Here’s how Nelly Dean tells it, after Heathcliff has fled from Cathy’s room and returned to find her dead:

“May she wake in torment!” he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. “Why, she’s a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there—not in heaven—not perished—where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

Here’s how the team of screenwriters tell it, leaving Heathcliff in the room to speak directly to Cathy’s new corpse:

What do they know of Heaven or Hell, Cathy, who know nothing of life? Oh, they’re praying for you, Cathy. I’ll pray one prayer with them – I repeat ’til my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest so long as I live on! I killed you. Haunt me, then! Haunt your murderer! I know that ghosts have wandered on the Earth. Be with me always. Take any form, drive me mad, only do not leave me in this dark alone where I cannot find you. I cannot live without my life! I cannot die without my soul!

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur didn’t stray too much from the original text once we get to the tongue-stiffening piece, and that’s some humility from a pair of Hollywood’s most famous writers. Of course Bronte’s handling of Cathy’s death, happening once Heathcliff has been chased from the room, leaving him to vent his spleen elsewhere once he can’t vent it at her anymore is precisely how this relationship has gone. Chasing and receding, ebbing and hiding, the two of them can’t even figure out how to be together when they have no more time to steal. But this is Hollywood, and we say things like “this is Hollywood” for good reasons. It’s Hollywood when Heathcliff picks up Cathy out of her bed and takes her over to the window. It’s far easier to get that close-up of Laurence Olivier, and the image of Olivier holding up Merle Oberon’s body and then removing it from the window, picking her up heavily, letting her head fall, the dark shape of Donald Crisp in the window as Heathcliff starts to take her back to the bed. Watch it without sound and this is a frame that looks ripped from the silent films of fifteen years before; William Wyler and Gregg Toland have not let all the talking, let alone their actors, do the work for them. Crisp may as well have never left the era where he got his start.

Olivier does speak, though, and in speaking he makes words written for the page turn into words that still work onscreen. The crude say, “In vino veritas.” They have it wrong, for alcohol merely opens the mouth while maiming the tongue. Heathcliff knows, and I suppose Cathy would know too if she were still around, that the truth is “In luctus veritas.” In grief we can access a dialectical truth that our less disturbed brains cannot quite handle, and those truths are voiced by Heathcliff in these final moments of the movie. It is true that he has harmed Cathy beyond her capacity to bear, even if we don’t necessarily have to come along with the literal term “murderer” that he uses. It’s also true that he has no prospects of life without her, even though the two of them have been distant from one another for so long. It is Heathcliff’s rude life and not some piety that keeps him from drawing a knife across his throat and spilling his blood over Cathy’s white nightdress in order to join her all the sooner.

In Hebrews, drawing from the long tradition of animal sacrifice detailed minutely in the Old Testament, Paul writes that without blood there is no forgiveness of sins. Heathcliff, veins intact, does not ask for a way to atone. He knows that there is no way for him to atone, and keeping it a buck here, he wouldn’t do it anyway. Thus he demands that Cathy, his only love amid a life of hates including her as well, commit a justice upon him that prolongs his suffering and gives him solace. Heathcliff and Cathy are not typically given as an Orpheus – Eurydice pair, but the way that Heathcliff errs and then reaches back for a shade is much the same thing that Orpheus does. Heathcliff is not an easy hero to root for, and there is no deed, really, which requires us to look at him as anything more than your English teacher’s professor’s grandma’s favorite Gothic hero. What I love about this moment at the end is that Heathcliff abandons the stiff upper lip, the pride which has sustained him and goaded him through a life of many humiliations. The sailors in the navies at the time of Heathcliff’s birth tried to withstand whipping without crying out, biting lips, holding on as long as possible before letting loose a whimper or cry. Heathcliff gets to the whipping post, recognizes what he’s there for, and collapses like a person who might actually accept the punishment he’s earned.