BRIDGERTON has proved to be one of Netflix’s most popular productions. Its peculiar combination of history, the lifestyles of the rich and the famous, and identity politics, has captured a substantial chunk of younger Netflix viewers.
How much these younger viewers actually know about the society, economy and politics of Regency England is uncertain – although “not much” would be a pretty safe bet. Nor can we be certain about how much their understanding of the period has been distorted by Bridgerton – but, on this question, “a whole lot” would probably be the correct answer.
So, what is so wrong about Bridgerton ? Why are these questions about history and its distortion so important?
Bluntly, the problem with Bridgerton is that it presents Regency England (1811-1820) as a nation in which racial diversity is evident everywhere. All the way from the poorest layers of society to the upper reaches of the English aristocracy, persons of African and Indian heritage are an integral part of their respective communities. Sadly, this presentation of England’s past is not only false, it is also dangerous.
If there really had been Black duchesses in Regency England, then our present-day reality would be entirely different. In fact, the creative and political impulses behind Bridgerton, if absorbed uncritically, must render any useful understanding of contemporary racism an impossibility.
When confronted with these criticisms, the creator of Bridgerton , Chris Van Dusen, responded that the drama “is a reimagined world, we’re not a history lesson, it’s not a documentary. What we’re really doing with the show is marrying history and fantasy in what I think is a very exciting way. One approach that we took to that is our approach to race”.
In spite of Van Dusen’s denials, Bridgerton ’s narrative appears to be based on the assumption that “colour-blind casting” – the assigning of dramatic roles without reference to the actors’ skin colour – produces an entirely positive set of progressive effects.
Colour-blind casting means that the discriminatory impact of elevating historical accuracy above equal opportunity is overcome. Henceforth, every role is open to every performer. This requires the audience to “look through” an actor’s skin colour and concentrate instead on the quality of their performance. Ideally, the jarring effect of assigning culturally significant “white” roles to people of colour also requires the audience to confront and examine their own racist assumptions and expectations.
If an actor of Indian heritage is cast as Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, or a black actress is given the role of Queen Anne Boleyn, and you’re outraged, then what does that say about you? The answer, of course, is that your outrage represents an unmistakable manifestation of deep-seated racism. Colour-blind casting isn’t the problem – you are.
Except that anyone who knows anything about their historical heritage knows full well that no one from the Indian sub-continent could possibly have had the luck of Dickens’ David Copperfield. England in 1840 just wasn’t that sort of place. They’d also know that there was absolutely no way a king of England – even one as wilful as Henry VIII – would have been permitted to marry a “Moor”. To cast Black actors in these roles is a gross distortion of the past. A distortion undertaken in the misguided hope of ameliorating the racism of the present.
To understand the racism embedded in contemporary European societies and their colonial offshoots it is necessary to understand the historical conditions out of which the sickness arose. That understanding would be greatly assisted if the source of the extraordinary wealth on display in Bridgerton : the grand estates and magnificent mansions; the glittering jewels and ball-gowns; the legions of servants; the great crowds of hangers-on; was accurately depicted as the fruits of the extraordinary profits of the sugar islands of the West Indies and the hundreds-of-thousands of slaves that were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to work in the (very white) aristocrats’ obscenely lucrative plantations.
The Prince Regent (after whom the Regency period is named) was, of course, the son of the King George III. It was his father who “lost” the thirteen rebellious colonies that became the United States of America. How helpful it would be, therefore, to produce a Netflix drama series whose leading characters hailed from both the slave-owning cotton producers of the American south and the cotton-mill-owners of the English north. How easy it would be then to expose how the chattel slavery that made America also made English capitalism. How Uncle Tom’s slave-cabin and England’s dark satanic mills were always bound together by unbreakable sinews of tortured human flesh.
Ah, but would such a truthful depiction of the past rate? Do the sort of people who watch Netflix really want to be shown the ways in which the horrors of the past drove sharp shards of misery deep into the West’s cultural soul. A truthful Bridgerton would explain the European people’s desperate need to erase the past. Episode by episode, it would depict the inevitable psychological projection of their worst impulses on to their victims: the relentless construction of the racial “other”.
But that would be a Bridgerton too far. And besides, who the hell would watch it?
It is surely no accident that Bridgerton ’s executive producer is Shonda Rhimes, the guiding intelligence behind that other big Netflix hit Inventing Anna. Rhimes just “gets” the millennial zeitgeist. History is what you make up – what you can make people believe. How? As easily as the real Anna Sorokin created the fabulous “Anna Divey”; or, by conjuring up the fantasy of a racially diverse Regency. You present an historically blank generation with “realities” they want to believe in.
An impossibly cool German heiress.
A world without racism.
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,”
Totally agree and after watching some of the 1st episode just couldn’t get past the historical inaccuracies . . also imagine the ‘colour-blind casting’ wouldn’t stretch to casting a white man in the role of a notable black figure such as Muhammad Ali or Shaka kaSenzangakhona (which would be equally inaccurate and stupid).
Tom hanks as Nelson Mandela?
Just imagine the outrage (and to be honest it would be warranted) . .
Or Brad Pitt as George Floyd?
Very interesting.
Glad you mentioned Anna “Divey”. I watched a 60 minutes about her. Oi found her ability to manipulate and charm (including the presenter) fascinating and horrifying at the same time. She is likely a psychopath with no conscience and now a Netflix star. Psychopaths always do well in a capitalised world. It’s made for them!
Sounds like a contemporary equivalent of the odious “Black and White Minstrel Show” which, beginning in the 1960s, ran for twenty years on BBC TV and featured the George Mitchell Minstrels wearing “black face” and singing songs from the slave fields of the deep south
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbcdBSFDklg
Not to mention the u der lad women with feather boas
More to the point as to why not to watch, the acting on Bridgerton is AWFUL. The leads last time were ok but most of the minor characters were jaw droppingly bad. And a quick glance at this seasons trailer confirms Season 2 is worse.
Let’s not forget: black faces weren’t common among the Regency elite primarily because black faces just weren’t common in England.
All countries were more or less pure ethnostates. England had Brits, Irishmen, and tiny scatterings of Dutchmen and Frenchmen.
I haven’t seen enough of the show so I’ll caveat towards the end.
Yes this is historically inaccurate and western entertainment has always been reimagining narratives and history, including race swapping. This is across TV, cinema and long before those mediums existed, white-Jesus anyone?
Is it harmful? Probably but does this differ with respect to social struggles (outside elite concerns) from a dozen other period dramas?
Chris frames colourblind casting and representation of colourblind society as indicative of modern identity politics but this is actually the antithesis. (by ‘colourblind’ I mean not putting social significance into race).
In CRT ideology, the civil rights era/MLK’s vision of a colourblind society is denigrated as at best naive, and at worst a covert means of upholding an oppressive white supremacy. Judging by ‘the content or character’ is out, judging by ‘colour of skin’ is back in. (Or more precisely judging by one’s beliefs and moral posturing around a supposed oppressive power dynamic that crosses ALL interracial interactions from government policy (reasonable) to personal and intimate relationships (zealous ideologue).
Any media representation of a genuinely colourblind society is actually the exact opposite of modern CRT and identity politics. Modern identity politics would seek to problematise interracial dynamics within the narrative in very specific ways (or dynamics of sex, gender, sexuality etc). Does that exist here? YES if there is heavy handed moralising along intersectional lines NO if it is a period drama where the characters ‘happen’ to be multiracial.
From an initial viewing, the good faith reading is that this seems more like a projection of multicultural middle class aspiration into a popular entertainment genre.
Want a decent Regency period piece on Netflix? watch “Taboo”, it’s a ripping yarn, great sets, period detail accurate.
The Last Kingdom is good too (Anglo Saxon England) if you can get past the occasional crappy Danish accents and the protaganist’s sword being worn in a back-scabbard.
Forget the fake revisionist garbage.
I’m looking forward to seeing a white Porgie and Bess some time in the near future.
So true. Treacly rewrite of history like Downtown Abbey. Like that nonsense at Te Papa. “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there”. Delusional national myths are a bad idea. A bad idea that usually helps fascism along with its accruing nastiness. I disagree with Chris on one point – I think the viewing, even the Netflix viewing public would be absolutely stunned if a truer, more sincere historical drama were delivered. Long form online tele has unshackled us from the tyranny of old time tv, with its demand for “jeopardy” every 15 (commercial) minutes. We get to wallow in stuff like a huge, rewarding novel. The need to centralise plots on a ‘love affair’, a ‘road to riches’, ‘ascent of man’ is gone. Long form drama is still finding itself. Surely we can hope that the sensibilities that gave us ‘The Wire’, ‘The Killing’ (the original), etc etc is going to give us a big roast meal sized sweeping historical drama some time soon! Are we ready for a five season series of this –
https://www.bookdepository.com/The-Last-Slave-Market-Alastair-Hazell/9781780336572?redirected=true&utm_medium=Google&utm_campaign=Base3&utm_source=NZ&utm_content=The-Last-Slave-Market&selectCurrency=NZD&w=AF7CAU968FL923A8V3Y3&gclid=CjwKCAjwopWSBhB6EiwAjxmqDdH8TP4p3FMXtzFF7-HgH6wdakxWbfflpVMvEiPEhXN1kqI_7UWloRoCwAYQAvD_BwE
I sure am.
Bridgerton is intended as compleeete camp nonsense. The costumes are 50 years out of date in many instances. Fifty! The dialogue is occasionally outright gibberish. The music is witty but ultimately – it’s just (Female Gaze) eye candy.
My wife enjoys watching and I enjoy taking the piss out of her watching it. It’s certainly laughable, and it’s not “colour blind casting” is it? It’s disproportionately brown in colour, deliberately. Some kind of propaganda exercise I suppose.
The reality is that there simply weren’t that many brown people in England at that time, in any of the social strata. Most of the Indians and Caribbeans only arrived post WW2. So nothing to do with racism at all. The corollary to this was the wokies complaining that there weren’t enough ‘people of colour’ in the movie Dunkirk. LOL
A couple points to show your perspective of history is tainted by your politics:
> The vast majority of the wealth in Regency England did not come from sugar plantations, it came from mining coal and iron to make iron products and spinning cotton to make clothes.
> North of England mill owners refused to buy cotton from the Confederacy because of their slavery. This hastened the end of the American Civil War but cost the mill owners a fortune. They did it nevertheless.
> Britain officially abolished slavery in 1833 and enforced the ban throughout the Empire with its military power, but well before that it was severely frowned up. The Quaker abolitionists started their successful campaign in the 1770’s.
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