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The Dark Side of Bridget Jones’ Diary

While all of the Hollywood gossip surrounding the recent film version of the best-selling novel Bridget Jones’s Diary is about the extra pounds actress Renee Zellweger packed on for the title role, Diary has a somewhat less glaring little secret — a hint of racism.

In Helen Fieldings’ harmless little updated parody of Pride and Prejudice? I must be mad. But then again, I don’t recall Jane Austen’s classic novel referring to the Japanese as a “cruel race” anywhere among its well-bred pages. Instead, Diary inflates that stereotype into a minor running joke, and that joke stands out all the more in the Miramax film, which is more action-oriented and less talky than the book.

It starts out innocuously enough, with the Jones character (Zellweger), quizzing her judgment-impaired and terminally batty mother (Gemma Jones) about the eligible bachelor she’s been set up with for their turkey curry Christmas celebration. It’s Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) — here, reprising his Mr. Darcy role in the recent BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. Mark has just been divorced by his wife, babbles Mrs. Jones. She was Japanese. They’re such a cruel race.

That brings the house down right there. The audience at my recent screening at the AMC Kabuki wasn’t even exclusively white, but then again, who said you need to be Caucasian and a veteran of World War II, to happily launch into Jap attacks?

The comment really started to irk when it turned into a running thread throughout the film. When Bridget Jones, for instance, introduces Mark Darcy to her friend and nemesis Perpetua, she describes him as a top civil rights lawyer whose “cruel-raced” wife left him — in a kind of lampoon of grip-and-grin, desperate cocktail conversation. More hilarity ensues.

Why is this so funny? And why is it so much more annoying in the film than in the book? The filmmakers have chosen to focus on lame physical comedy and a more linear narrative; hence, the movie has been leached of much of its witty, diary monologues that made the book so amusing. So there’s less to latch onto, dialogue-wise, and the little bits that remain stand out all the more.

But why does this erstwhile, unfaithful wife have to be Japanese in this most English of narratives? Can it only be sustained on slamming other cultures? After all, I didn’t hear Bridget or her ditzy mother trot out stereotypes about any other ethnicity. Can you imagine them burbling, drink and cig in hand, about the Irish, “that drunken race,” or the Poles, “that stupid race,” or the Scots, that “penny-pinching race.”

Instead, this kind of off-hand bigotry about Japanese — and by extension, of course, all Asians — still passes as humor.

And I can only see it getting worse, gazing at the trailers before Bridget Jones’s Diary for the imminent summer movie blockbuster Pearl Harbor, as those aestheticized, antlike hordes of Japanese bombers tie on their rising-sun doo-rags, ready to machine-gun everything good and godly in Norman Rockwell’s America. Yeah, those dirty Japs obviously had it coming to them — Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Asian recession, the sinking of the Ehime Maru, and all.

Can we say backlash, kids? I’m not advocating censorship, but for every Asian-U.S. crossover success such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or baseball player Ichiro Suzuki, there has to be a Bridget Jones’s Diary or Pearl Harbor — and their subtle or obvious racism becomes more acceptable in the public discourse.

These kinds of attitudes are simply slipping under the radar like stealth fighters. And people wonder why anti-Asian sentiments are on the rise. Some of those answers may be at a theater near you.