Bridget Jones deserves more credit

On the cover of The Hollywood Reporter this week, beautiful blond tresses cascade around Renee Zellweger, actress and movie star, whose latest movie Bridget Jones’s Baby premieres this month. “Renee Returns” is the title of the cover, and quotes such as “Why are we still talking about how women look?” and “Renee Zellweger on Aging in Hollywood, Gender Inequality” fill the inner pages. All this is seemingly in response to the October 2014 Elle Women in Hollywood red carpet, where Renee stepped out and was called “unrecognizable” by critics and paparazzi because of apparent cosmetic surgery that she had undergone.

Renee has had to answer for her supposed physical change in a litany of different ways. At first she agreed that she was “different” and in fact, the change was attributed to being finally “happy.” Later, she penned a Huffington Post article addressing the rampant sexism conveyed in one critic’s review of the new Bridget Jones trailer, an article titled: ”Renee Zellweger: If She No Longer Looks Like Herself, Has She Become a Different Actress?” In her own piece, Zellweger does not admit to having undergone surgery, but instead raises questions on why women in Hollywood are not allowed to move beyond scrutinization of their youth and beauty.

This weekend, in either a subconscious ode to the new movie or just through pure coincidence, I decided to re-watch Bridget Jones with my boyfriend (yes, men can and should watch it, too). And I was struck by how prophetic and powerful Bridget was, and it got me thinking about some terms brought up in school.

The other day, in my Intro to Television class, we discussed the propagation of the television trope of the “unruly woman” — who is defined by her relationship to excess in life. She might swear a lot, eat a lot, drink a lot, sleep around a lot. She is the character exemplified by Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath in Girls, Mindy Kaling in The Mindy Project or Ilana and Abbi in Broad City.

Even though it seems that Girls, Broad City and The Mindy Project have been adored and lauded for their seemingly “revolutionary” feminist depictions of female life and love on the small screen, Bridget was one of the first examples of this “unruly woman.” She “drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney and dresses like her mother,” as her future romantic interest Mark Darcy proclaims — at first disgustedly and then, later, adoringly.

And yet, I do not feel that Bridget Jones was given the credit she deserved when she first arrived in cineplexes back in 2004. Why wasn’t Bridget given more notice and confidence in literature and media for her own exemplification of this unruly woman? Part of me feels it has something to do with genre. The romantic comedy, with examples ranging from The Philadelphia Story  to You’ve Got Mail to Friends with Benefits, has long been pigeonholed into the category of a “chick flick” — a term often used with abandonment and meant to degrade and dismiss the female stories at hand.

However, as some critics would argue, the genre itself has all but died out and settled into the cinematic graveyard, along with the classic Western and film noir. But I think that might have to do with the infiltration the genre has had with making its way to the small screen. Even though we wouldn’t necessarily call The Mindy Project or Girls romantic comedies in the purest sense of the term, they definitely fit into the genre. Now, however, they are engendering a new type of discussion around the female narrative, one that is no longer relegating the female story to the back seat, away from the male audience’s eyes. And yet, Zellweger’s criticism seems to still be facing the backward views we might have had in 2004. We still haven’t allowed Bridget Jones and the actress who portrays her to transcend typical Hollywood conventions. The media has not allowed Zellweger — or perhaps any other female actress whose name doesn’t start with “M” and end in “Streep” — to ignore the age factor. Even though THR cover story is in no way damning, part of me wishes they’d never brought up the controversy at all.

If we live in a media landscape that now respects and even reveres the character trope exemplified by Bridget Jones, don’t we think it’s now time to move past the age factor, into a new era? Bridget was a stepping stone to normalizing this unruly woman, but we still have a long way to go to normalizing other aspects of being a woman. Maybe it’ll take a while, and we’ll look back at Bridget Jones — and by osmosis, Zellweger herself — as a revolutionary feminist icon only in retrospect. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Minnie Schedeen is a a senior majoring in cinema and media studies.  Her column, “Film Fatale,” runs on Wednesdays.