"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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