Valentine's Day Massacre
The second chapter of BJD, encompassing February
Thank you so much for joining me on this adventure! I hope everyone has now got ahold of a book or digital download and is reading along, because this won’t make as much sense if you’re not, and it makes little enough sense to begin with. If you’re still shopping, I like the Penguin Ink edition that’s in my Substack profile. I know someone, maybe a couple of someones, who actually went out and got that “emotional fuckwittage” banner tattoo, isn’t that fantastic??? The original ‘sex-doll eyes and mouth emerging from diary pages’ cover is gross, but it is iconic and it did its job, and at the end of the day that’s all that matters when it comes to covers, I guess.
One question I’ve gotten from many of you in the BJDD community is “Emily, why do you hate the movie version of this book so much?” I don’t think it’s wrong to like the movie but I do think the movie totally misses the point of the book. In its defense, I am the only person ever ever to have understood the subtle, secret point of the book, which probably only becomes clear after you’ve reread it every December for several years running. Lucky for you, I will reveal it to you now:
The movie’s problem is that it takes Bridget at her word that she is a sad sack. Movie Bridget spends a lot of time reading self-help books and feeling bad that she’s single, and the time she spends at home alone is portrayed as lonely and pathetic. Renee Zellweger also has that droopy affect, all wrong for the character, to say nothing of her accent. But in the book, even as Bridget complains constantly about everything, she’s also living a very fun and exciting life — an easy thing to miss, because of all the complaining! She gets off on the dramatic highs and lows of her crushes but that kind of self-dramatizing sadness she feels when things aren’t going well is part of the fun. She also goes out with her fellow singletons many nights a week and spends her days doing pretty much whatever she wants at all times, other than her frankly undemanding job, where she mostly flirts with her boss’s boss. Honestly it’s a shame anything has to happen in this book. I would have been content with just a lot of descriptions of smoking, drinking a little bit too much, and eating weird snacks while watching TV. Readers — especially, perhaps, readers like me who are no longer in the feckless happy-hour portion of their own lives — understand that Bridget is having a blast, and that a boyfriend is gravy. Whereas, watching the movie we are made to feel like Bridget is seriously at risk of dying alone and being eaten by an Alsatian.
This chapter mostly moves the plot forward, doing a lot of heavy lifting so that things can get into place for hijinx to ensue in later chapters. Bridget’s ridiculous mom is revealed to be having an affair with a “smoothie” she met on vacation, leaving Bridget’s poor dad to cry on her shoulder. The flirtation with Daniel Cleaver progresses to sex, an outcome that was inevitable as soon as they started “electronic messaging” about her skirt. And in a fun scene that proves the point I just made, Bridget goes to dinner at her “smug married” friends’ house.
She thinks very mean thoughts in this scene — so much meaner than rom com heroines are usually allowed to think! “‘Yes, why aren’t you married yet, Bridget?’ sneered Woney (babytalk for Fiona, married to Jeremy’s friend Cosmo) with a thin veneer of concern whilst stroking her pregnant stomach. “Because I don’t want to end up like you, you fat, boring, Sloaney milch cow,” was what I should have said.” See?? She doesn’t actually want a life other than the one she’s currently living.
Other things I especially enjoy about this chapter:
*I forgot to say this earlier but ‘Silk Cut’ is such an appealing name for cigarettes, it makes me want to eat them. Bridget refers in passing in this chapter to the Martin Amis novel where a character “starts wanting a cigarette even when he’s smoking one. That’s me.” It’s fun that Bridget, the character, supposedly hasn’t read Money but nevertheless shares some of Martin Amis’s antic and high-energy prose style, as well as his knack for describing hangovers (“vile, acidic”).
*The romcom trope where a character is phony in an attempt to fit in but is so bad at it that it’s winsome: Daniel and “Simon from marketing” are talking about “foot-ballers being arrested for throwing matches,” and she says “I know it’s a thuggish way to behave, but as long as they didn’t actually set light to anyone I don’t see what all the fuss was about.” Tee hee.
*passing reminders that Bill Clinton is president and Princess Diana is still alive
Please join me again next week, for “March: Severe Birthday-Related Thirties Panic”!