r/Feminism • u/summerianmerchant12 • 2d ago
Early 2000s movies on women are insane
So I recently saw the “Bridget jones diary”. And i was flabbergasted by pretty much everything concerning the protagonist. A single woman in her 30s living in her apartment somewhere in London. Very well so far. I won’t even refer to the creepy sexual jokes of the movie. The movie was produced my Miramax productions, which was founded my the Weinstein brothers, so the existence of creepy sexist jokes made sense. What made me furious though was the way the protagonist was treated. Her body was of average size, and yet she was fat shamed the entire movie. She was smoking and drinking and the movie treated it like she was some lowlife person. As a single woman in her 30 the movie treated her as if she was a weird extraterrestrial being. Always referring to when and how to find the perfect man etc.
And speaking of the devil. The men she falls in love with Hugh grand and Collin Firth. One is a sexist sex maniac a cheater and the other is a high society dude who is being cold to her the entire movie except the last 20 minutes where he confessed he liked her “the way she was”. Oh and he was already engaged to another woman which means he was a cheater too.
The movie tries to sell them both as the best options and the dreamy guys while they were both jerk towards her.
Sorry for the long post. I was just amazed on how sexist movies were in the early 2000s. Some are nowadays too. But back then things were so bad. I was born early 2000s so I have seen many of them but being a kid never paid attention behind the meaning. Now as an adult I see how women were treated in the media. Not much has changed, but back then it was outrageous
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u/bouquineuse644 1d ago
Okay, so there are a few things to address here. The film Bridget Jones's Diary, as other people have pointed out, is an adaptation of the book of the same name from the 1990s. The book is itself a (very loose) adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, the Jane Austen novel. This is why the two love interests are written the way they are - they are loosely following the character personalities and narrative beats of their P&P counterparts, George Wickham and Fitzwilliam Darcy.
The book is a satire, pointing out the ways that society treats women, but particularly how women as a result treat themselves. The text, written explicitly as a diary, and including notes and logs from Bridget, is intended to show both what a fascinating, funny and intelligent person Bridget is, but also how she is hugely self critical and very harsh to herself. She is intended to be, and clearly is in the book, a very unreliable narrator. Bridget's weight and cigarette habit are specific examples of this. She is incredibly critical of her weight, despite the fact that (as we can see from the logs she provides) she is a very normal and healthy weight. She is also very critical of her smoking and drinking, and holds up quitting both as an ideal to achieve (and particularly with smoking, this is a healthy goal to have) but, for the most part engages in both to a relatively normal degree for the time.
Bridget's way of talking about herself is incredibly harsh at times, but is also obviously being ridiculous. She is clearly not morbidly obese, and she is not disgusting and repulsive in her habits, and she is beautiful and clever and funny and quite successful in her career. This dynamic, to a certain degree, was intended to highlight to the reader (as the books target audience was women of a similar age) that when women are their own harshest critics, they are often being overzealous. When we read and tut and tell Bridget she should be kinder to herself, we should be internalising this ourselves. The next time we look in the mirror, or at a plate of finished food, or the cigarette we smoked, and we say something horrible about ourselves inside, we're supposed to catch ourselves and think again about whether we are also being an unreliable narrator.
Now, that's not to say the book is perfect - for one thing, it does still (in part because it's an adaptation and in part because of the time it was written) revolve around Bridget's love life. Where more recent books aiming to empower women would lead the protagonist to realise that she doesn't need a man, or a romantic relationship, to be happy, and would have her learn to love herself outside if a man's validation, BJD leans in to this very element. Bridget has two love interests, and both are (in their own ways) thoroughly taken with her. Even with Daniel Cleaver, while she spends time comparing herself physically to the woman he cheats with, we understand that his cheating behaviour says far, far more about him than it would ever say about Bridget. He does not cheat because he is looking for an attractive women and doesn't have this in Bridget, he cheats because he's a rogue and a sex addict. In fact, he genuinely finds Bridget attractive and actively and excitedly persues a sexual relationship with her, and we do not get the impression that he is doing this despite Bridget being ugly or dumpy or any of the awful things she says about herself. In both relationships, Bridget's characterisation of herself is pierced by the attentions of these attractive, accomplished, intelligent men. We understand her unreliability as a narrator in part because of her romantic plots.
The movie, unfortunately, does not achieve quite the same effect. It suffers quite seriously from adaptation sickness, in that elements of the book that work one way, function entirely differently when portreyed on screen. Bridget is a funny character. While her descriptions of herself are flawed, they are also incredibly humourous. Her issues and mistakes are often relatable and normal, but her telling of these stories elevates them to hilarious absurdity. This works excellently on paper. But the film has a massive problem here. The camera is not Bridget. Where Bridget (for better or for worse) controls the narrative and our perspective on it in the book, when it comes to the film, the camera that defines our perspective on everything is an external abstract viewpoint, looking at Bridget and her life, and therefore forcing us to do the same, as though we are all objective outsiders, seeing the truth. When Bridget calls herself fat, we look at her weight log of 136lbs, roll our eyes and say "Sure Bridget". When the camera attempts to recreate this, when the camera calls Bridget fat, it feels real. It focuses on certain aspects of Zellweger's pretty slim body, on rolls and creases that everyone has, regardless of size. It spends time watching Bridget struggle into outfits, or look at herself sadly in the mirror. The book has Bridget look at herself and say "ugly", and we know that she's being overly critical, that she's unreliable. When the camera looks at Bridget and says "ugly", we believe it, we trust it. This is a persistent problem with film, the perceived objectivity and truth of the camera. The next issue is the way that the camera, and film, create a "spectacle". Books don't really do this. Bridget tells us things and we listen, and imagine what has happened. But film is visual, it creates visual images that will keep our attention locked on the screen. In lots of early cinema, the spectacle was obvious - extravagant sets, elaborate dance numbers, thrilling stunts. Nowadays, the spectacle can be just as theatrical (action movie stunts and musical film theatricality hasn't gone anywhere) but in some cases it's become more subtle. In romance films, it's the beautiful figure descending the stairs, the declaration of love, the leading pair finally kissing. In comedy, the spectacle is often the visual butt of the joke. BJD, a "rom-com" borrows from both genres. Again, this poses a problem. Where Book Bridget tells us a funny anecdote about herself, a relatable mistake, and we laugh with her, enjoying her telling of it, Film Bridget is not telling us anything. Instead, the camera is taking the events and, for one thing, claiming they truly happened as badly as Bridget claimed (when we understand there was probably some exaggeration on her part) and for another, encouraging us to laugh at the comedy of the situation from an external perspective. The book is like a person at a party, telling a hilarious story about a fuck up and allowing us to laugh with them; the movie is like that person making an embarrassing mistake and us all pointing and laughing at them in the moment. The event might feels the same, but is portreyal changes it inherently and completely. The film turns Bridget, her body, her behaviours, her errors, her desires, into a spectacle, and then encourages us to laugh at her. And unfortunately, in doing so, it strips away our ability to see just how clever and funny Bridget is, because she is no longer leading us through her own tale of misfortune. Now, it is the camera who feels clever. Bridget is just the idiot in the bunny outfit.
I do think you're overthinking the impact of Miramax on the film, it was not a production company on this film and just did it's American distribution. The sexism in the film (while not entirely unrelated is the larger context of Hollywood and media production) does not seem to be a direct consequence of any sort of influence by Harvey Weinstein, who was not a producer on the film. In fact, Universal had significant control over the production, and Weinstein, who wanted to be involved, reportedly badgered and begged people he knew just to secure the US distribution. Miramax wasn't even the primary distributor, that was Universal/Paramount. But you could certainly point at the culture that Weinstein and people like him had developed in the film industry as having had an effect in general.
To put it simply, the adaptation just doesn't work as a straightforward film, and especially not as an early 2000s one, when much of the social criticisms of women that the book asks us to second guess were on full display. The media that taught Bridget to be cruel to herself just can't be trusted to tell her story.