A rush of blood to the head

In what very quickly came to seem an act of incredibly foolish masochism I proposed watching 'Bridget Jones's Diary' on Saturday night. "Well", I had reasoned, "know your enemy and all that." Sometimes I feel myself becoming rather too twisted and cynical, but this is just the sort of film that corroborates and revitalises that cynicism. Perhaps nothing is quite so excruciating and nauseous as the heroine's self-obsession. OK, it might be symptomatic of 'the modern condition' (as hoary old literary critics like to call it), but it's portrayed straight and with a repulsive degree of approval and sympathy - at least in the film (I haven't troubled myself with the book). Essentially, it's the difference between the cappucino-frothy neuroses of the characters in Candace Bushell's 'Sex In The City' and the knife-through-butter social satire of Bret Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho'. The latter avoids implicit approval or endorsement in favour of analysis and cold dissection - all is empty, meaningless, showy, superficial, trivial (which is why I cannot understand Ellis's praise for 'Sex In The City').

Perhaps this is all missing the point, though. While art should challenge, stimulate, arouse, incite, more often than not it placates and appeases. Of course people will continue to enjoy escapist and mawkish nonsense like 'Bridget Jones's Diary'. The need for such fictions isn't wholly created and constructed in the media, it does genuinely exist. But as James Joyce once opined: "Nature is quite unromantic. It is we who put romance into her, which is a false attitude, an egotism, absurd like all egotisms."

Christ, that was pompous, even for me. One final non-pompous observation: with 'Bridget Jones's Diary' Richard Curtis once again proves that everything he has touched since 'Blackadder' turns to bollocks.