It is a truth universally acknowledged that any Jane Austen fan worth their salt is up on all of the latest “Pride and Prejudice” spinoffs and updates.
Like the “Lizzie Bennett Diaries.” Or “Austenland.” Or the lovably gory trainwreck that is “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”
I love all things “Pride and Prejudice,” even if they’re only related to Austen’s original work by a fraying thread. But I can’t get behind “Bridget Jones.”
Last year, I finally caved into the hype behind the “Bridget Jones” franchise and decided to give it a try. At first glance, the movies seemed reasonably funny, with the added bonus of a thinly veiled P&P-esque plot and an appearance by Colin Firth — the original silver-screen Darcy — as Mark Darcy.
So I watched the movies. In the first one, “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” the titular character is a single 30-something-year-old woman who works at a publishing company in London. Bridget herself narrates the story to us because it’s told through the lens of her personal diary.
Throughout the movie, she meets Mark Darcy, and they instantly hate each other. Bridget begins a relationship with Daniel Cleaver, her boss. By the end of the movie, though, she realizes that Daniel is, as she would say, “caddish,” and Mark is the guy for her.
I ended my afternoon of Netflixing the movie feeling slightly humored but also slightly grated. And I just couldn’t figure out why.
Sure, Bridget is funny. She’s fairly graceless and bungling, hardly able to make it through any social situation without an enormous gaffe. But she’s also obsessed with marriage and constantly worries about her appearance.
I forgot about the movie until a few months later when I read “The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild” by Susan J. Douglas. She makes the case that enlightened sexism — the idea that because gender equality ostensibly has been won, it’s okay to perpetrate sexist stereotypes in popular culture because we’re all “in on the joke” — is still thriving in our culture.
By this rationale, it’s okay to be obsessed with marriage, men and your weight. Because men and women are now equal, and oh my gosh, get your crazy feminist rantings out of my face, okay?
“Bridget Jones” fits this pattern perfectly. It even serves to create the narrative that feminism is restraining women from acting on their “true” impulses.
As Douglas writes, “The diary mode ‘reveals’ that real women are not, in their secret selves, constrained by the feminist thought police; they naturally, even inherently, rebel against feminism and are genuinely pathetic slaves to the desires for men and marriage.”
It appears that “Bridget Jones’s Baby” is no less free of Bridget’s bungling and general ineptness than the previous two movies. In the movie, she strings along two men — Mark Darcy and the newly introduced Jack Qwant — during the course of her pregnancy because she’s unsure which one is the father.
Bleck. Count me out on that one. It may be a truth universally acknowledged that Austen fans are fully in the know when it comes to retellings of her beloved stories. But no one said we have to like all of them.
acgroove@indiana.edu
