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With a fourth Bridget Jones film in the works, and the inevitable backlash that will ensue, we should examine which characters we tear apart, says Hadley Freeman
BRIDGET JONES is back, and that means singletons, smug marrieds and, most predictably of all, critics carping about how much they hate the character. When news broke last week that a fourth movie will start filming in May, based on Helen Fielding’s 2013 novel Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, the usual moaning followed. Bridget is ‘anachronistic’, ‘irrelevant’ and with a life ‘unrecognisable’ to women today, claimed the commentators.
Tchuh, as Bridget would say, what a load of emotional fuckwittage. It’s interesting to see which fictional characters attract this kind of criticism. I’ve never heard anyone complain about, say, Bertie Wooster’s chronic drinking and general idiocy, and James Bond has been shagging and shooting people for longer than most of us have been alive.
No one complains that their lives are ‘unrecognisable’ or that they are irrelevant or unrepresentative. And yet Bridget, like her American sort-of-sister Carrie Bradshaw, is accused of all of those things, because she’s a female character, created by a female author, and a lot of women love her. It is a rule of thumb that anything women enjoy and men don’t will be widely derided as stupid, yet similar things men love get a pass.
Fashion is sneered at as silly, yet football is celebrated as a national pastime, even though one involves clothes, which people have to wear every day, and the other involves people chasing a ball up and down a field for no reason at all. It’s the same thing with Bridget Jones, plus an extra issue: female characters are expected to be ‘relatable’ (oh, dreaded word) in a way male ones are not.
This means audiences are supposed to be like them, and approve of them. But Bridget was never perfect – that was always the point of her – and her obsession with her weight was always ridiculous, as her friends told her repeatedly. One of my fa
