Bridget Jones is a glorious emissary from a better age
Zoe
Williams | The Guardian – September 12,
2016
Trying
to hate the third
Bridget Jones film is like
trying to sulk while a toddler is tickling you: if it’s hard to take
against Renée Zellweger in any guise, it’s simply not viable when
she’s lip-syncing to House of Pain. As she paces round her yard of
failures, and ends “at least I’m finally thin,” it’s hard to take
against that too. Comic talent leaps from the screen like frogs out of a
box. Why was I even trying to hate it? Because it was Bridget Jones, and
in the 1990s, that’s what we did.
Before the first film we
complained about the column, then the book, on feminist grounds. Finally,
a character had arrived who didn’t embody a prissy femininity of self-control, but in
its place was a constant hum of trivia and calories and incompetence. She
couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t make soup, she couldn’t stay
upright, she had all the agency and independence of a gosling, she was
always at her most loveable when she was showing her knickers. It was as
though there was so much fear in rejecting the classic female ideal of
decorum that we had to crawl on our hands and knees to be accepted some
other way. Inconveniently, she was often very funny. But funny could wait
until we’d smashed the patriarchy. That was wrong. No, let me
try that again. I was wrong. The self-abasement and the humour were
inextricable, and contained a subtle liberation that it was a big mistake
to undervalue. Big mistake, to quote another politically problematic but deceptively
important film: huge.
The first Bridget Jones film came out in 2001, by which time there was a
kind of meta-disapproval for Zellweger, as the envoy of US body fascism
trying to ape British slatternliness. How can you tear down the cultural
constraint of female perfectionism with a heroine who battles constantly
with her thighs and drinks wine in pints, and not at least check first
whether or not Kate Winslet is available? The distinction between herself
as an actor and herself qua casting decision seemed lost on Zellweger, who
was extremely vexed at the column inches devoted to her appearance, and
has remained so. In retrospect, I can see why. It’s hard not to take
things personally when they’re literally all about your person.
But seeing the third film makes me realise how much there is to miss about
the 1990s politically. Bridget is now 43, and gets accidentally pregnant
after two one-night stands, too close together to figure out whose child
it is. I probably just about have it in me not to say who the father is,
between Colin Firth’s Mark and Patrick Dempsey’s Jack, but otherwise
take it as read that this piece will be riddled with spoilers.
Immediately, the film made me miss sex-positive feminism. There was a
time, towards the end of the last century, when we rejected the word
“slut” not because it was victim-blaming but because there was no
victim. The charge of sluttishness simply made no sense. A woman might
choose to get drunk and have sex with a stranger, and it might not be a
cry for help or a violation, it might not have meaning, she might not have
low self-esteem, she might just feel like it.
She might be charting the exhilarating waters of her own sexual destiny or
she might just be passing the time. She couldn’t be made to feel
ashamed, not because the Daily Mail
didn’t try, but because shame is a two-way street and she didn’t have
it in her. Sex didn’t have to be a transaction, with a winner and a
loser (or two losers), as it is in Girls;
it didn’t even have to be an idealised transaction resulting in mutually
satisfied participants, in the manner of Sex and the City. It
could exist entirely outside the framework of investment and return, use
and exploitation, in the space we used to call life.
I miss the jokes. At one point in Bridget
Jones’s Baby, Bridget’s gay friend announces he’s adopting, and
says: “We’re having a baby. A gayby”. That joke could only be made
because it was seeded in a more ludic time. You wouldn’t write that in a
story first conceived today, because someone would think it infantilised
same sex relationships, and someone else would think it implied that gay
parents tried to preach homosexuality to their children, and some other
someone would think it sexualised babies.
Which may not sound like a huge loss, because it’s just a piece of silly
wordplay, but it is a loss: the ability to take a joke is a fundamental,
perhaps defining, component of social legitimacy and confidence. When we
all have to be as sensitive as our most sensitive ally, we cram into an
ever tighter cultural corner, pearl-clutching, offence-taking, acting out
the humourlessness of which liberals were always mischievously accused.
And I miss Emma Thompson;
or rather, I miss the kinds of roles for which only Emma Thompson will do,
caustic, intelligent, sceptical, warm. Try to imagine Theresa May
explaining to Emma Thompson why she needed grammar
schools, or a van telling
immigrants to go home or
face arrest; it’s really enjoyable.
More than any of that, I miss fecklessness, the ability to accept error as
part of the human condition, without trying to stratify it by class or
gender and write it off as the kind of thing only undesirable people are
capable of. What contemporary political narrative would Bridget Jones fit
into, in her current situation? She’s not a scrounger; she’s not a
troubled family; she’s not a benefits cheat. (She probably is, for a
time, a drain on the NHS.)
But nor is she a hard-working family, or a striver. She’s not having a
baby because she planned it, or can afford it, or has a brilliant
maternity package, or lives near an outstanding primary school. She
couldn’t begin to justify her decision, couldn’t even dignify it with
the word, it’s more of a happenstance. She doesn’t match any of the
criteria of a decent citizen in our current politics; but that’s a fault
in the politics, which is kept afloat by a po-faced self-righteousness
that can’t brook a joke in case empathy and fellowship come rushing in
alongside it.
The real work of building a “country that works for all” consists not
of standing greyly by and intoning it, but of being able to see a person
in wildly inauspicious circumstances, entirely of their own making, and
feeling for them; knowing it could be you; wanting to help. That was the
subversive element of Bridget Jones – her every pratfall built a deeper
collective bond and made a narrow, judgmental, me-first worldview more
absurd, more laughable, more impossible to maintain. She returns, like
Batman, just when we need her most.
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