Who Decides What Books Are Really About?

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Movie adaptations of literary classics have been a center of online debate this year. From Emerald Fennel’s raunchy take on Wuthering Heights to Guillermo del Toro’s rather bland Frankenstein, filmgoers and literature fans alike are left wondering: have these people even read the book? And why is Jacob Elordi always involved?
In this video I wanted to talk a bit more about text to screen adaptation in general - what it is and where it’s supposed to sit in relation to the source. I took the movie Adaptation by Charlie Kaufman as a point of departure because it’s a fun film and a great example of a drastically transformative adaptation that still pays homage to the book it’s inspired by.
I skipped over the death of the author discourse that has become a part of every think piece about adaptation, not because I don’t think it’s useful, but because I wanted to introduce a different critical essay just to spice things up. I highly recommend reading this Linda Hutcheon essay on adaptation if you enjoy that part of the video, it’s only a dozen pages and so worth it!
Lastly, I hope this video comes across as what it is: not an attempt to get people to change their minds about these two movies, but a chat about this topic that is slightly less alarmist than average.

Thanks for watching xx


Timestamps

00:00 - intro: Adaptation
02:08 - Frankenstein (2025) and Wuthering Heights (2026)
05:49 - The Wuthering Heights promo discourse
16:01 - what is an adaptation meant to do?
20:37 - Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein
28:39 - the book is always better than the movie


Sources & other things mentioned:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20058017?

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movie...

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article...

https://lithub.com/emerald-fennells-w...
-heres-why/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/a...
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