by Megan Robinson, Staff Writer

Within the DVD of Sharon Maguire’s 2001 romantic comedy Bridget Jones’s Diary lies the special feature entitled “The Bridget Phenomenon.” Bridget Jones stole the hearts of millions in the UK first with Helen Fielding’s witty column, wherein the fictional Bridget Jones would give her opinions on real day-to-day concerns, then went global with the original publication of Bridget Jones’s Diary in 1996. On the page and eventually on the screen, Fielding’s character captured the experience of the modern woman in a way that was only just beginning to be explored with the likes romantic comedies from Nora Ephron as well as the adaptation of Candace Bushnell’s own column to television in the hit HBO show Sex and the City. In “The Bridget Phenomenon,” Fielding sums it up succinctly: “I think the reason why so many women all over the world have identified with Bridget Jones is that it’s about the gap between how women feel they’re expected to be and how they actually are.”

As Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) finds herself on the silver screen in sequel after sequel, including a film releasing this year, it seems the sentiment still rings true over 20 years later. Each film has been a smash-hit at the box office grossing well over $200 million each, with Bridget Jones’s Diary as the reigning champion with a box office total of $334,273,059. In short: the world has had Bridget Jones fever for well-over 20 years with no signs of stopping. Each film has, however, been released in varying states of the cinematic landscape, particularly for the romantic comedy which struggles to exist on the silver screen today. While Bridget Jones, the character, remains the same year after year, her films represent these radical shifts in tastes and the industry alike, each acting like a perfect time capsule of the period they were released in. To be a time capsule, however, is not a bad thing: indeed, the longevity of the Bridget Jones franchise seems to be in the simultaneous comfort and novelty of each film, where Bridget still represents the everywoman but grows with us as well.

Bridget Jones’s Diary has entered the pantheon of classic romcoms since its release in 2001 for obvious reasons. A modern retelling of Jane Austen’s seminal romantic novel Pride and Prejudice, there is no world in which Bridget Jones’s Diary is a failure; the use of a classic and perfect romantic structure with new characters that illustrate the issues of modern society the same way Austen had hundreds of years before screams “classic.” Romantic comedies had fallen to the wayside by the 1980s, as Erin Carlson writes in I’ll Have What She’s Having: How Nora Ephron’s Three Iconic Films Saved the Romantic Comedy: “The Screen Actors Guild reported a widened gender gap in 1989, with men seizing 71 percent of of feature film roles and 64 percent of TV roles… Hollywood courted young men from Boston to Beijing who overwhelmingly preferred Guys Chasing Guys… over gender-balanced fare that focused on character, words, and women”(100). Slowly, though, a shift began: from Norman Jewison’s 1987 hit Moonstruck and Rob Reiner’s 1989 romance When Harry Met Sally to the beginning of Nora Ephron’s career as a director and the rise of Richard Curtis as a defining romantic screenwriter of the 1990s, the perfect conditions were formed for honest, slightly un-glamorous, but charming women-led films. Bridget Jones’s Diary may have released towards the tail-end of this movement, but it arrived with a bang.

Bridget Jones is a modern woman born of third wave feminism, where the question of whether it’s even possible to “have it all” as a woman began to form. The film is uproariously funny in presenting that dichotomy Fielding described: Bridget goes from an impressive job in publishing to a local TV anchor job and has a wonderful apartment in the city, but she spends most nights alone, sometimes watching Frasier with a bottle of wine and the depressing, adult contemporary station blasting. Bridget trips over her words, cooks a birthday dinner including blue soup and orange parfaits so sweet it’s closer to marmalade, and goes through the same ups and downs over the course of a year as the rest of us. Every character is irreverent and charming, bringing the blunt and explicit conversations we have in real life to the silver screen with ease. Though everyone in the film seems to be questioning whether their lives are complete, it’s Bridget that nails that all too familiar fear many women have—am I too old, too fat, too independent, to find love?

For some, this represents how Bridget Jones’s Diary is so alien to modern society; after all, Millennials became a generation that made getting married and having children well into their 30s the norm rather than the sad exception for some lucky spinsters. In fact, you’ll see the internet often rife with posts about how Bridget doesn’t need to lose weight, and the film is promoting the horrific diet culture of the 2000s that decided that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Therein lies the “time capsule” description as a caveat. However, the seasoned Bridget Jones’s Diary fan recognizes that, in the end, Bridget is loved for who she is, and it was society’s constant pestering about her weight, her clothes, and her biological clock going “tick-tick” that kept her from seeing that love was blooming—all of these insecurities are the distraction.

For 2004’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Sharon Maguire exited the director’s chair and Beeban Kidron stepped in. In just three short years, however, the cinematic landscape had fully shifted, and romantic comedies were no longer after Oscar gold, despite the previous film landing a nomination for Zellweger’s performance. 1999’s There’s Something About Mary (dirs. Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly), according to Erin Carlson, marked a paradigm shift in romantic comedies, as it beat-out Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail both at the box office and even critics: “The Farrelly brothers flick unleashed ample gross-out humor to spin the classy genre on its head…To some, Mary’s blockbuster bona fides seemed to signal the end of the verbal romcom that Nora [Ephron] revived and the birth of a slapstick generation” (267). Though films inspired by that same verbal romcom form like Bridget Jones’s Diary and 2002’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Joel Zwick) still captivated audiences, a shift in the form was felt and subsequently reflected in The Edge of Reason.

The first Bridget Jones film opens with a reluctantly attended Turkey Curry Buffet; the sequel with much the same, only this time Bridget is no longer single, and instead she happily meets with boyfriend Mark in a matching ugly snowman sweater. While the first film, though, melds cringe comedy with serious romantic drama, the second throws Bridget through the slapstick wringer in what is a far cringier affair. If the most embarrassing thing that happens to Bridget in the first film is that she accidentally lands on a cameraman sliding down a firepole, showing the local area her behind on television, the most embarrassing thing that happens in The Edge of Reason is a race to the bottom. When your main character is able to report live “from a big vat of excrement,” landing from her skydiving journey in a literal pig pen in the first 5 minutes, you know she’s going to have a bad time. It may play the hits of the Turkey Curry Buffet and another fist fight between Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), but The Edge of Reason aims to up the stakes with as many outlandish gags as possible: Bridget’s botches skiing down an entire mountain all the way back to her hotel room, falls off of Mark’s roof while attempting to stalk him, and is arrested for drug trafficking in Thailand.

The Edge of Reason has a colder, slicker, digital look to it that sets it apart from its predecessor’s warm, lived-in aesthetic. It is also a categorically worse film, taking Bridget Jones from the land of the mildly exaggerated to the fully hyperbolic idea of a modern woman. She is, though, still Bridget Jones, and though she may make herself look terribly insecure and pathetic in this sequel, her concerns still mirror those of the everywoman. “Time capsule” is even more applicable to this film than its predecessor, though this time the term does have its caveats: the film reaches a strange apex of racism, homophobia, and transphobia all rolled into one when Bridget enters Thailand that no seasoned Bridget Jones fan can defend. And yet, it still compels millions to this day, though some of that might be borne out of the innate inability to look away from a car crash we all have.

In what had appeared to be the end of Bridget Jones’s cinematic journey, Sharon Maguire returned for a third entry in the franchise: 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby. Yes, the same Bridget Jones who was in her 30s in the first film all the way back in 2001 was finally going to have a baby. The catch? She has no idea whose baby it is. In a shocking twist, Bridget and Mark did not stay together after The Edge of Reason, but a rekindled spark between them right after a brief connection with tech mogul and mathematician Jack Quant (Patrick Dempsey) at a music festival—the kind of casual attitude towards sex that Bridget Jones help to normalize decades prior. Despite the kooky premise, Bridget Jones’s Baby returns to the more grounded tone of the original film while also mirroring the biggest cinematic trend of the time: the legacy sequel.

Legacy sequels, reboots, and reimaginings have not gone away, mind you. After all, Disney hedged its bets on a new Indiana Jones just last year, with then 81-year-old Harrison Ford still donning the hat and whip all these years later. They would not, however, have done this without the proven success of legacy sequels and reboots in the 2010s, both on film and television alike: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (dir. J.J. Abrams, 2015) along with its sequels, Creed (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2015), Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller, 2015), Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2017), and so many hit the silver screen, while shows like Fuller House, Will & Grace, Murphy Brown, The X-Files, and more returned, some as if nothing had ever changed. Bridget Jones, too, returned, as if nothing had changed: the film opens with our heroine back in her apartment celebrating her birthday alone. This time, though, she rejects the adult contemporary and jumps around, as it were, dancing with a newfound lust for life. It’s this lust for life that will eventually create the sticky situations of the rest of the film, but this is a Bridget Jones that’s happier than ever being imperfect; of course, it always helps when two beautiful men fight over you.

Sure, Bridget Jones’s Baby reveals each returning character as a way to light up the centers of our brain that feel nostalgia. It calls back to previous films so that those of us in the know will have our own little jokes to love. But the closure between Bridget and Mark is nothing short of magical, where he proves through lamaze class all the way up to the delivery, where he literally carries her through a feminist protest celebrating his defense of a feminist punk group, what it means to have a soulmate. Work pulled him away from Bridget again and again, but in the end he proves to her that she will always matter more than she could ever have imagined after that first Turkey Curry Buffet. It’s impossible not to cry when Bridget asks him “What if it’s not yours?” and he responds, so elegantly, with “Then I’ll love him anyway. Just as I love you. Just the way you were, the way you are, the way you always will be.” It is nostalgia in a box of chocolates to hear this refrain from 2001: classic, sweet, and lovely. Bridget Jones’s Baby is, miraculously, not just a “where are they now” film riding a nostalgic high. In an ever-changing world, Bridget is technologically incompetent to a cringeful and hilarious degree, but also touches on the real whirlwind we’ve all been caught up in thanks to Silicon Valley types that believe the problem with society is that we don’t use our phones enough. Her pregnancy in her mid-40s truly represents a new kind of woman that was so stigmatized that she could never exist before without great confusion and shame—after all, they call it a “geriatric” pregnancy, much to Bridget’s shock. Bridget Jones’s Baby is a fantasy about soulmates where a woman just like you and me is allowed to achieve her dreams regardless of her age, just as Bridget Jones always has.

In essence, each Bridget Jones film represents the cultural stages of modern life as we’ve experienced them. They are “time capsules” that make us smile as we remember who we used to be and what, or who, we used to love. More than that, though, Bridget Jones, the character, is every woman who’s been convinced of her spinsterhood and tried every method to improve herself, only to realize she’s exactly who she needs to be. I am Bridget Jones: I can’t quit any bad habits, I’m known to kickstart my life only to give up a week into creating “the new me,” I do indeed spew verbal diarrhea often and trip over my words regularly, my love life has always made me look like a spinster with a ticking clock hanging over her head, and, yes, my relationship with food can only be described as toxic. But that’s not just why Bridget Jones matters. She is flawed, wrong by society’s standards, utterly strange but real, and in the end of each film, Mark loves her because of these flaws. In fact, multiple people love her deeply just as she is: her parents, her completely strange and kind friend group, and multiple love interests across films. Bridget Jones isn’t just a representation of me and millions of other women around the world, she’s a symbol of hope, a lighthouse that calls me to shore whenever I begin to drown in misery and loneliness. When I dig up each of these time capsules, I’m launched into a world where I can truly be myself, not who I’m expected to be. The Bridget Jones series is, somehow, an honest fantasy, wherein the spinsters of the world can be honest in our loneliness and be seen by someone who understands us while abandoning our cynicism when Mark Darcy tells us that “nice boys do fucking kiss like that.”

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