The Dueling Universes of Bridget Jones
Production for Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016), the third installment in the Bridget Jones series, has begun. This is somewhat surprising since the odds have long seemed stacked against this film.
For example, delays have been so persistent that Colin Firth, who plays Bridget’s love interest Mark Darcy, has quipped, “You might be seeing Bridget Jones’ granddaughter’s story being told by the time we get there.” Also, Hugh Grant, who plays Bridget’s other lover Daniel Cleaver, 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.
Emma Thompson has been brought in to revive the script, 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.”
Let’s Clarify a Few Things, Shall We?
That Daniel Cleaver is the baby’s father may be confusing for some. Many American readers, I imagine, 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, Mark and Bridget 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 this storyline: he nobly pops up twice to suggest he could adopt Bridget’s baby if the two 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’s taking a hiatus from her diary to focus on their baby. [Here’s an archive of the series.]
“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, well, 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 (Jacinda Barrett) is removed as a threat when she is revealed to be a lesbian (an attempt at a comic twist), and Firth’s Mark Darcy 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’s being dead?”
Good questions! Lucky for you, I went to the source herself.
My Conversation with Helen Fielding
In 2013, Fielding visited Washington, D.C. for an event promoting her third Bridget-based book: Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.
I had an uneasy feeling from the start. I’d hastily read the 386-page book earlier that week in order to be prepared for the event. But listening to the chatter around me, I realized I was perhaps the only one who had. Many of the other attendees admitted they had only seen the film adaptations. What’s more, some were just learning that Mark was dead at the beginning of the book and that the story followed Bridget as a 51-year-old widow and single mum of two. These people had somehow avoided an entire week of reports about that plot-twist and the shock it engendered amongst fans.
In short, I felt like an angry fan at Comic-Con. These people have no idea, I thought bitterly to myself. Am I the only one paying attention?
My first question to the author:
“Did you consider doing the third book as another Jane Austen update?”
Helen Fielding stared at me blankly. I continued:
“Because…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, whom I assumed had not noticed the literary allusions (about which I’ve written in more detail here), but also because Fielding’s expression made me wonder if she, perhaps, had forgotten she did this.
Then Fielding began to ramble, saying first, she had wanted to create her own story and second, she believed she’d progressed beyond the updated Austen shtick. Yet she also admitted to incorporating elements of Austen in the book. Fielding later noted, in an answer to someone else’s question about Mark Darcy’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, Fielding 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 the author’s opinion, the only way to revive Bridget’s story in a compelling way. In the end, Fielding 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.” So, yes, 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.
My second question to Ms. Fielding was about the dueling Bridget universes: the Independent columns about a baby fathered by Daniel Cleaver versus the book about the family created with Mark Darcy. At that point, I had not read the columns. But I admitted that my friend who had read them was quite confused.
“If your friend is confused, imagine how confused I am!” Fielding joked. She continued, “I think I can reveal now that the baby was Mark Darcy’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. Through some hijinks, Bridget’s friends had obtained DNA from Daniel Cleaver in the form of a fingernail clipping, and the match was positive.
My 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 Mad About the Boy strongly implies Bridget and Mark married before their first baby was born. Indeed, in the book, Daniel is the children’s godfather, 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 for Fielding to sign my book, I tried to push back on her answer here in the most polite way I could manage. The author then told me she actually never finished the columns because of her own pregnancy. Again: this seems to be a misremembering of what happened.
So I left Fielding’s Mad about the Boy 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 Bridget Jones’ 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 Emma Thompson, who’s adapted successful screenplays for Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility and HBO’s Wit. However, recent reports are far from reassuring.
Clearly, Zellweger and Firth are reprising their roles, but Grant is still MIA. Instead, apparently Patrick Dempsey has been cast as… someone: another potential baby daddy, no doubt. Finally, People reports that Bridget Jones’ Baby will allegedly “fill the gap” between Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason and Mad About the Boy.
All I can say is: good luck with that.
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