I was recently channel surfing when I spotted Bridget Jones’s Diary rolling through its opening credits. I settled onto the couch to be conned by Hugh Grant’s magnetic smarminess for the umpteenth time, but not eight minutes into my viewing experience, a shocking realization hit me: Bridget Jones, the titular character whose New Year’s resolution is to “lose 20 pounds,” weighs 136 pounds.
In the classic 2001 rom-com, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this month, we meet our heroine at a low moment following a particularly brutal humiliation at her parents’ New Year’s Day party. “If I didn’t change soon, I was going to live a life where my major relationship was with a bottle of wine, and I’d finally die fat and alone,,” the 32-year-old reflects between sips of vodka while “All by Myself” blasts in the background. The concept of spinsterhood at 32 clearly merits further examination, but there’s something else that needs scrutiny: A core premise of the movie is that Bridget Jones is fat.
The movie—and the book by Helen Fielding that it was based on—goes to great lengths to tell us Bridget’s exact weight at several points. “Weight 136 lb” is the very first thing the movie Bridget writes in her diary, which is odd since she lives in the U.K., where we can only assume they lament body weight using kilos. (But who needs basic cultural accuracy when you can give American women tools for bitter comparison?) We are told from the start that Bridget’s number is an obstacle to overcome, and she spends much of the remainder of the film trying to alter herself.
Were this a movie about a woman with low self-esteem learning to love herself, it might have settled differently 20 years on. But it’s not just Bridget who is preoccupied with her weight. Does Mark Darcy—played by a thoroughly lovable Colin Firth—really love her just as she is, her friends wonder? “Not thinner?” her friend Shazza asks. “I thought you said she was thin?” Laura from the New York office sneers to Daniel (Grant) when confronted by a heartbroken Bridget. To really drive home this point, Laura is played by a conventionally leggy model type introduced to the audience naked.
When Bridget Jones’s Diary came out, I was 11 years old and just learning that hating your body was a normal part of being a woman. I loved Bridget the same way I loved all imperfect rom-com heroines of that era, and I rewatched it whenever the movie made its rounds on cable. My focus was on the love triangle, not the character’s BMI. But Bridget’s stats matched mine in high school, which was around the time I started starving myself. How many times had I watched this movie as a teenager and internalized that my body needed fixing too?
When I watch the movie now, I’m struck by the lengths to which it goes to link Bridget’s weight with her overall health and lifestyle. (Now I am practically the same age as Bridget, and I happen to be the same height as well.) When Bridget is happy, drinking less, and smoking less, her weight is lower, but scenes of her drunken and alone are often accompanied by a voice-over telling us that her number has gone up. Fatness has long been defined as a moral failing, based only on willpower and self-determination alone, rather than what it really is: a messy combination of genetics, socioeconomic status, nutrition, exercise, and so much more. One movie, of course, should not shoulder the burden of that widespread narrative—but I was curious to what extent Bridget Jones had affected women of my generation.
“As a teenager, the weight story line in the movie made me feel like I was already failing at what it meant to be a woman who was put together,” says Jess Kent-Johnson, a 35-year-old software engineer from Madison, Wisconsin. “I was 16 and weighed the same amount as a 32-year-old character, and that weight was clearly problematic. If I couldn’t keep my weight under control, did that mean I was also destined to be a hapless, awkward singleton who needed the miracle of a generous Mark Darcy–type to validate my existence?”
“I can confidently say that the years of destroyed self-worth I’ve experienced due to my body are thanks to the culture and media of the early 2000s,” laments Nicole Napolitano, a 27-year-old in Brooklyn. Bridget Jones’s Diary is hardly the only movie from that era that treated a size 8 as problematic. Natalie in Love, Actually is consistently described as chubby. “I think there’s a pretty sizable ass there...huge thighs,” a female colleague says to Hugh Grant, appearing this time as the British prime minister, in a bizarre moment of inappropriate office bonding. Kendall Davis, a 33-year-old writer and editor who lives in Colorado, noted how harmful that story line was for her: “Natalie is constantly called fat, and I always thought, Wow, if she is fat, then I’m giant.” I guess we should be grateful that they never told us Natalie’s exact weight.
There’s also Chrissy in Now and Then, who is told to her face that she’s fat despite being barely larger than the other girls in her clique. She’s shown eating and lounging throughout the film to really drive the point home that she’s the lazy one. Then there’s the fat stepsister in Ever After, played by a charming Melanie Lynskey, who is consistently fat-shamed throughout by her wicked sister. And then there’s the Sex and the City movie, where everyone acts shocked that Samantha, a woman about to turn 50, no longer has a six-pack. The look of horror on Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte’s faces says it all—that thin woman wearing tight designer clothes has let herself go.
“The relentless criticism of normal, even skinny, bodies led me and an entire generation of girls to believe the worst possible thing that could happen to you is being fat,” Davis told me. She points out that Bridget “isn’t even a realistic representation of an average woman.” Bridget’s weight is in the 24th percentile for British women of her height, meaning the number on her scale is lower than 76% of women her height and age. As Taylor Maness, a 23-year-old digital marketer in Charlotte, North Carolina, notes, “Her healthy body was made out to be an obstacle she had to overcome. This narrative primes women for a lifetime of insecurities and self-doubt.”
Looking back 20 years, it’s impossible to reflect on Bridget Jones’s Diary without mentioning the media storm that surrounded it. Renée Zellweger famously gained 30 pounds twice in order to star in this movie and its sequel. The tabloids turned that fact into five years of material scrutinizing whether the actress was too fat or too thin or not losing weight fast enough or losing weight too fast. “The entire narrative of both the movie and the publicity around the movie was about how huge Bridget/Renée was,” Davis said. “Articles touted her figure in Chicago“—which was notably thinner—“as the ideal and Bridget Jones as this horrific, gross sacrifice for her art.”
I’m not trying to cancel Bridget Jones. It remains one of my favorite romantic comedies. But understanding the ways we were programmed to hate our bodies is important in learning how to un-hate them. Just this week psychologist Lisa Damour wrote in The New York Times that the “National Eating Disorders Association helpline has had a 40% jump in overall call volume since March 2020.” Even now, eating disorders are still among the deadliest mental illnesses, second only to opioid overdose. These are heavy stats to drop at the end of an essay about a romantic comedy, but as someone who has struggled with eating disorders for almost half of my life, I know the impact of the media, whether you’re an impressionable preteen or a 31-year-old woman. It may have been 20 years since Bridget saw 136 pounds on her scale and groaned, but we still have a long way to go when it comes to body positivity.