I was reading about a Gen X woman who had watched one of the old Bridget Jones films with her Gen Z daughter, in a desire as it were to share the spirit of Y2K, which does indeed now present itself as something of a prelapsarian era. And the daughter (God bless her) said to her mother sorry, I don’t get this, she’s not even fat.
Then I started seeing all these publicity stories about the fourth Bridget Jones film, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, with images of Renee Zellwegger’s Bridget - now a midlifer single mother - hanging out with Leo Woodall, that brilliant young actor who was in that oversold Netflix One Day. The BJ4 film is ‘much anticipated’, which amazed me because I didn’t know that there had ever been a BJ3.
One Boxing Day, I’m guessing in 2002, a family member on a power kick forced everybody to watch a DVD of Bridget Jones’s Diary; if anybody left the room the film was paused so that they should miss not a moment. And somehow, perhaps on a very long flight, I sort of saw Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. From what I read on imdb.com, the third film - Bridget Jones’s Baby - was more of the same, albeit with a baby. Now, apparently, ‘Bridget is back and is about to take over London’, which to me seems unlikely, not least given the reaction of the above Gen Z-er, but I am sure that the considerable brains behind the venture know exactly what they are doing.
The films have been hugely successful. The first one grossed £222 million. The one I didn’t know about, the baby one, took £8.11 million in its opening weekend. They are awash with talented people (Hugh Grant, an actor I’ve always deeply admired, not least for his ability to coast unimpaired through dross, gives a casual little screen acting masterclass in that first film). And Bridget, in her original newspaper column form, was a sharp cultural concept: a London cool girl whose spiritual home is the 192 in Notting Hill, and whose life is a shambolic affair behind the flat door and beneath the Agnès b.
Obviously it was the right thing, commercially speaking, to turn this on-the-money creation into - what? A woman who works in publishing yet believes she could plausibly claim to be on the phone to F.R. Leavis, who pratfalls around like Miranda Hart while dressed, more often than not, in the grimly titillating style of a Benny Hill girl, who does not bother to check whether she might have Coco the Clown cheeks before walking into a smart dinner event. Renee Zellwegger’s sweet vulnerability saves the day, but it always bothered me that Bridget had to become ridiculous in order to be likeable.
What I really found bothersome, however, is that she was - is - meant to be in any way representational. For instance: I have never been married. And I can truly say that I have never felt, or been treated, in the way that those first two Bridget Jones films portray as, yes, OTT, but also… here comes the word…. relatable.
I intensely dislike relatable. According to the OED the word was first recorded in the early 18th century, but I doubt very much that it was used in the contemporary manner (Robinson Crusoe, he’s just so relatable). It is the concept that I dislike, the way in which it both flatters and deforms the relationship between a creative product and its consumer. There is something reductive about - say - the way in which Elizabeth Bennet, a character so enchantingly vital that most readers will innately respond to her, was reconfigured for the You’re Worth It generation (and of course as a prototype Bridget Jones): relatable because she was the girl who got the man by ‘being herself’. She did, yes, but there was slightly more to it than that…
I was a watcher of Sex and the City, which may have been designed to be relatable, although like Bridget’s fatness it is deemed not to have aged well (but never, as the And Just Like That sequel does, offer up mea culpas for your previous Cavalier crimes against today’s Roundhead morality. It merely diminishes what went before). In fact I rather loved SATC, for its acuity, its jokes, its speed - for being great television. But did I ‘relate’ to it? Yes, a bit, of course I did, just as I related a bit to Fleabag and a bit to the women in Jean Rhys and a bit to Ursula Brangwen and a bit to Enid Roach in Slaves of Solitude. But I don’t relate to Jean Brodie, or to Linda Radlett, or to Jane Eyre, or to most of the female characters in Shakespeare. I don’t particularly relate to the women in those mid-20th century novels that I love so much, the ones defined and confined by marriage in Elizabeth Taylor and early Elizabeth Jane Howard.
What I relate to is the work. The creation. Therefore I relate to all the characters in all the books and plays and screen works that I love. That feeling - which is a loose, happy, extremely magical one - does not need to be packaged up and brainstormed and crowbarred into the concept of relatability.
Of course what I am saying is completely pointless: relatable rules (does this apply to men also? My sense is that women are considered peculiarly susceptible, which is annoying in itself). And I completely understand why it rules: it is an easy sell. Presumably in Bridget Jones; Mad About the Boy the relatability factor will be the fact that Bridget is ‘ageing’ (Botox bee stings replacing Coco the clown cheeks). As indeed she would be; given that, as years go by, the total that one has amassed goes up.
I may be wrong, and it may be that the Trials of being a Midlifer - and considerably older than the character played by Leo Woodall, with whom Bridget is possibly having a romantic interlude - will not be a central theme of BJ4, but if I were an outgoing member of the Conservative administration I wouldn’t bet on it. This culture is obsessed to the point of lunacy with ageing. It is determined to make it ‘relatable’, even though so much of what is offered up is based upon nonsense: take, for instance, this forthcoming film with Demi Moore, The Substance, which was a hit at Cannes and whose premise is that Demi - playing a past-her-prime film star, ie herself - can inject a dodgy new drug and become Margaret Qualley for half the week.
The film is doubtless very good, but I cannot begin to express how much I loathe the sound of it. To me it is absurd on two levels: first, because Demi Moore is a beautiful woman with genuine star quality, who should not need to play a cruel meta version of herself, even though it was her choice and it has generated her vast amounts of publicity. Second, because Demi Moore is a beautiful woman who, having rigorously maintained her appearance and used the best possible cosmetic interventions, looks to have aged about ten years since Disclosure (1994) and could probably pass for Margaret Qualley’s older sister. So the whole thing seems to me both vaguely sado-masochistic and ultimately false.
Not relatable.
But then relatability, too, is a concept that can be faked.
Do let me know what you think, should you care to… including on a question that I am wholly unequipped to answer: do Swifties ‘relate’ to Taylor…?
Very very good. My personal bugbear is the limiting nature of relatability, the idea that you cannot enjoy or engage with anything that doesn’t somehow show you an exact representation of yourself. I like Star Wars, Spartacus, The Comedians and Scoop, but none of them is “relatable” *and I don’t need them to be*.
You have nailed it all on the head Laura (dare I say I found this to be so relatable , I jest!). Such an overused buzz word I find, and beautifully pointed out, from Elizabeth Bennett to Carrie Bradshaw, both I loved in my own way, but could I relate and make their experience mine.. goodness no! A little side note on the age point..I was reading the other day that Angela Lansbury was always cast as the much older (think Manchurian Candidate), mentally gargoyled woman because she wasn't deemed to be pretty or young enough looking...it really irked me beyond belief!