the film's point-of-view character, another radical departure from conventional adaptations of the novel, and by the use of a 4:3 ratio rather than the widescreen we might expect. Like Heathcliff, the viewer feels trapped in the narrow frame afforded him in a racist society. As Rose notes, Arnold's Heathcliff is racially insulted by his adoptive brother, who also beats him. Brutally pejorative reactions to his ethnicity come to define his character, "degrading" him as Catherine says.
Arnold makes powerful sense of Brontë's novel and its passionate argument, long recognised by feminist critics in relation to Catherine: that there can be no true love, because there is no true freedom in a society where there is any form of power and domination. Rose concludes: "Through Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights unsettled formerly stable boundaries of 19th-century Britain, including racial ones, and it is apparently still doing it today." In comparison with the shallow cosmetic surgery of the "post-racial", Arnold's film, by emphasising the consequences of racism, shows a way to excise its deep and lasting wound.
