Sunday, April 17, 2022

Bridgerton 2: Jonathan Bailey's Anthony Bridgerton, Simone Ashley's Kate Sharma, Austen Adaptions, and Entertainment for Women


 There's a lot of serious stuff going on in the world and I want to talk about a Netflix romance series, "Bridgerton." I think entertainment is as serious as it gets. How we tell stories, what stories we tell, for whom we tell stories, about whom we tell stories, and what we tell ourselves about the stories we tell all direct our behavior. Fictional stories inform real life.
 
"Bridgerton" is a Netflix miniseries. It began airing in December, 2020, for eight episodes and eight more episodes appeared in 2022. It is based on romance novels by Julia Quinn. The series chronicles the loves of the wealthy, aristocratic Bridgerton family of a widowed mother and her eight children. They live in Regency-era England, that is the early nineteenth century. This is the same time setting of Jane Austen's novels. "Bridgerton" is very popular, having set viewership records for Netflix.

"Bridgerton" made headlines for two reasons. One, it has a multiracial cast. The 2020 episodes featured a torrid love affair between Simon, Duke of Hastings and Daphne Bridgerton. Simon was played by Rege-Jean Page, a tall, slender, stunningly handsome black man, and Daphne was played by Phoebe Dynevor, a tiny, ethereal white actress. Queen Charlotte, Lady Danbury, and a couple of other main characters are also played by black actors.

 

The idea was inclusivity and justice. It's a pretty stupid idea because, of course, as is necessary in the romance genre, the leads have to be very slender and freakishly gorgeous. There's a gif of Rege Jean Page taking off his shirt, and he appears to have no bodyfat and amazingly well defined chest and abdominal muscles. Romance storylines, just like romance actors, especially from the Regency era, revolve around the lives of the one percent. The leads are rich, privileged, young, healthy, attractive, and their biggest worry is what gown to wear to the ball.

 

So, no, there is nothing "inclusive" or "just" about telling stories about rich privileged, genetic jackpot winning black people alongside rich, privileged, genetic jackpot winning white people.

 

The multiracial casting was justified with a Woke legend that Queen Charlotte was actually black. Queen Charlotte wasn't black, but if enough Woke websites say she was that's as good as a time machine that can rewrite history.

 

So, the first season, the multiracial cast just struck me as stupid.

 

This season, the multiracial casting didn't bug me. In fact I enjoyed it. It was cool to see so many different types of faces on characters. Black actress Adjoa Andoh stars as Lady Danbury, a widowed mover and shaker who is intimate with the queen and who plots other people's lives for them. Andoh is a ham and she chews scenery and steals scenes. She's fun to watch.

 

Golda Rosheuvel is mixed race. She plays Queen Charlotte, and I love her. Queen Charlotte's husband is the notoriously mad King George. You see the world-weary sadness and resignation on Charlotte's face. Her scenes with her mad husband are heart-wrenching. Rosheuvel is manipulative, selfish, spoiled, imperious, sentimental, and kind, by turns. She's giving a great performance in a silly romance series and she really deserves better material.

 

"Bridgerton" would be infinitely less worth watching without Andoh and Rosheuvel, so, yes, hurrah for multiracial casting.

 

The second "Bridgerton" feature that made headlines was the sex. "Bridgerton" included a lot of nudity and simulated sex scenes.

 

A&E released the hugely popular 1995 "Pride and Prejudice" miniseries. In that miniseries, I don't think that the leads, Colin Firth as Darcy and Jennifer Elle as Elizabeth Bennett, kiss once. Maybe they kiss once. If they did kiss, it was so forgettable, I can't remember it. Okay, the internet is telling me that there was one kiss in the series, but you had to watch 359 minutes to get to that kiss.

 

Which brings me to this. Bill Maher once said that "Men's sexual fantasies disgust women and women's sexual fantasies bore men."

 

I think that's true. I think men and women are different. I think that there are such things as "men" and "women." I hear I could get kicked off Twitter for saying these transgressive things. One reason I'm not on Twitter.

 

For my money, the hottest scene in A&E's "Pride and Prejudice" is this. Elizabeth Bennet has made clear to Mr. Darcy that she does not like him. Circumstances conspire to land both of them in his house. His vulnerable young sister is playing piano (or harpsichord? Spinet?) As Bennet plays, Darcy watches her. The look in his eyes … and I don't even have to finish that sentence. The look in his eyes. Elizabeth can't even see him; her eyes are on the sheet music. Darcy, is just looking at her and O My Deity. That is the single hottest movie scene I've ever seen.

 

And if that were not enough excitement! A catty woman mentions the name of a man who broke Darcy's younger sister's heart. The sister fumbles on the piano, and Elizabeth rushes to rescue her, and to rescue the moment, without anyone being embarrassed. Elizabeth, ever so slowly, raises her eyes and makes momentary eye contact with Darcy. It's just so beautiful!

 

This scene takes place in a roomful of people. Everyone is fully dressed. There's hardly any dialogue at all and zero physical contact. Sexy. Hot. Unbearably hot. I can't watch the scene without reacting.

 

In contrast to this hot scene that involves zero physical contact at all, there's the hot scenes that men like. Use your imagination.

 

"Women prefer softer porn," said Senator Howell Helfin, as played by Chris Farley, in a Saturday Night Live skit satirizing the Clarence Thomas hearings. "Women like something with stories and costumes that will transport them to another place and time. Their inhibitions are loosened by escape when they are allowed to fantasize about another era. Women don't like close-ups of oversized genitalia. That's never gonna turn them on." chimes in Senator Strom Thurmond, as played by Dana Carvey.

 

Are most women like this? Do most women prefer subtlety and depth?

 

I don't know. I do know that Jane Austen's novels have not been out of print since 1832. There's no sex and no nudity in those books. There is story, there is depth, there is relationship. And women can't get enough of them.

 

I also know what couples look like. There is a plethora of young, beautiful women married to older, uglier men. Yes, these men are smart, deep, successful. But still old and ugly. There's nothing like that on the other side. You're not going to find young, hot guys marrying older, uglier, but smart, deep, successful women.

 

Men and women are different.

 

A&E's "Pride and Prejudice" might be dismissed as junk food, as candy, as escapism. But it's actually pretty deep, as are all of Austen's works. A woman's life rises or falls on her relationships, primarily on whom she is able to attract as a husband. Single women, even in our enlightened day and age, are poorer than men or married women. "Single women are more than three times as likely than married women or married men to live in poverty" (source). Elizabeth Bennet's carefully deployed smiles, eye contact, costumes, and witticisms carried the key to her lifelong fate.

 

There's a centuries-long debate on this topic. Contemptuous readers, usually men, dismissed Austen as "trivial." After all, there are no knife fights or sex scenes in Austen novels. One essay in this scrum is entitled – beautifully – "The Profundity of Trivial Things."

 

For women, eye contact matters. For women, kindness matters. For women, the whole story matters, from the first moment "He looked at me!" For women, how society, from your mother to your best friend to your social circle, matters. This is why I value the A&E "Pride and Prejudice." Because it honors what matters to women. Even though it is an escapist fantasy, it touches on real life themes, and treats them respectfully.

 

Nudity and graphic sex scenes strike me as more of a male thing. But women are rushing to watch "Bridgerton." Thing is, they are rushing to watch "Bridgerton" season 2, and season 2 has much less nudity and sex. So there's that.

 

The soft core porn in Bridgerton 1 is very much geared toward women, not men. Daphne has sex with one man, Simon. She loves him and he loves her. They marry and are committed for life. He will become the father of her children. Daphne is no man, she's no James Bond. She's not screwing a series of younger, very attractive nymphomaniacs whom she uses and then tosses aside. For James Bond, his sexual conquests, his "Bond girls," are mere sidelines, less important than the gadgets in his guns and his cars. His main story is about how manly and masterful he is at shooting, killing, fighting, and dominating. Daphne is all about her family. Simon, naked, muscly, ridiculously handsome Simon, is the center of her entire world.

 

I watched Bridgerton 1 because I wanted to write about the multiracial casting. That essay is here. I didn't enjoy it and I fast forwarded a lot. I was curious about Bridgerton 2. I thought I'd have a look. Season 2 caught me by surprise. I actually cared. I cared about what "Bridgerton" was doing right, and because I cared about that so much, I also cared about what "Bridgerton" did, for me, that was wrong.

 

"Bridgerton 2" focuses on the oldest Bridgerton, Anthony (Jonathan Bailey). He's meant to be 30 years old. Anthony is seeking a bride. He decides to marry Edwina Sharma (Charithra Chandran), but he is secretly in love with her older sister, Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley). For eight episodes, Anthony politely pursues Edwina by sipping tea with her, while secretly lusting after Kate. Around Kate, his muscles pop out of his cheeks, his nostrils flare – he is inhaling Kate's scent, that of lilies – and his knuckles grip tightly. Kate and Anthony's faces get closer and closer and you think they are about to kiss, but then they pull back, because, "I am a gentleman!" There is a lot of yearning and delayed clinching.

 

Men scoff at romance. They say, "It's so predictable. You know which characters are going to get together. There's no suspense."

 

It's true. You can usually tell which characters are going to get together in the end just by looking at the movie poster. No one can look at the poster of "When Harry Met Sally" – actually no one could hear the name of that movie – without realizing who is going to end up marrying whom.

 

The reward, for a romance fan, is not something so cheap and shopworn as mere "suspense." Rather, the reward is insight into human nature. The question romance asks is not so much "who" as "how." Women aren't ready to have sex with any attractive man they meet. They need a little more. What is that little more?

 

Elizabeth and Darcy, Harry and Sally, are both couples who hate each other when they first meet, and their lives take them apart from each other. Harry marries another woman; Elizabeth almost ends up with Lieutenant Wickham. But life, and the plot, and human nature, intervene, and Elizabeth discovers Darcy's true nature and learns to respect and admire him – and also to be amazed by his big, fat income and Pemberley, his big, fat mansion that will someday be hers. Harry and Sally support each other through heartaches and even try to fix each other up with blind dates, and through that process, they realize that "You are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night." Romance plays on the little details that cause people to love each other past that first attraction or repulsion. For a man, a woman is attractive because she is hot and she is available. A woman needs more, and romance provides that more. You see his and her characters develop, and see those characters mesh in a way that would work in a lifelong commitment.

 

I tuned in to "Bridgerton 2" to see HOW Anthony would end up with Kate instead of Edwina.

 

Bridgerton gets many aspects of escapist entertainment for women right. I like looking at the clothes. In day to day life, I am allergic to fancy clothes. If I had been born with that perfect body I might be a clothes horse. But I wasn't. I have the shoulders and arm length of a guy. I know because I wear men's clothes. When I try to wear women's clothes the shoulders are never wide enough and the sleeves are never long enough. With my body, I would look stupid in anything feminine. Also, I don't live a feminine life. I need clothes for hiking, for cleaning house, for sitting at a computer for hours at a time typing. So though I'm not into clothes in the real world, I am very much into clothes in the reel world. I want to see intriguing costumes onscreen. Bridgerton's characters change clothes in every scene. Queen Charlotte wears a different, even more bizarre wig every time she appears. Her last wig was almost as tall as she is. Simone Ashley, who plays Kate Sharma, has the distinctive ashy dark skin tone of Tamil people. Kate frequently wears midnight blue and that shade of blue against Ashley's skin is perfection.

 

Women and girls are central in Bridgerton in a way that we just aren't in real life. Women and girls are never this central in entertainment for men or mixed audiences. Only female audiences want to see entertainment with this many females onscreen.

 

The female characters in Bridgerton are not just hot chicks serving as arm candy for male leads. Bridgerton females range in age from Hyacinth, the youngest Bridgerton, who is meant to be 11 years old, to Lady Danbury, played by an actress who is 59 years old. Eloise, who is supposed to be 18 but acts more like 14, is the youngest character given much screentime and plot engagement. So far, Hyacinth is just the pesky little sister in the background. Each female character is given a story, agency, complications. Violet, the widowed matriarch, is a loving maternal presence, deferential to her oldest son, who is now the head of the family. She hangs back, but when she does choose to speak, she speaks depth. In a flashback, we see the trauma of the birth of her final child. The attending physician asks Anthony if he should save Violet or the baby, who is badly positioned. Should he cut the mother, and save the baby, or cut the baby, and save the mother, he asks Anthony, as Violet screams in pain.

 

Eloise is kicking and screaming against being pushed into a cookie cutter feminine mold. She wants to think, and her first crush is on a boy who thinks. He's working class, though, so it's hard to see how this relationship can go anywhere. The boy is not Eloise's most important relationship. Her most important relationship is with Penelope Featherington, another teenage girl. They have a fight that is as epic as any fight between two men in a Bond movie, but much more believable, and, ultimately, more important.

 

Lady Danbury runs everyone else's life. Queen Charlotte is complex.

 

Eloise has heart to heart talks with her older brother, Benedict. Anthony makes it a point to dance with his little sister, Hyacinth. Older women, Lady Danbury, Violet, and Queen Charlotte, tell younger males how to behave.

 

Bridgerton is a series where females, from adolescents to widows, matter. They don't just matter to each other. They matter to the Masters of the Universe, the young, hot guys.

 

That's very, very good. Clothes. Women mattering.

 

There's a great deal of emphasis on speech. Females are more verbal than males.

 

A trans person writes to me sometimes. This person is a very talented writer. This is someone who identifies as male, though being XX. I have never met this person in real life, so I have no previous memory of "he" as "she." And yet I can never think of "he" as "she" because this person writes like a girl.

 

I'm a language person. Language matters to me. Even punctuation matters to me. Women and men don't just use speech differently, women and men use punctuation differently. Trans extremism asks me to shut down the parts of my brain that assess biology, and also language.

 

Bridgerton's action is mostly talk. And clothes. Kate's midnight blue cape flying in the wind as she rides on horseback. I'm not thinking about the horse. I'm lusting after a midnight blue cape, and the skin tone that would work perfectly with that midnight blue cape.

 

Why set your story in the Regency period? Why not just make a series about a family of eight and their romantic adventures in 2022?

 

I think the Regency period is chosen because its societal norms meet women's needs.

 

Years ago, I met a man through a political event. He invited me to his apartment for dinner. I went. He had a spacious apartment in a nice Manhattan neighborhood and he served me a nice meal. After dinner was over, he asked me, very casually, to spend the night with him. I declined. I was astounded. He had made zero effort to seduce me. He was totally oblivious to my lack of interest in him. I'm painfully aware that society now offers women and girls few reasons to say no nowadays. The Sexual Revolution supposedly lowered all barriers to sex. Except, women and girls don't want to have sex with every man they meet.

 

Jane Austen paints a Regency world where strict social expectations ruled how men and women could make contact. Men and women, according to these rules, could not have casual sex. So they had to come up with some other way to connect. These strict rules worked for women. At least the women who choose, generation after generation, to read Austen think so. They want a world where men have to work to gain women's favor, and those men have to do that without immediate sexual intercourse. Sex takes on new importance exactly because it is so difficult to obtain, and so forbidden. Men have to give women witty conversation, and significant eye contact, patience, respect, and time.

 

Another way to achieve that same goal is to force your leads apart somehow. Anthony loves Kate, but for reasons I never understood, he proposes marriage to Edwina, her little sister. Older sister Kate, who insists that she hates Anthony, hovers in the background. Anthony and Kate trade barbs. At Anthony and Edwina's wedding, Kate drops her bracelet to the floor, and Anthony rushes to pick it up. Only then does Edwina suddenly realize that Anthony has been in love with Kate this whole time.

 

Jonathan Bailey, who plays Anthony, is one hell of an actor. He is apparently a stage actor as well, and he's gay. He's currently starring in a play titled "Cock." I guess it doesn't take place during the Regency period. Or I guess it could, if it were about poultry.

 

Bailey's performance in "Bridgerton" is powerhouse. I can't remember the last time I've seen anything quite like it. He reminds me a bit of Ralph Fiennes in "The English Patient." In that movie, Fiennes also was intense and romantic. Bailey also reminds me of Rudolph Valentino.

 

Bailey is not the handsomest man in the world, but he brings so much intensity, conviction and focus to his role that he is irresistible. He plays Anthony so thoroughly that I really believe I'm looking at someone named Anthony Bridgerton who lived 200 years ago, and that's remarkable, because the series revolving around Bailey is pretty absurd and unreal. It's plainly fantasy.

 

Bailey's depiction of a young man who watched his father die and who had to take on the burden of the entire family, who is tight-assed, rigid, humorless, arrogant, selfish, priggish, domineering, hypocritical, hot-headed, and undone by love for Kate Sharma, is utterly believable, and even poignant. He reminds me of my older brother Mike, who played daddy and mommy to me when we were kids and poor and both daddy and mommy were away all day and much of the night at minimum wage, manual labor jobs.

 

So, yes, Bailey's performance is entirely believable.

 

But it's also completely a performance from a romantic fantasy. Bailey is, as his part demands, larger than life, melodramatic, swoon-worthy, hot-as-hell, and entirely worthy to occupy the front cover of a romance novel.

 

I tuned into "Bridgerton 2" casually, but I sank into "Bridgerton 2" as if it were a vat of hot chocolate, because I was so moved by, and so fascinated by, Jonathan Bailey's performance as Anthony.

 

Simone Ashley, who plays his love interest, Kate Sharma, is supernaturally beautiful. She has huge eyes, and a doll's perfect nose, lips, and chin. Her skin is flawless. She has enough hair for four people. She is tall and even her thighs, visible in "Bridgerton 2" are slim.

 

She'd make a great runway model.

 

I never believed in Ashley's Kate Sharma. I never saw warmth, or desire, or humor, or anything other than an exquisitely beautiful face. I don't know if Ashley received poor direction or if she's a beginning actress. Yes, other voices see Ashley very differently, and praise her performance. For me, there was nothing there.

 

But it's more than Ashley's onscreen flatness. Kate Sharma is the single worst romance heroine I've ever encountered. Kate is a psycho. She's a character from a Hitchcock movie, not a Regency romance.

 

Kate Sharma is schizophrenic. With her little sister Edwina, Kate is a submissive masochist. Kate refuses to live her own, entire life, insisting on trying to give her life to her little sister Edwina. She does this because she was the child of her father's first wife. After his wife died, he married again, to Lady Mary, and Mary and her father gave birth to Edwina. Then her father died, and Kate was left as the daughter of a woman who did not give birth to her. Kate feels she must justify her existence, so she puts Edwina first in all things, and refuses to marry so that Edwina can find a husband.

 

Behind the scenes, though, passive aggressive Kate is doing everything she can to sabotage Edwina's happiness. Kate puts Anthony's hand on her, Kate's, breast. Kate drops her bracelet to the ground at Edwina's wedding. Kate, full of guilt, tries to jump a horse over a hedgerow in a rainstorm, and ends up fallen and unconscious. Kate is a freaking mess. She's a character from a dark Freudian case study, not a romance!

 

With Edwina, Kate is a submissive. With everyone else, Kate is a virago. I can hunt! I can assess horse flesh! I can do code! Kate insists, aggressively and obnoxiously. She isn't believable at any of this. Katherine Hepburn could convince me, in any movie, that she was the superwoman she claimed to be. Simone Ashley did not convince me that Kate could diagram a sentence. She doesn't come off as smart or competent. Just as, endlessly, pretty.

 

"Bridgerton" never made clear to this viewer why Anthony couldn't court Kate, if he was so attracted to her, rather than Edwina, whom he acknowledges throughout the series he doesn't love. So the yearning scenes are just dumb, gratuitous, laughable manipulation of the viewer. Clearly someone said, "Women like yearning scenes. Throw in some of those." And Anthony and Kate are forever getting close enough to kiss, panting, and not kissing. Without any reason whatsoever.

 

And the "how" here is totally screwed up. Anthony is a domineering, dutiful, humorless oldest brother. Kate is a domineering, dutiful, humorless oldest sister. These two would make each other miserable.

 

This is all made so much worse by Edwina, as played by Charithra Chandran. Chandran is not as unnaturally perfect as Ashley, but she's very, very pretty and full of dimples and charm. Her character, Edwina, is a classic little sister – eager to please, a bit naïve, but with a loving heart that will mature beautifully. She'd make the perfect wife for stuck-up Anthony.

 

"Bridgerton 2" pairing Anthony / Bailey with Kate / Ashley was a major blunder.

 

And I have to think that that blunder was informed by exploitation of, rather than use of, women's romance conventions. The writers get it that women like lengthy courtship rather than immediate intercourse. They get it that women like yearning scenes. They get it that women like spunky heroines. The writers tossed all these conventions into a blender and gave us a pastiche of conventions, rather than anything with any depth. Escapist entertainment based on Austen novels is also, upon further inspection, actually pretty deep. The more you look at "Bridgerton 2," the more shallow manipulation you discover. Jonathan Bailey's and Charithra Chandan's terrific performances are wasted in an exploitative pretend women's art, rather than real art that touches on real life.

 

But, you know what? It was still fun to watch, as the world goes straight to hell.

 

 


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