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 

Deep Sleep

In my teens up to my early 30s, I got by on very little sleep. At most 6 hours a day, usually 4-5. I felt most awake in the early morning. I woke up mentally around midnight and hit my most lucid moments around 2 am. According to my grandfather, my father and various uncles, this is the time when ghosts come out. Scary, long-dead, amorphous (usually) women with long hair and no feet who waited for you in outhouses and country schoolrooms. Before Park Chunghee modernized the country through military “democracy.” Before the 1988 Olympics when I got my first bra and perm and playing cards buckled in the humid summer air. Before segyehwa. Before KPop.

When you write or party or watch a movie or have sex or do anything after midnight, time stops or slows down, and everything feels like a deeply significant event. Images, actions and moods take on an enhanced, dreamlike quality. For me it used to be the best time to write. Whether it was a poem, an academic paper or just me communing with myself and my future selves in the many journals I have kept since I was 8.

These days, I find myself craving sleep. Just like I crave food. Constantly. It’s as if living in my mind all these years has finally caught up with me at age 40. And all I want is to live in my body, experiencing as much pleasure as I can in it and through it. This means often turning off my brain. Not analyzing. Not thinking. Not judging. This is difficult for me. Believe me.

Sleep is good for this, because it allows for dreams. I read recently that Thomas Edison used to sleep only 3 hours a day, much like Leonardo Da Vinci, both famous eccentric inventors. Edison would tie metal balls to his wrists and sleep sitting down (while working, one presumes). As soon as he dozed off too much, the sound of the metal balls hitting the ground would wake him up and he would immediately write down any genius ideas he had cooked up in his sleep before he forgot them.

Impressive.

Insane.

I’ve been trying to write down my dreams. It’s hard. I think sometimes forgetting dreams is not bad. Why do we try so hard to remember? To document memories through writing or photos or videos? As if, by reminiscing over who we were in the past – through selective memory – we can better understand who we are and what we have become, or shouldn’t become? But sometimes the memories are burdens, just like histories. Writing can become a burden. Language is a burden.

Deep sleep – with no lucid dreaming, no neoliberal attempts to mine productive commodities from subconscious play – this is what I crave these days, and have decided to indulge in, with wild abandon. It is the most wonderful luxury.

To sleep in.

To not do anything.

To slow down.

To NOT GIVE A SHIT.

To become Luscious Vegetable.

Of course I can only do this when I’m on holiday or depressed. I’m an academic after all. I make my living by being awake, alert. This – “alert” – is the adjective that a PhD supervisor once used to describe me in a glowing reference letter. The sentence went something like, “She is one of the most alert students I have ever had the pleasure of supervising.” I think he probably meant “neurotic” and “paranoid” as well. These are the companions of alert. One becomes awake in this hyper conscious way -- of one’s environment and others -- through training.

When I was a kid, I had to develop really good nunchi. Because my mother who I love and who loves me but who used to be crazy, had a way of communicating her desire and anger in the most inconsistent ways. I had to learn to read her body language so I wouldn't make her mad, or disappoint her, or turn into my father whom she hated. With (some) good reason. My dad – now he really liked to sleep. He slept instead of writing the academic papers and books that would have gotten him tenure. He slept, I think, because he was afraid of the failure that he had become and kept becoming. He slept to escape a life he probably never wanted.

My brother, who is younger than I am, and much more successful (he owns his own company and can make friends with anyone) also liked to sleep. Once, when he was in elementary school, the teacher asked the students in class to to go to the blackboard and write what they most liked to do. Other kids wrote things like, “I like birthday parties … ice cream … Transformers.” My brother wrote, “I like to sleep.” The teacher thought he was a very peculiar child.

Almost everyone I’ve dated – except one strange exception who slept 12+ hours a day – has slept few and irregular hours. In my last serious relationship, I managed to convert my lover into someone who went from sleeping 3 hours a day to a regular 7-8 routine. He was very grateful. He also stopped being an alcoholic for 3 months because, he said, he loved me. But old and bad habits die hard. The lovely fairy tale we lived for a little while is over (the messy dramas documented neatly in my journal for future analysis). No doubt, he is back to the drink and 3 hours of sleep.

I write this in Kuala Lumpur at my friend’s quiet flat in the suburbs. The sky is overcast. I arrived 2 days ago from a conference in Hong Kong. I feel very glam and grateful to the universe. This morning I got up at 6 am then went back to sleep and woke up at 11 am. I am looking forward to delicious Malaysian food tonight. In a few days, I’ll be back in the air (my favorite place, nowhere), watching another bad movie while everyone else sleeps. Then to Korea, the place that didn’t feel like home for a long time. Oddly, it’s beginning to since I left my adopted home of America to live in a third space called Australia. A place where I have no history and no commitments. An in-between, interim place where I can indulge in deep and dreamless sleep every night. 

Part of 잠물결"Restless" - an art exhibit by Taey Iohe, Seoul, December 2013

Drowning Not Waving

paperclip pricks kill

tiny daily wounds fester

follow random

natural patterns

of swarms of ants and bees

lemmings and their

suicide trajectories:

dark puffy dots cover

the cold surface of the water

how lovely to meet a cool and quiet end.

but what if

that sought after

peace is only the portal

to a parallel world

with the same absurd day-to-day

the same stupid people with the same stupid

jokes and higher degrees and fancy

wooden salt and pepper shakers

receding hairlines extending bellies

popping out the same

smelly drooly mottled babies

shitting and sucking and crying

to be held

tight smiles masquerade as

happiness, fearful mediocrity
spews toxic purple fumes

as it burns, warms toes

feeds institutions and marriages

tuition, therapy, plastic surgery

away from that communal fire
a brief yearning,

not for dreams deferred,

but memories of what

dreams might have been
for what or why

© Jane Park 

Twelve Years Ago

What is it I want most in my life, she asks herself.

2001

The real new millennium

27 years and alone

Blunt cut growing out

Nails bit down to blood

Resolutions:

Drink more water.

Exercise.

Stop dating.

Stop fucking.

Make peace with silence.

Make peace with myself.

Where does she see herself in a year, 5 years, 10?

An airy condo, a spiral staircase
White window seats

Splashed with colorful pillows

Windows

Big, clean, clear

A breathtaking study

Wall-to-wall books

An uncluttered mind complemented by

A spare, efficient body with 
Elegant, logical lines

Lines that don't break.

Drink more water.

Exercise.

Make peace with silence.

Make peace with myself.

Make peace.

© Jane Park 

Emille

The Sacred Bell of King Songdok

This bronze bell, the largest of its kind in the Orient, was cast in 771 A.D. during the reign of King Hyegong, the 36th ruler of Shilla. An impressive example of Shilla metal craft, the bell is approximately 3.78 meters high and 2.24 meters in diameter, weighing 18.9 tons. The making of the bell was first undertaken by King Kyongbok to honor the spirit of his deceased father, King Songdok. King Kyongdok died before realizing his dream and the bell was not completed until the reign of his son, King Hyegong.The hollow tube, which is believed to control the tone, the kneeling apsaras (or heavenly maidens), the four panels (each containing 9 nipple-like protrusions), and the lotus and grass designs are all typical of bells of the Unified Shilla period (668-935). The bell is commonly known as the Emile Bell, a name derived from an ancient Shilla term, pronounced em-ee-leh that means "mommy." According to legend, the bell would not ring when it was first cast, so it was melted down to be recast. The head priest of a temple threw a small child into the molten metal, saying he was told to do so by a vision. When the bell was recast and struck, it sounded like the baby's cries of em-ee-leh when the child was sacrificed.  --Gyeongju National Museum Travel Guide

Above mountains swathed in thin blue mist

Teeter giant dragonflies

Buzzing drunken mid-summer songs

Under black earth and bright green grass

Slumber kings and soldiers

Servants and concubines

Ancient tongues, wrist bones, and hair

Ache and hope

The everyday grind

Between the two worlds

A large bronze bell

Is tolling is pleading

Inside 

The necessary sacrifice of a woman 
Who had nothing else to give

A nation under threat

A grateful, indifferent king

The child’s voice cries for his mother

em-ee-leh em-ee-leh em-ee-leh

Knowing no one will answer

No one will come

© Jane Park

From Whence Comes the Title of my Blog

Ernest Hemingway's Iceberg Theory of Prose:

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured, or well-bred, is merely a popinjay."

(Death in the Afternoon. Scribner, 1932)

A popinjay:

1. a person given to vain, pretentious displays and empty chatter; coxcomb; fop.

2. British Dialect . a woodpecker, especially the green woodpecker.

3. Archaic . the figure of a parrot usually fixed on a pole and used as a target in archery and gun shooting.

4. Archaic . a parrot.

The popinjays are winning over the icebergs in the world. Of course I have problems with Hemingway as I would with any man who compares a woman to a racing yacht. But if I let ideology govern my taste in art, I'd be bored out of my mind. (And as sexist as that metaphor is, you have to admit it's pretty compelling and it sticks.) What I admire about Hemingway is his approach to writing as life - thought and feeling embodied in action. I also have a thing for doomed, stoic heroes. I.e. being them not necessarily wanting to be with them. How to write a Hemingwayesque heroine - Octavia Butler comes close - but I want my female heroes to be slightly less geeky, and funny. A funny woman of color. Now that would be revolutionary.