Jane Eyre: Isolation, Winter, and Doom

Plain, ordinary, obscure girl’s parents die. Girl goes to live with her rich aunt where she’s abused, humiliated, and finally sent off to boarding school, where she’s further abused and humiliated and sometimes denied food for imaginary religious infractions. Finally, she gets to leave the boarding school because her fine education has equipped her to become a governess at a bleak estate in the middle of the English countryside where Judi Dench, the housekeeper, walks around talking about isolation, winter, and doom. Every time a character looks out the window, they see blankness and scrub and fog. The young woman, the governess, whose name is Jane Eyre, has never seen a city or spoken with a man.

One day, she’s walking around outside in a bunch of fog, and Rochester, galloping by, falls off his horse—that’s how they meet. Rochester owns the estate. He has nice facial features and a mean, mercurial personality. Their second interaction is by a fireplace. The whole movie, he wants to put his penis in her but she doesn’t pick up on his cues because, again, she’s never interacted with a man, so she keeps politely walking away. Which, of course, makes him want to put his penis in her even more. Rochester has a secret that, in case you didn’t read Jane Eyre in high school, I won’t spoil, but she bails when she discovers it, wanders crazily over the countryside, and then realizes she’s crazy and deep down loves Rochester and returns to find out he’s gone blind.

I can’t imagine how many fog machines it took to make this. There’s the endless fog outside and drawing rooms full of suspended haze, not to mention all the other pallor: overcast skies, chronically pale Judi Dench sipping milky soup, sheer see-through curtains, ladies dying among white frills, flurries of snow, gleaming white horses, white bricks, lace like crazy. It’s a competently done Gothic Victorian classic brought to you by the color white.