Carrie Bradshaw VS Bridget Jones

Well, i am a huge fan of Sex and the City and of Bridget Jones Diary, they are both cinematic icons and i was inclined to compare the two. No real logic, just a whim!

Both films represent something of a stereotype on either side of the pond. Both are characters talking frankly and honestly about being single and dating in your thirties, funnily enough although these characters represent the same social group in society, the characters themselves couldn't be more different. Bridget Jones is a woman who is socially awkward, slightly chubby, frumpily dressed and with an overbearing, mortifying mother. Carrie Bradshaw is naturally stylish and always impeccably dressed, skinny and affluent. Interestingly enough they both work in publishing, Carrie writing a column for The New York Star, and Bridget for a publishing house.

Both detail their lives through written media, Carrie writes a column every week, detailing her and her girlfriends sex life, and Bridget through writing her diary. Both were also avid smokers, and Bridget started every entry with the number of cigarettes smoked. What is interesting about these characters is how they both represent an ideal. The british ideal is seen as someone tangible, someone real, whearas the american version is a complete fantasy. Don't let it seem like i am disrespecting SATC, i absolutely adore this show, (in fact i'm watching it right now) it's just that it represents a complete fantasy, people don't really dress like this or talk like this, people don't go out for cosmopolitans every night and they don't own huge manhattan appartments with even bigger manhattan closets. Bridget Jones is the complete antithesis of this ideal, Bridget is a character who despite being socially awkward and relatively unattractive, manages to be witty and clever, whilst perhaps not having some of the panache of her american counterparts.