In a cinema year featuring Oscar-winner Halle Berry in Catwoman and her attendant leather bondage kitsch, and a new Lars Von Trier film, with Nicole Kidman occupying this round’s honorary position of abuse in Dogville, it’s predictable that the pointless sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, would hardly constitute a blip on the radar regarding negative screen portrayals of women. Yet it’s precisely mainstream cinema of this sort that has the most cultural impact, rather than the fitfully execrable blockbuster or the controversy-courting art director. The first Bridget Jones was a huge hit with enviable box office, and the industry can’t bear to leave a cash cow unmilked. Why change a formula that seems to work? There was certainly no need for Bridget to show any emotional growth when she could just retread the “identifiable” tics from her debut. But how can any self-respecting young career woman identify with Bridget without a hefty degree of self-loathing bundled in?

Simply put, the idea that Renée Zellweger, as Bridget, is some kind of lovably fallible everywoman is appalling. From the get-go, young women everywhere are supposed to ache with recognition and sympathy over Bridget’s darling little quirks and failings and feel that (finally!) an imperfect, relatable girl has been given her moment on the silver screen, and the tyranny of impossible goddesses that make us doubt our looks and our personalities has finally been abolished. Like all single career women, Bridget is a slobbering alcoholic, a superficial ninny posing as a competent professional and intellectual. She binges and purges like a seasoned bulimic. She has the emotional maturity of a 12-year-old, is obsessed with weddings, and believes “the one” is her only end possibility other than death. Wait, that sounds pathological, you say? Oh no, not our Bridget!

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the Bridget Jones phenomenon, is how neatly it duplicates and even intensifies the problems of representation that cause the insecurities it exploits. The idea that mass media creates impossible and irrational standards for women is hardly news, but it seems especially cruel to wrap a particularly potent dose of those standards within what is masquerading as a rebuttal to them. Feminist film theorists mapped out the idea of woman as spectacle in cinema decades ago, as well as the difficulties and detours for women in identifying with these spectacles. Rather than giving women something to identify with, Bridget merely provides a particularly painful spectacle, and it all does come down, with an awful inevitability, to that of the female body.

Bridget’s body is a constant locus for witness and humiliation in the film (her constant obsession with her weight, her mistaken arrival at a party in a Playboy Bunny costume, catching her boyfriend cheating with a very skinny woman), but any opportunity for exposing the mass pathology of normal women desiring an unhealthy weight to look more like a celebrities is completely negated in the star persona running counter to this in the film’s reception. The primary hoopla surrounding Bridget Jones’ release twice involved not so much the adaptation of a best-selling novel, as the transformation of Hollywood skinny Renée Zellweger into a “believable,” “average” female body by gaining a rumored 30 lbs for the role. Zellweger gave constant interviews about how terrible and disgusting the weight made her feel, and entertainment interviewers fawned over how “courageous” she was, and what a true artist this made her. Even more appallingly, the actress’s weight gain was necessary to portray Bridget at a supposed 136 lbs (the middle to the lower end, by current medical guidelines, of what’s appropriate for her height) with the character’s supposedly understandable vow that 20 lbs must clearly be shed for her to be viable on the meat/meet market. Among the motivational tools Bridget keeps on her fridge are pictures of anorexic models with her oversized head pasted on—a grotesque and almost violent fragmentation of the female body. And no wonder Bridget is so messed up in this department: the otherwise loathsome (a guilty pleasure of a performance by Hugh Grant) Daniel seems quite unreservedly attracted to her sexually, but the noble, Jane Austin adaptation-approved Mark Darcy (the costume drama stiff Colin Firth) is saintly in his resignation to her panopoly of shortcomings. In a Thanksgiving-thru-Holiday film season involving a new Pixar release, a Wes Anderson film, Closer, and Lemony Snicket, I somehow failed to catch Edge of Reason in the theater, but in honor of its DVD release, I vowed to screw up at work, alienate my boyfriend, and stick a finger down my throat, after drinking a bottle of wine and humiliating myself in public.