The trailer for Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, has dropped today, shocking everyone who didn’t read the book that this time around, Mark Darcy is dead. (The character, that is. Colin Firth is fine!) It feels a bit too much for an already gloomy end of year, argues (an admittedly overreacting) Emma Clifton.
Here I was, minding my own business looking at social media – a pretty perilous way to spend time, frankly, in this day and age – when I saw the trailer for the new Bridget Jones movie come up.
The original Bridget Jones movie is a perfect piece of rom-com mastery: silly, sexy, romantic, with perfectly relatable moments – Bridget alone at the family and friends Christmas event, yet again – and perfect writing: ‘I like you, very much, just as you are.’
Plus, there’s rumpled and naughty Hugh Grant, sexily repressed Colin Firth, her bonkers friends and a surprise cameo from Salman Rushdie. What more could you want?
Like many people, I forgot about the second movie, and then loved the third movie – McDreamy and Colin Firth carrying Bridget-In-Labour to the hospital is slapstick perfection. But now, the Bridget Jones multiverse is being threatened for me. Because in the new movie, Mark Darcy is dead.
Have we not suffered enough?
I realise that it’s based on the book, but I remember the ‘Mark Darcy is dead???’ outrage being so strong when the book came out in 2013 that I thought, surely, it would go into the realm of Follow Ups We Don’t Talk About: like the Sex and the City movies, or any of the Veronica Mars films or sequels.
And that was 2013 – an absolute golden time, respectively, in our society. Trump was just the guy from The Apprentice! The word ‘covid’ meant nothing to us! The terrifying IPCC climate change report wouldn’t come out for another three years! You could afford to kill off beloved characters, I guess, because real life was pretty good!
But now? Now, we live in hell. With the movie coming out for Valentine’s Day – nothing is more romantic than the one that got away finally marrying you AND THEN DYING – this means I now have to associate Bridget Jones in her leopard print knickers and cardigan, passionately making out with Mark Darcy in the snow, with death. Cool!
This reminds me of watching Love, Actually every year with my group of friends where we, without fail, are reminded of the fact that Liam Neeson’s wife, Natasha Richardson, actually did die young and he really was widowed (and never remarried, unlike his on-screen counterpart, who moves on within a month).
I just… can we not have some small, nice things, that remain? Must we do this? Look, I love the idea of a movie about a widowed mother of two having a sexual awakening as she rediscovers a lust for life after her husband dies. I love it! And the news that the British babe from White Lotus is going to be in it, PLUS the hot husband from Love, Actually? Magnificent!!! He should be in everything!! But couldn’t we just do it all without murdering our sweet, reindeer jumper wearing Mark?
It’s possible that I’m overreacting – cough – but in a time where we need escapism more than ever, the idea that one pristine bubble of romantic joy is now tainted with one of the worst existential threats we face – everyone we know and love could die, any day, without warning – is just a bit too much.
Happy Valentine’s Day!