Why I Hated the Last Bridget Jones Movie but Kept Watching it Anyway

I’m in business class on New Zealand Air and the movie options are depressing. Nothing, after Hunt for the Wilderpeople which was charming and quirky in that Kiwi way with a cute chubby Maori kid and Sam Neill grunting in the gorgeous LOTR bush, especially caught my eye.

Because I teach a class on race, I then watched Birth of the Nation which elicited the emotions I knew it would. It was not Sankofa, not Mandingo, not even 12 Years a Slave. The trauma/torture genre is a staple now, like the disaster/apocalypse/post-apocalypse genre – you know what you’re getting, like porn. You wait for the emotional triggers, and there is release. In the end you feel empty but you’ve come.

So what compelled me after watching two films by and about people of color to turn to Bridget Jones’s Baby? The same thing - all movies are potential teaching material when you're a cultural studies academic, romcoms no exception. I occasionally give lectures on post feminism – and the Bridget Jones films along with Sex and the City are the classic texts, updated with Girls and whatever newish TV show or film is out that foregrounds the self-absorbed first world problems of white women who can’t figure out why white men don’t want them.

One of my favorite quotes ever is from Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: “If visibility equals power, young white girls should be ruling the world.” This is the fantasy world BJ sucks you into. A world where white girls rule.

It’s a world I want to reject yet one I live in.

The movie targets me – in every way except racially since I’m not white though I guess as a model minority Asian American woman who performs whiteness really well in an all-white department in a mostly white super gentrified neighborhood in Sydney which is diverse in the way that a shopping mall in Singapore is diverse or a food court is diverse – anyway, I digress – I mean to say, I’m conditionally white, like my Jewish friends only with special Yellow Girl Magic, which translates automatically to slutty Hello Kitty -- to all men of all colours. This is also called Asiaphilia, or Yellow Fever. I’m told most men have a touch of it.

White women are jealous of Asian women because we look and apparently act like children, and everyone knows that every straight man at heart is a paedophile. Because that’s how patriarchy works. Men like you on top if you’re tiny and they can pretend they are ‘letting you’ fuck them, letting you have the power for a little while. I’ve had guys actually say this to me while I am riding them and not thinking of them at all, just pretending they are expensive Scandinavian vibrators. It’s hilarious.

I am supposed to like this movie. I am supposed to identify with Bridget Jones, weirdly recognisable and not recognisable as Renee Zellweger post-eye surgery (Internet says she is Sami which makes sense, because that eyelid thing she got done makes her look more ‘white’ like a conventional blond, not the ‘unique’ look she had before which was sort of Asian, the small slightly squinty eyes – once a guy said I looked like Renee Zellweger and I got really mad because I was fat then in my twenties, like baby pudge fat, and so was Renee and also I found the characters she played, with their gaping wound vulnerability and cuteness and abjectness infuriating.)

I am supposed to identify because like that character I, too, am in my early 40s, single, reasonably but not too successful career-wise, a klutz, no longer fat and on occasion, after a drink or two, and what I convince myself was scintillating conversation, I have been known to accidentally fall on a dick and mistake that for love.

I have also gotten accidentally pregnant. How I felt when I found out was very different from how Bridget felt. I have never seen what I felt ever, on screen. It would probably work better as a performance art piece, spoken by Estelle Getty as Sophia Petrillo. I guess you could argue The Golden Girls was a precursor to the postfeminist shows of today, but really it was a different creature altogether. Not glossy, not young, not hip. Revolutionary for showing us female bonding in all its messy, complicated realness without the constant, tiresome spectre of fuckability looming over the characters and the audience. How I miss it. How I miss them.

Picture it. Dulwich Hill, a quickly gentrifying suburb in the Inner West, Sydney, Australia. Autumn (northern hemisphere spring) 2014.

You’re 41, in an off-on again relationship with a white Australian ex-music producer-rapper who thinks he was Korean in another life (seriously, he tells you straight up that he’s more Korean than you because he knows slang that he learnt from an international student). He wants to be a photographer, is talented enough but has no follow through, can’t keep a job, is an alcoholic who says he will change for you, and manages to stay sober for a year, giving you hope. But the rest of the time you walk on eggshells, taking the silent treatment like a pro, and the rages and the blackouts because he makes eggs for you in the morning. You love the cuddles and his smell. The warmth of his side of the bed. He’s a constant +1 at boring dinner parties.

He is hot enough, he doesn’t talk much (which is a relief) and looks like he’s listening – actually to be fair, he was a great listener. You love the sound of his voice, it’s rich and thick like chocolate syrup and so sexy, and you don’t like chocolate. You are very comfortable together, you have the same sick sense of humour, you get annoyed by the same things. You think he’s the one so you put up with all the little meannesses, because you’ve invested so much time and energy into him, into the project that is your relationship, and he loves you so much, he keeps telling you over and over. Even though he eats most of your food and doesn’t do his share of the housework and refuses to pay rent. 

Because - without him, what would you do? How could you face the exhaustion of playing the dating game, especially now that it’s all online and ‘ghosting’ is a thing and nothing is ever clear or permanent and everyone is scared. (Never mind that you’re in Australia where dating, like everything else, is vague. If the person you sort of remember having sex with is still in your bed in the morning, congratulations! You may be in a relationship?)

How could you stand the loneliness of coming home to an empty apartment and no one to watch Netflix with?

So you keep taking him back, and one time when he’s back, you’re watching one of those historical re-enactments of Jesus and for some reason this turns both of you on like crazy and you end up having sex on the couch. No worries, you think. You’re on the pill.

Who knew you would get knocked up on the pill at 41 watching Jesus? You feel so betrayed by your body. By science. By your gender and orientation. He’s convinced the baby is a miracle, a miracle baby and he cries and pleads with you to please please please have it. It will change him, it will change the relationship. You’ll get married. His mother will take him back. You’ll finally get to meet his mysterious parents who disowned him. And you actually consider it. Since, as the girlfriends your age you confide in tell you – it may be your last chance. You know the kid will be cute, smart, with a great sick sense of humor. It will be Aussie Korean Keanu. You could shape this little life.

But then reality kicks in – as does your body which can’t stop throwing up everything, including water and air, for two weeks straight. Your body rejects the poppyseed of pink tissue growing inside you. You realize there is no way you can have this child. You cannot raise two children. So you abort.

And it’s the most wonderful thing ever.

The nausea and the pain go away. You wait for the sadness to flood you and it doesn’t. Just the idea of sadness that you feel you should be feeling. The loss of potential. And you remind yourself how your love of potential always gets you in trouble. The future perfect doesn’t exist. At heart you are -- you have to be -- a ruthless pragmatist. You live in the now. You cope.

No one rescues you.

Unlike Bridget Jones. Who never once considers not having the baby. A film that glorifies motherhood – updating it for Gen X audiences who think they want to be Gen Y but in the end, smugly (and with non-ironic awareness) concede they want the happy heteronormative ending, the script of their parents, or rather grandparents (Baby Boomers experimented).

I don’t want this.

I don’t want Colin Firth who looks severely constipated all the time. Nor do I want Patrick McSupposed to be Hotness or any of these male ideals that are thrown in my face. I don’t want marriage. I don’t even want an equal relationship – I don’t believe in equality, it doesn’t exist. We measure it (like intersectionality). We quantify it as a mode of sameness.

What I want is dynamic equilibrium. Neither top nor bottom but glorious, perpetually fascinating, moving, changing switch. Someone who doesn’t crowd me or cling to me but also doesn’t flake on me, someone who actually has my back. A co-conspirator who gets the joke, who breaks the script, who realises there is a script.

Someone who, like me, has given up hope but still has a soul. 

This person lives in my head. I finally get that it's a fantasy, my fantasy, and I'm done projecting fantasies on people. Better to project them on screens. 

That is the romcom performance art piece I would write. It would have no white people (except as background and sidekicks), maybe some Jews, and they would be queer. There would be no happy ending. I would have a lot of great, empty sex, fall in and out of love with lots of inappropriate people, break and grow.

I would get over my writer’s block, Colin Firth would die, and I would finally get a dog.

The end.

© Jane Park