Bridget is Back Baby!
Rom com lovers were beside themselves with joy at the announcement of a fourth Bridget Jones movie set to begin filming in London this coming May. After the seemingly quite final ending of the third installment of the film series, 2016’s Bridget Jones’ Baby, this caused a lot of surprise amongst lovers of the BJCU (Bridget Jones Cinematic Universe). Bridget Jones’ Baby saw the titular protagonist (Renee Zellweger) get married to the love of her life Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) with whom she had a newborn son. In textbook fairytale endings, this one’s pretty classic. What more really does Bridget need to prove?
Bridget Jones and the Edge of Reason(able living prices)
Critics of the original film spoke about how often Bridget laments about the sorry state of her life, despite walking into a journalism job with no formal training, living in a single occupancy flat in literal Borough Market and having Hugh Grant and Colin Firth chasing after her. I don’t know about you, but that’s kind of my actual dream life. Even in the early 1990’s, when the original film was set, the UK was coming out of a huge recession and Bridget’s constant references to her terrible, awful life seemed to er on the side of gauche.
Now, in post-pandemic Britain, a country deep into harsh austerity measures and currently undergoing a cost of living crisis, a character like Bridget Jones is going to seem incredibly out of touch at best and mildly villanous at worse. I don’t think British audiences are going to be so kind to a protagonist who has been given a lot of free passes in her life, when many can’t afford to heat their homes, let alone own one.
Bridget Jones’ (food) Diary
One of the modern criticisms levelled at Bridget Jones is the way her relationship with her own body is represented. Throughout the film series, Bridget constantly and obsessively tracks her weight, often remarking on how fat she is, even the people’s hero Mark Darcy describes how he loves her ‘wobbly bits’ despite the fact she didn’t have a wobbly bit in sight. From a 2020’s perspective, this kind of relationship with food and body checking would probably be considered a form of disordered eating. It doesn’t particularly matter but for the majority of the series, Bridget is around 9 stone which is a UK size 10, actually quite a bit thinner than the UK average. The 90s were an era of ‘heroin chic’, creating an almost impossible body standard for anyone, let alone someone with Renee Zellweger’s build. Many women found Bridget’s struggle with her weight and body relatable due to society’s expectations of women’s bodies at the time, which with hindsight, is extremely worrying.
With the third film installment coming out in 2016, one would’ve expected the weight and calorie tracking storyline to be written out to roll with the times, but it remained ever present, with Bridget even tracking her weight and lamenting on how much it increased during the period where she was literally pregnant. The fourth book in Helen Fielding’s series that films are based on, which is rumoured to be the inspiration for film four still has the calorie and weight tracking with each diary entry, a deeply problematic element of the book which will probably be found in the new film if Bridget Jones’ Baby is anything to go by.
Bridget Jones is all white
Like many films from the 90’s, the series lacked any sort of named character that wasn’t white and middle class. This wasn’t particularly rectified in the 2016 film either, I’m not calling for diversity for the sake of diversity, but a person who lives and works in central London will be meeting and interacting with many people from a variety of cultures and backgrounds. It’s unrealistic to have a distinct lack of POC people in a modern film and if the same thing happens again in a film released in the 2020’s, it will most definitely stand out.
In Defense of Bridget Jones
While I, and many others have lobbied a huge amount of criticism at Bridget Jones, I think it is fair to acknowledge that she might seem a little bit cringe and distressingly Gen X, because she is just that. The series grows with her and these films show every person’s experience when they are not part of the young and hip crowd anymore. Bridget seems out of touch because her 90s heyday is so far removed from the state of the world today. She still tracks calories because in her 20’s, that was what she did, she struggles to work technology because she was born into a generation that precludes it. It seems unfair to judge her by the standards of Gen Z when that isn’t who she is. Bridget Jones isn’t a protagonist for us, she’s a protagonist for our mums and aunts and middle aged family members, we watch her because she is a window into our mums’ 20s, not ours.
There will be plenty of 3rd wave feminist female protagonists for us to enjoy and we’re already starting to see them now as Gen Z enter the film industry, Bridget Jones is an old friend that many middle aged women can go back to and feel seen and acknowledged. Just because women become middle aged, they don’t become invisible, and films still need to be made for other generations that aren’t Gen Z.
One thing’s for sure, one day we’ll all be old and cringe and desperate for our daughters to enjoy films that we loved in our 20’s. Mother’s Day is coming and what better way to acknowledge it than to remember that once your mum was just a girl in her 20s enjoying a rom com like you do now?