''Oh plunge your hands in water
Plunge them up to the wrist;
Stare, stare at the basin
And wonder what you have missed.''
...
''O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you can not bless.''
W. H Auden, 'As I Walked Out One Evening'
''Love being single as you can have fun with all different people and life is full of freedom and potential.''
...
''Whole London is full of couples holding hands...Am going to be alone for [the] rest of [my] life. Alone.'
Bridget Jones:The Edge of Reason (pp 189-90)
The rains make me crave Romantic Comedy. It is the soul's junk food. It is like putting your brain on a diet of cheeseburst pizza with fries, along with full-fat cappuccino with a topping of Belgian chocolate. It makes your intellect fatty, lazy, slowing it down with flab of fantasies and impossibilities, which brilliantly seductive as they are, would never be allowed to happen by the reality principle itself.
But then the rains make me crave cheeseburst pizza as well.
I was reading Bridget Jones recently (the films being my perennial favourites during the valedictory and vulnerable week between Christmas and New Year ) and wondering about the precise nature of its enduring appeal to the generations of women between twenty and fifty five or thereabouts ( i.e mothers and daughters alike) that speaks to their existential dilemmas in the the most incisively comic, yet compassionate, manner.
Helen Fielding's was an honest, fresh, brilliant and genre-defining text that unfortunately started the end-of-the-millennium trend of 'chick-lit' (a disparaging publishing category) which eventually spread its contagion to other forms of the mass-media in the forms of romcom/ chick-flick and telly sitcoms that centred on the ersatz female angst over not being able to find a partner well into her thirties while her biological clock ticks away. Think Rachel and Monica from Friends--smart, attractive women tortuously obsessing over the subtextual meanings of whatever happened or did not happen during their frightfully ambiguous dates, wondering whether this time they had indeed kissed the Prince Charming or it was yet another frog.
These were essentially urban, post-feminist fairy tales which addressed a generation of emancipated and empowered women who believed that they had the power to write their own destiny, that their mothers, the pioneers of the Second Wave feminism and Sexual Revolution, had inculcated in them, which would finally usher in the economic independence of the women of the 80s and 90s.
Herein comes 'The Bridget Jones Paradox': on the one hand she is conditioned by the Western, Capitalistic rhetoric of individual reliance and self actualization, under the aegis of the democratic- Welfare state, on the other hand she is retarded in her progress by a more primordial and fundamental need-- which the Greeks called 'Eros--the life force, the organic, creative urge to be emotionally and sexually complemented by a sympathetic Other, who rounds out the jagged edges of our own fragmented and flawed egos. This second process requires a surrender of the independent and competitive ego to the demands of companionship and co-habitation. Caught in the crack between the two conflicting worlds, the modern woman must struggle a lot as she finds happiness in neither, and if she tries to bring the two together, they combust in her face in some sort of inexplicably flammable reaction.
As to why this genre flourished in the 90s is easy to detect. It was due to a millennial anxiety over the future of marriage and family, as sacred, inviolate institutions,in the face of divorce, gay rights, live-in / casual sex, to say nothing of the involvement of technology in the forms of cyber hook- ups and dating apps. Thankfully Tinder, with its horror stories, was still beyond the stuff of wildest nightmares of Bridget and her romantically maladjusted tribe of friends.
Stragglers like Bridget--the dreamers, the idealists, the urban Cinderellas--must fall behind in the race, as it is all about sexual marketability and manicured perfection in the brutal, fast-paced, opportunistic, and unforgiving universe of new age dating ; anything less than that, one is out.
Bridget, the hot mess with her ill-timed humour, goofy sincerity, her cellulite-ridden thighs and golden innocence is a recipe for disaster. But she is also Everywoman, all and each one of us with her inept, pissed, humiliated 'loser'- girl persona; with all her pratfalls, blunders and imperfections, waiting to be accepted, loved, invited into the arms of the man who will see through all that and just understand.
This gendered fantasy gives rise to an urban community--a sorority of acutely confused women--offering each other disastrous dating advice, solely on the basis of second-hand theoretical knowledge derived from unrealistic dating manuals, and outright harmful coaching from dating Gurus. It is all because they are scared to engage with a man's raw, unedited emotions that can destroy their carefully constructed self perception.
Helen fielding creates a delightful comedy of manners, set in cyber age London, to expose the confusion, vanity, nastiness and bad faith that surround the war of sexes in the contemporary world of seduction and courtship.
One of the laughable moments of such false enlightenment and confused clarity goes: ''The more a man likes a woman the more he will avoid getting involved.'', declares one of Bridget's best friends, to help her get over an especially painful and humiliating break-up. ''So chucking me could be a sign that he is really serious about the relationship?'' surmises a distraught and miserably muddled Bridget. It is also a stab at the now infamous Mars-Venus theory laid out by John Gray that became the dating Bible of an entire generation.
What all this theoretical confusion did, in effect,was poison the ground of honest and spontaneous engagement on a basic, human level between the sexes, creating cut-throat suspicion, distrust and hostility on both sides of the gender-divide. Women, dying to secure their lovers' respectful affection, were, and may be, still are reeling under indifference, infidelity, flakiness and downright lies from them; they are feigning cool detachment whilst bleeding and feeling suicidal inside.
This expectation is not simple, neither is it easy to fulfill. There is no authoritative guide to help one navigate through the tricky waters of another persons true emotions which he is trying his best to hide. As it turns out, men on the other end, on whom the onus of this expectation lies, who are supposed to just miraculously understand us simply by looking, are equally awkward, afraid of rejection, emotionally inept and clueless about what women want. Like Mark Darcy, Bridget's dream suitor, they try to look distant and angry when they are devastated and sad, giving women a totally wrong message about their emotional reality.
We, who are addicted to Friends, Sienfeld, Will and Grace, or How I Met Your Mother, i.e classic television sitcom, know how men let themselves be pointlessly torn between the 'Bro' obligation to act 'cool' so as to maintain sexual tension, and a more human and primal need to be emotionally and sexually rewarded by a woman worthy of attention.
As cynical adults we all have baggage. Love has burned us before, and we have been Love's fool, against our best judgement, over and over again. So we do not trust our gut anymore. Even the 'diary' that should ideally record our deepest and most honest emotions (the English Puritan tradition especially encouraged journal keeping as a form of spiritual exercise, hence the first novel in English language was a fictional diary indeed, that of Robinson Crusoe) is no more a trustworthy record of our innermost reality, as the content comes filtered through the individual's bad conscience, corrupted both by complex modernity and the gradual process of maturation in such an atmosphere heavy in cynicism.
In other words there is no end to our lying to ourselves. And these lies are ultimately self-wounding. ''It is awful being single'', bursts out Bridget's feminist friend Shazzer, ''no one to put their arm around at the end of the day...Alone. Completely alone.''
So here we come. Cynical adults in love. Chronic (self) deception our forte. Unlike innocent teenagers, unashamed of their emotions,their romantic fragility, the prelapsarian Romeos and Juliets, confessing their love for each other in cheesy but honest platitudes, we, the older folk, are cautious, guarded, repressed and most fatally inhibited. We are protecting ourselves from the hurt and betrayals by our constant defensive lies in order to barricade our emotional core, our scared and fragile egos, against the assault of disillusionment. We have walked through numerous break-ups/ divorces,and acts of disloyalty, to learn that love is a mug's game.
So is there no way forward from this insuperable deadlock? This dilemma that eludes answers? Must we accept the cynical reality of the unattainability of love and simply grow up into embittered old men and women with nothing but a misanthropic worldview to see us through the slow and painful years of dotage--emotionally bankrupt, spiritually destitute?
It seems that there is. But it is an arduous road to take which is not for the faint-hearted.
It is through the painstaking stripping away of the defenses and lies, the prejudices and false selves, of the paralysing fears and doubts discrediting our most authentic and legitimate desires, that the road to salvation lies. To be finally able to stand naked before the Other who has such unlimited power over us that they can annihilate us with their rejection. The secret is to be able to embrace our vulnerability.
It is not without coincidence that all major Romantic Comedies deploy this symbolic moment of emotional nakedness through the metaphor of literal and visual denudation,a sequence of physical exposure, a literal glimpse of the protagonist's raw skin:
In The Proposal, Ryan Reynolds must see Sandra Bullock (his tyrannical boss) emerge naked from the bathroom before he can break through her tough exterior of professional ambition and emotional resistance, and engage with her on a romantic/sexual level;
A nearly naked Bridget (Renee Zellweger) hobbles through a particularly bad London snow, in flimsy lingerie, chasing a wounded Colin Firth walking away from her life, attracting disapproving stare from elderly pedestrians, before she can confess her vulnerability for him and be invited into his open arms offering warmth, refuge and covering her dimpled thighs, her thirties' girth and her shame. It is a typically kitschy and effective moment in conjunction with an earlier scene when he lists the things he hates about her and tops it with a stilted and awkward confession, ''I like you as you are''.
This is it. The salvation.
The key to every woman's ( and I suspect every man's too) deepest erotic fantasy.
Every adult's emotional G spot. To find acceptance with our skinny arms or saggy breasts, our fat bellies and gray hair. Our lies, our secrets. Our scandals and crimes.
Our mistakes,our imperfections.
Our shame,our failures, without any extenuating explanation.
Our naked, naked rawness, where we bleed and know you hurt too, because of the hurt we have caused each other.
To be loved liked that. In spite of that. Because of that.
Love in this profound sense, is forgiveness.
Just as a fully dressed Mark Darcy covers a naked Bridget in his arms, her naked surrender, with the ends of his coat, love is that compassion too.
And love is that moment of nakedness. It is the most awkward and risky act of self-exposure, which does not come without inspired grace. This decision to finally take off the protective layering of lies, defenses and denials.
Now what if the person standing across you stabs you at your most vulnerable moment?
They can. And they do.
It is quite common in life. But the fun of inhabiting a text, is that unlike in real life, there is a teleological structure in a text ,ensuring a happy closure as a generic imperative with Romantic Comedy.
We love Bridget because she has the emotional courage to do what we can not.
To risk self exposure in the face of infinite odds.We know that the author is on her side. In life we do not have that faith in either karma or fate.
So we let life pass us by.
Before Sunrise, A delicate, meditative poem on celluloid, uses a few stanzas of Auden's text I have quoted in the beginning, as a philosophical commentary on our hopeless reality :
''In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have its fancy
Tomorrow or today''.
We are scared but Bridget isn't. That's how fairy tales end; And fairy tales are precious because they give us what life denies--the miracles, the redemption, that are tucked beneath the wrong choices and the bad timings that life is made of.
Plunge them up to the wrist;
Stare, stare at the basin
And wonder what you have missed.''
...
''O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you can not bless.''
W. H Auden, 'As I Walked Out One Evening'
''Love being single as you can have fun with all different people and life is full of freedom and potential.''
...
''Whole London is full of couples holding hands...Am going to be alone for [the] rest of [my] life. Alone.'
Bridget Jones:The Edge of Reason (pp 189-90)
The rains make me crave Romantic Comedy. It is the soul's junk food. It is like putting your brain on a diet of cheeseburst pizza with fries, along with full-fat cappuccino with a topping of Belgian chocolate. It makes your intellect fatty, lazy, slowing it down with flab of fantasies and impossibilities, which brilliantly seductive as they are, would never be allowed to happen by the reality principle itself.
But then the rains make me crave cheeseburst pizza as well.
I was reading Bridget Jones recently (the films being my perennial favourites during the valedictory and vulnerable week between Christmas and New Year ) and wondering about the precise nature of its enduring appeal to the generations of women between twenty and fifty five or thereabouts ( i.e mothers and daughters alike) that speaks to their existential dilemmas in the the most incisively comic, yet compassionate, manner.
Helen Fielding's was an honest, fresh, brilliant and genre-defining text that unfortunately started the end-of-the-millennium trend of 'chick-lit' (a disparaging publishing category) which eventually spread its contagion to other forms of the mass-media in the forms of romcom/ chick-flick and telly sitcoms that centred on the ersatz female angst over not being able to find a partner well into her thirties while her biological clock ticks away. Think Rachel and Monica from Friends--smart, attractive women tortuously obsessing over the subtextual meanings of whatever happened or did not happen during their frightfully ambiguous dates, wondering whether this time they had indeed kissed the Prince Charming or it was yet another frog.
 |
| Friends: The Anxiety of New Age Courtship |
These were essentially urban, post-feminist fairy tales which addressed a generation of emancipated and empowered women who believed that they had the power to write their own destiny, that their mothers, the pioneers of the Second Wave feminism and Sexual Revolution, had inculcated in them, which would finally usher in the economic independence of the women of the 80s and 90s.
Herein comes 'The Bridget Jones Paradox': on the one hand she is conditioned by the Western, Capitalistic rhetoric of individual reliance and self actualization, under the aegis of the democratic- Welfare state, on the other hand she is retarded in her progress by a more primordial and fundamental need-- which the Greeks called 'Eros--the life force, the organic, creative urge to be emotionally and sexually complemented by a sympathetic Other, who rounds out the jagged edges of our own fragmented and flawed egos. This second process requires a surrender of the independent and competitive ego to the demands of companionship and co-habitation. Caught in the crack between the two conflicting worlds, the modern woman must struggle a lot as she finds happiness in neither, and if she tries to bring the two together, they combust in her face in some sort of inexplicably flammable reaction.
As to why this genre flourished in the 90s is easy to detect. It was due to a millennial anxiety over the future of marriage and family, as sacred, inviolate institutions,in the face of divorce, gay rights, live-in / casual sex, to say nothing of the involvement of technology in the forms of cyber hook- ups and dating apps. Thankfully Tinder, with its horror stories, was still beyond the stuff of wildest nightmares of Bridget and her romantically maladjusted tribe of friends.
Stragglers like Bridget--the dreamers, the idealists, the urban Cinderellas--must fall behind in the race, as it is all about sexual marketability and manicured perfection in the brutal, fast-paced, opportunistic, and unforgiving universe of new age dating ; anything less than that, one is out.
Bridget, the hot mess with her ill-timed humour, goofy sincerity, her cellulite-ridden thighs and golden innocence is a recipe for disaster. But she is also Everywoman, all and each one of us with her inept, pissed, humiliated 'loser'- girl persona; with all her pratfalls, blunders and imperfections, waiting to be accepted, loved, invited into the arms of the man who will see through all that and just understand.
This gendered fantasy gives rise to an urban community--a sorority of acutely confused women--offering each other disastrous dating advice, solely on the basis of second-hand theoretical knowledge derived from unrealistic dating manuals, and outright harmful coaching from dating Gurus. It is all because they are scared to engage with a man's raw, unedited emotions that can destroy their carefully constructed self perception.
Helen fielding creates a delightful comedy of manners, set in cyber age London, to expose the confusion, vanity, nastiness and bad faith that surround the war of sexes in the contemporary world of seduction and courtship.
One of the laughable moments of such false enlightenment and confused clarity goes: ''The more a man likes a woman the more he will avoid getting involved.'', declares one of Bridget's best friends, to help her get over an especially painful and humiliating break-up. ''So chucking me could be a sign that he is really serious about the relationship?'' surmises a distraught and miserably muddled Bridget. It is also a stab at the now infamous Mars-Venus theory laid out by John Gray that became the dating Bible of an entire generation.
What all this theoretical confusion did, in effect,was poison the ground of honest and spontaneous engagement on a basic, human level between the sexes, creating cut-throat suspicion, distrust and hostility on both sides of the gender-divide. Women, dying to secure their lovers' respectful affection, were, and may be, still are reeling under indifference, infidelity, flakiness and downright lies from them; they are feigning cool detachment whilst bleeding and feeling suicidal inside.
This expectation is not simple, neither is it easy to fulfill. There is no authoritative guide to help one navigate through the tricky waters of another persons true emotions which he is trying his best to hide. As it turns out, men on the other end, on whom the onus of this expectation lies, who are supposed to just miraculously understand us simply by looking, are equally awkward, afraid of rejection, emotionally inept and clueless about what women want. Like Mark Darcy, Bridget's dream suitor, they try to look distant and angry when they are devastated and sad, giving women a totally wrong message about their emotional reality.
We, who are addicted to Friends, Sienfeld, Will and Grace, or How I Met Your Mother, i.e classic television sitcom, know how men let themselves be pointlessly torn between the 'Bro' obligation to act 'cool' so as to maintain sexual tension, and a more human and primal need to be emotionally and sexually rewarded by a woman worthy of attention.
As cynical adults we all have baggage. Love has burned us before, and we have been Love's fool, against our best judgement, over and over again. So we do not trust our gut anymore. Even the 'diary' that should ideally record our deepest and most honest emotions (the English Puritan tradition especially encouraged journal keeping as a form of spiritual exercise, hence the first novel in English language was a fictional diary indeed, that of Robinson Crusoe) is no more a trustworthy record of our innermost reality, as the content comes filtered through the individual's bad conscience, corrupted both by complex modernity and the gradual process of maturation in such an atmosphere heavy in cynicism.
In other words there is no end to our lying to ourselves. And these lies are ultimately self-wounding. ''It is awful being single'', bursts out Bridget's feminist friend Shazzer, ''no one to put their arm around at the end of the day...Alone. Completely alone.''
So here we come. Cynical adults in love. Chronic (self) deception our forte. Unlike innocent teenagers, unashamed of their emotions,their romantic fragility, the prelapsarian Romeos and Juliets, confessing their love for each other in cheesy but honest platitudes, we, the older folk, are cautious, guarded, repressed and most fatally inhibited. We are protecting ourselves from the hurt and betrayals by our constant defensive lies in order to barricade our emotional core, our scared and fragile egos, against the assault of disillusionment. We have walked through numerous break-ups/ divorces,and acts of disloyalty, to learn that love is a mug's game.
So is there no way forward from this insuperable deadlock? This dilemma that eludes answers? Must we accept the cynical reality of the unattainability of love and simply grow up into embittered old men and women with nothing but a misanthropic worldview to see us through the slow and painful years of dotage--emotionally bankrupt, spiritually destitute?
It seems that there is. But it is an arduous road to take which is not for the faint-hearted.
It is through the painstaking stripping away of the defenses and lies, the prejudices and false selves, of the paralysing fears and doubts discrediting our most authentic and legitimate desires, that the road to salvation lies. To be finally able to stand naked before the Other who has such unlimited power over us that they can annihilate us with their rejection. The secret is to be able to embrace our vulnerability.
It is not without coincidence that all major Romantic Comedies deploy this symbolic moment of emotional nakedness through the metaphor of literal and visual denudation,a sequence of physical exposure, a literal glimpse of the protagonist's raw skin:
In The Proposal, Ryan Reynolds must see Sandra Bullock (his tyrannical boss) emerge naked from the bathroom before he can break through her tough exterior of professional ambition and emotional resistance, and engage with her on a romantic/sexual level;
A nearly naked Bridget (Renee Zellweger) hobbles through a particularly bad London snow, in flimsy lingerie, chasing a wounded Colin Firth walking away from her life, attracting disapproving stare from elderly pedestrians, before she can confess her vulnerability for him and be invited into his open arms offering warmth, refuge and covering her dimpled thighs, her thirties' girth and her shame. It is a typically kitschy and effective moment in conjunction with an earlier scene when he lists the things he hates about her and tops it with a stilted and awkward confession, ''I like you as you are''.
This is it. The salvation.
The key to every woman's ( and I suspect every man's too) deepest erotic fantasy.
Every adult's emotional G spot. To find acceptance with our skinny arms or saggy breasts, our fat bellies and gray hair. Our lies, our secrets. Our scandals and crimes.
Our mistakes,our imperfections.
Our shame,our failures, without any extenuating explanation.
Our naked, naked rawness, where we bleed and know you hurt too, because of the hurt we have caused each other.
To be loved liked that. In spite of that. Because of that.
Love in this profound sense, is forgiveness.
Just as a fully dressed Mark Darcy covers a naked Bridget in his arms, her naked surrender, with the ends of his coat, love is that compassion too.
And love is that moment of nakedness. It is the most awkward and risky act of self-exposure, which does not come without inspired grace. This decision to finally take off the protective layering of lies, defenses and denials.
Now what if the person standing across you stabs you at your most vulnerable moment?
They can. And they do.
It is quite common in life. But the fun of inhabiting a text, is that unlike in real life, there is a teleological structure in a text ,ensuring a happy closure as a generic imperative with Romantic Comedy.
We love Bridget because she has the emotional courage to do what we can not.
To risk self exposure in the face of infinite odds.We know that the author is on her side. In life we do not have that faith in either karma or fate.
So we let life pass us by.
Before Sunrise, A delicate, meditative poem on celluloid, uses a few stanzas of Auden's text I have quoted in the beginning, as a philosophical commentary on our hopeless reality :
''In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have its fancy
Tomorrow or today''.
We are scared but Bridget isn't. That's how fairy tales end; And fairy tales are precious because they give us what life denies--the miracles, the redemption, that are tucked beneath the wrong choices and the bad timings that life is made of.
