Hearing about the movie Wuthering Heights again recently reminded me of the joke title I always think of for that movie: Withering Heights. It would actually be quite appropriate for that story too, what with everyone ending up miserable hermitlike wretches or corpses by the end of it. But I thought it was about time that someone at least proposed a story for the joke title: Withering Heights.
So here is my story outline for the new classic-to-be, the gothic novel for the 21st Century: Withering Heights: There is a double-love-triangle between four people, two of whom are childhood sweethearts, and the third and fourth of which are the sweethearts’ spouses, whom they each married out of spite to punish the other. Oh, and their spouses are brother and sister, just to complicate things further, since they can’t just fall in love and run off together, leaving the childhood sweethearts to get back together and live happily ever after. So the childhood sweethearts still love each other, but they’re too proud to admit it, since they became estranged and did the marriage-rebound thingy due to some ridiculous misunderstanding in the past, which they are too angry and jealous to figure out and work through now. And naturally, the brother and sister are both jealous and suspicious, since they know about how their spouses loved each other in the past, and probably still do. Oh, and I almost forgot: all four people are extremely acrophobic! Oh, and they also lost all of their money in the recent Wall Street meltdown, so they’re all desperate.
So what happens is, the brother and sister spouses of the childhood sweethearts inherit a super-swanky high-rise penthouse apartment in New York City on the top floor of some ridiculously tall skyscraper, and the will stipulates that they and their spouses become unimaginably wealthy only if they all agree to live full-time in this sky-high apartment together. Oh, and the apartment is on this rotating platform which hangs over the edges of the building it’s on top of, and it has glass floors, and full-length windows and balconies all around, so they’re all constantly terrified to look down or out the windows, or to ever stand out on the terrace or balconies, since they’re all super-scared of heights. And so naturally, in this setting, they all get extra-hyper-tense and argumentative and paranoid, and they all end up pushing each other off the balconies or out the windows and/or falling to their deaths themselves, at which time their “dead” relatives show up from behind some secret sliding panel (yet another married-on-the-rebound couple, one of which is related to the brother and sister by blood, and the other by marriage) and go: “Ha ha ha ha haaaaa!” at the end, since they each were in love with and were jilted by the man and woman from the childhood sweetheart couple when they went to marry the brother and sister, respectively, and this "dead" couple wanted to get revenge on all of them for it!
(So actually, I guess it’s a double-love-square between six people! Or would that be a love-hexagon with lines connecting all the corner points on the inside of the shape, dividing it into multiple triangles?)
(So actually, I guess it’s a double-love-square between six people! Or would that be a love-hexagon with lines connecting all the corner points on the inside of the shape, dividing it into multiple triangles?)
So, if it has enough thunder & lightning rumbling and flashing through all the windows contantly, is it gothic enough?
