Severe Birthday-Related Thirties Panic

In which we learn that Bridget is an Aries

This weekend I went to see Frozen 2. I had high hopes for Frozen 2 because I am exaggeratedly grateful for any cultural object that my 4.5 year old and I can both enjoy. This is a vanishingly small list of things that currently has 3 book series, 3 movies and 0 tv shows on it. I was so eager to add Frozen 2 to this arsenal of entertainments. If Frozen 2 had been like 4% more competently done I would have LOVED it. But unfortunately I could not love it because the plot was inexcusable gobbledygook. I promise I’m about to work Bridget in here! So here’s the thing about plot: I’m not a big plothead! A lot of my favorite books and movies aren’t taut machines with perfect construction; I love characterization and atmosphere and vibes. If you can capture a vibe, I’m yours, auteurs and authors. But there is a baseline level of competence that I insist on in an animated Disney movie and I’m sorry to say that F2 does not pass muster. It relies on retconning these various elements onto the world of the first movie: an enchanted forest, a river of memories, Elsa’s ability to see into the past by creating ice-sculptures of moments in time, a kindly and wise native tribe who are related by blood to our platinum blonde, blue-eyed heroine, and an alternate explanation for the heroines’ parents’ death that is both unnecessary and nonsensical. This is sort of the tip of the flash-frozen iceberg but since I suspect that you’re not actually super interested in the Frozen Cinematic Universe I will stop myself there. My point is just that the same exact world domination could have been attained by Frozen if it had just had a funny misunderstanding, a clear villain, and LITERALLY ANY clearcut existential threat to Arendelle that could be vanquished by the power of sisterly love. If you’re going to have a Plot, just have a simple one. It doesn’t matter if we can predict exactly where things are going; the fun, usually, is in getting there.

Helen Fielding understands this. She is not about to reinvent the wheel. She names a character Mark Darcy, made fun of him for being named Mark Darcy and being standoffish (“It’s like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting ‘Cathy’ and banging your head against a tree”), then calmly continues renovating Pride and Prejudice with zero apology. She sets up the pins, then knocks them down. It’s very satisfying as well as a good reminder for all of us who make things that there are places to be original and places to be derivative and structure is almost always a place to be derivative. Save the cat, et cetera. (I’ve never read it but I’m sure it’s correct!)

So in this third chapter of BJD — a really good chapter!!! — we don’t hear from Mark Darcy at all, because he is being reserved for a later plot purpose. Instead, we get more push-pull with Daniel Cleaver, who is committing emotional fuckwittage all over the place — most egregiously, when he invites Bridget to Prague for the weekend then is like whoops nevermind (“I can’t make Prague next weekend” - his actual words). This is a real thing that men do, believe it or not! See also: casually saying “marry me” in a way that’s obviously a joke but which cannot help but trigger all your most deeply repressed fantasies. God, Daniel Cleaver is garbage. Bridget gets to have a fun speech at him in this chapter where she tells him very sternly that how he has behaved is very bad and tells him to shut up when he makes fun of her. She immediately softens toward him, though, of course.

Also in this chapter: the item of intel about her mom’s new job as a television presenter is dropped in very casually, not even needing a whole scene around it. Helen Fielding is swimming gracefully and paddling her little duck feet frantically beneath the surface, plotwise!

Other highlights:

*“(necessity of open mouth during mascara application great unexplained mystery of nature)” one of those things that I swear I’ve never seen elsewhere in print and seems momentous. Imagine keeping your mouth closed. You’d have to be a robot!!

*“Work — once merely an annoying nuisance — has become an agonizing torture.”

*When Bridget comes home drunk and her diary records her drunk thoughts. It strains credulity about the literal diary-ness of the book, but we don’t really care about that. Argor sworeal brilleve.

*Subsequent hangover description: “Could feel water flowing like crystal stream into section of head where most required … maybe since hangovers are caused by dehydration water is drawn into the brain by a form of capillary action.” I can’t tell you how many times I have thought the crystal stream section of head part verbatim.

*Set piece at the end of chapter where Bridget tries to throw herself a birthday dinner party which gets out of hand due to over-enrollment and is rescued by her friends, who throw away the failed meal in progress, clean her kitchen and take her out for dinner. The best moment is in the lead-up when she has the prep planned to the minute then steps out to have a fag and it’s suddenly a quarter to seven.

Less enjoyable:

*I’m just really hating all the dieting parts this time through. They’ve never bothered me that much before but this time they’re actively bumming me out. At least Bridget isn’t that racist and is only a little condescending to her gay friend Tom!

*The scene where Bridget has to attend a tea party for her godson Harry’s birthday and the moms are all horrible in a very unimaginative way, competitive over their infants’ potty-trainedness and newborns’ APGAR scores. It’s very Shouts and Murmurs-level humor, or like that SATC episode where they go to Connecticut, which it predated by two years and may have influenced instead of vice versa but still. It’s so easy and stupid to make fun of bougie moms with young kids. Once you see the pathos of the whole mom situation it becomes a lot harder to find it humorous, in my unbiased opinion.

Bits and bobs:

“Sympathize with Jesus in sense of embarrassment he must, and perhaps should, feel over two-millenia-old social imposition of own birthday over large areas of globe.” (V. v. relatable thought that Bridget has about her birthday)

Tune in soonish for APRIL: Inner Poise!