The Dueling Universes of Bridget Jones

It has now been confirmed that filming for “Bridget Jones’s Baby” — the third in a series about the beloved, ditzy Brit — started this month. This is somewhat surprising news. The odds have long seemed stacked against this movie. Delays have been so persistent that Colin Firth quipped, “You might be seeing Bridget Jones’ granddaughter’s story being told by the time we get there.” Hugh Grant reportedly left the project because of his dislike for the original script, written by Bridget Jones’s Diary author Helen Fielding and One Day author David Nicholls. The great Emma Thompson was brought in to revive the script last fall — but I’ve seen no reports that this has prompted Grant to reconsider. And this is problematic — because, if we’re to believe the source material, Grant’s Daniel Cleaver is Bridget’s baby daddy.

This may be confusing for some. Most American readers are probably unaware of the series of columns in the British paper The Independent for which Fielding revived her character in 2005 and 2006. The storyline started out well within the Bridget Jones books’ canonical boundaries. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason ends with Bridget and Mark Darcy together again after various mix-ups and miscommunications. At the beginning of the Independent columns, however, they have broken up again, and Bridget is at sea. Things get even more complicated after a one-night stand with Daniel, when Bridget falls pregnant (as the Brits would say). It is not immediately clear whether Mark or Daniel is the father, but, by the time the final column in the series ran, all the characters seem to have accepted that Daniel is the father of Bridget’s bouncing baby boy.

Mark is an intermittent presence in the storyline; he pops up twice to nobly suggest that he could adopt Bridget’s baby if they got back together. Bridget is tempted, but Daniel comes around to the idea of fatherhood and they, essentially, get back together. The columns end with Bridget taking a hiatus from her diary to focus on their baby.

“Excuse me,” you might be saying. “Didn’t Bridget and Mark get engaged at the end of The Edge of Reason?” An understandable question, but you must be mixing up the 1999 book, which was excellent, with the 2004 movie, which was not as good. In the book, a conniving character named Rebecca does whatever she can to steal Mark from Bridget, and, due to various misunderstandings and jealousies, she nearly succeeds — but love wins and Bridget and Mark reunite. They attend her friend Jude’s wedding, where Bridget “half-catches” the bouquet, but thinks twice and lobs it to her friend Shazzer, who drops it. There is no engagement. In the movie, Rebecca is removed as a threat when she is revealed to be a lesbian (in an attempt at a comic twist), and Mark (Firth) proposes to a puddle-soaked Bridget (Renee Zellweger), who says yes. They attend her parents’ vow renewal, and Bridget catches the bouquet.

“How can both versions be reconciled?” you may well ask. “And what about that other book Fielding wrote about Mark being dead?” Good questions!

I actually went to the source herself with these (and other) questions, when Fielding came to Washington, D.C., in 2013, for an event promoting her third Bridget book: Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.

I had an uneasy feeling from the start. I had read the 386-page book in a rush earlier that week in order to be fully prepared for the event, but, in listening to the chatter around me, I realized that most attendees had not. Many admitted, in a not terribly guilty way, that they had only seen the movies. Some were finding out for the first time that Mark had been killed off at the beginning of the book, and that the story followed Bridget as a 51-year-old widow and single mum of two — they had somehow avoided a week of reports about that plot-twist and the shock it engendered. I felt like an angry nerd at Comic-Con. “These people have no idea,” I thought bitterly to myself. “Am I the only one paying attention?”

It’s certainly possible that I was the most worked-up person there — because I ended up being the first person to volunteer any questions. I had three questions but decided to limit myself to two for the sake of everyone’s sanity.

My first question: “So, did you consider doing the third book as another Jane Austen update?” Fielding stared at me blankly. “Because,” I rambled, “of how the other two books, you know, were updates of Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion?” I added this explanation not only for the benefit of the attendees, who I assumed had not noticed the literary allusions (which I wrote about in more detail here), but because Fielding’s expression was making me wonder if she, perhaps, had forgotten she did this.

Then Fielding began to ramble a bit herself, saying that she had wanted to create her own story, and that she believed she’d progressed beyond the updated Austen shtick — but said that she still put elements of Austen in the book. She later noted, in an answer to someone else about Mark’s death, that if Austen had ever written a book about settled domestic bliss, maybe she could have used that as inspiration. Fair point. As it was, she said, she could see no other way to make Bridget single besides killing Mark off, because he would never leave her. And it seems being single was, in her opinion, the only way to revive Bridget’s story in a compelling way. In the end, she sort of took Austen’s advice from Emma: “Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations that a young person who either marries or dies is sure of being kindly spoken of.” Bridget evidently married — at least in this version of the Bridget universe — but it wasn’t enough to make an interesting situation, so someone had to die.

Fielding also told me that Mad About the Boy had elements inspired by “The Sound of Music.” This is true enough, in that new love interest Scott Wallaker (apparently inspired by her son’s real teacher) is frequently around children and blows a whistle to corral them. He is also brooding and curt like Captain von Trapp.

My second question was about those dueling Bridget universes: the Independent columns about a baby fathered by Daniel versus the book about the family created with Mark. I had not, at that point, read the columns, but I told her that my friend who had was very confused.

“If your friend is confused, imagine how confused I am!” she joked. She continued, “I think I can reveal now that the baby was Mark’s.” The attendees tittered, while I silently sank further into confusion. You see, according to the columns, the paternity was no longer in doubt by the time of the birth. Bridget, through some hijinks involving Jude and Shazzer, had obtained DNA from Daniel in the form of a fingernail clipping, and it had been a positive match.

My nerd rage was growing. Did Fielding genuinely believe she had left the paternity open, and that Bridget’s marriage to Mark followed the news that the baby was his? But in Mad About the Boy, it’s strongly implied that Bridget and Mark married before their first baby was born. Indeed, Daniel is both children’s godfather in the book, having “finally made it up” with Mark before his death. That seems slightly less realistic if there were a period in which Daniel had been suspected to be a father in a less metaphorical sense.

When I went up to the stage to get my book signed by Fielding, I tried to push back on that answer in the least annoying, most polite way I could manage. She then told me she actually never finished the columns because of her own pregnancy. Again: this seems to be a misremembering of what happened.

(I also asked my third question: Was Bridget’s “wildly bohemian” neighbor with a “mane of black hair” and a husband in the music industry based on British writer Caitlin Moran? The answer, sadly, was no, though Fielding agreed they do have a similar look.)

So I left the book signing with more questions than answers, despite having consulted the most authoritative source possible.

How did we get here? How did the Bridget Jones series end up with more reboots than a superhero franchise?

At the signing event, Fielding seemed far more preoccupied with the casting options for the theoretical movie adaptation of Mad About the Boy than with the “Baby” movie — which was already in the works (and already stalled). She was particularly excited about the casting for Roxster, Bridget’s 29-year-old “toy boy” love interest whom she meets on Twitter. It would certainly make sense to use the book as source material for a movie — as the main actors are either past 50 or approaching it — but apparently it was not meant to be.

If I trust anyone to parent “Bridget Jones’s Baby,” it is certainly Emma Thompson — who adapted beautiful screenplays for Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility” and HBO’s “Wit” (both of which she starred in). However, recent reports are far from reassuring. People says that Zellweger and Firth will reprise their roles, but makes no mention of Grant. Instead, apparently, Patrick Dempsey has been cast as … someone. Another potential baby daddy, no doubt.

People also reports that the movie’s plotline will “fill the gap” between Edge of Reason and Mad About the Boy. All I can say is: good luck with that.