Under the Bridge Series-Premiere Recap: Bic Girls
If Reena Virk had lived, she would be my age right now. Presumably, she’d have a career, or a family, or a cool car of her own — or all of the above — and she’d only occasionally think back on the social and emotional tumult of her high school days. But the capricious, desperate, and not-so-secretly violent nature of teen girls played a role in ending Reena’s life before it could even really begin, and the world has stopped several times to wonder exactly why.
Hulu’s new miniseries Under the Bridge is adapted from Rebecca Godfrey’s book of the same name. As many adaptations do, it takes certain liberties with the source material, painting Rebecca (Riley Keough) in shades that feel borrowed from Sharp Objects. She dresses in black and gives monosyllabic answers to her doting parents. There’s a mysterious loss in her past, and she clearly has a self-destructive streak. In the series premiere, Rebecca returns to her small, sleepy hometown to do some research on the secret lives of teenage girls, only to fall head-first into the story of a lifetime. (For reference, in real life, Rebecca Godfrey didn’t begin speaking to the parties involved until 1999.)
The first episode of Under the Bridge does a serviceable job of introducing us to the main players in this story. We meet Rebecca, a gaggle of local teens who eventually all become suspects in Reena’s murder (we’ll get to them), and Cam Bentland, a character created out of whole cloth for the TV series. Fresh off her shocking Best Actress loss at the Oscars, Lily Gladstone steps into the role of a cop with something to prove. Cam is a girl in a boys’ club, one that’s perpetuated by her father and her brother, both of whom are also introduced as cops. The initial family vibe here isn’t great, which makes me very concerned about how far Cam will go to investigate this story. At one point late in the episode, we learn that these two women have History™. Okay, it’s only alluded to in a sideways glance that Rebecca gives Cam as she visits the police station, but that’s all we need to know that shit’s going to go down.
Aside from the two adult women on the outside of the story, the heart of this episode belongs to Reena herself, played by a soulful Vritika Gupta. At this point in the narrative, it feels like everyone involved in the production is invested in making Reena a whole person and not just a token dead girl. Writer Quinn Shephard and director Geeta Patel take time to follow her in several disparate spaces in the hours leading up to her demise, and they color in the outlines of her life mostly by showing, not telling. We learn mostly from conversational context that Reena was recently kicked out of her house and was living in a group home called Seven Oaks. As she returns home for her first dinner, she clashes with her mother (Archana Panjabi) on several topics, including using the phone, her choice to wear nail polish, and helping to serve traditional Indian food. Pick your battles, Reena’s mom! She’s a teenager! Everyone else in the house, including Reena’s father and her doting uncle seem pretty committed to giving her some grace as she struggles through her adolescence, but the conflict with her mother seems very charged and thorny. It’s a safe bet that we’ll learn more about it as the season progresses. Punjabi is a sharp and skilled actress, and you don’t cast her unless you’re going to really use her. This woman is going to have a moment, and soon.
Before her welcome home dinner, Reena stops by Seven Oaks. Her uncle picks her up from school in his very cool yellow car (the book tells me it’s a Karmann Ghia) and presents her with the CD she requested. It’s Biggie’s latest release, and she pops it in with a squeal of delight. She passes a dude named Connor on the street, and she’s so excited to be seen in this cool car with cool music blasting. Her eagerness to fit in and be liked is achingly relatable, but once we see who she’s aspiring to hang with, the bottom falls out.
As Reena arrives at Seven Oaks, she gets a warm welcome from a girl named Dusty who’s smoking a ciggie outside. Dusty brings her upstairs to a shared bedroom where Reena hangs back, unsure of her place in this tableau, both afraid to assert her presence but also desperately wanting to be a part of things. In miniature, this scene is an agonizing portrait of teenage girl hierarchy at its worst. Reena offers up her Biggie CD, and the unimpressed Josephine grabs it from her. They put it on and start singing and dancing with abandon. And, when Josephine (Chloe Guidry) sees that Reena is jumping on her bed, a territorial instinct takes over. Josephine shouts at her to stop, shattering her moment of joy and adding a veiled insult about her weight to really stick the knife in. Then, she tells her she’s not invited to the party they’re going to that night. Ouch. It’s unclear exactly why Josephine is so hell-bent on making Reena — a girl who clearly worships her — feel like shit, but a smart guess would be on the feeling of power that an otherwise powerless girl might get from tearing another girl down.
Let’s take a second to talk about Josephine. She’s awful, but she’s magnetic. She’s living at Seven Oaks and, later, when she calls her mother from the police station, it’s clear that she doesn’t have any family support. Her difficult situation might instill sympathy in the viewer, but her caustic demeanor and typical Mean Girl look — blonde, full makeup, trendy clothing — telegraph that she might just be the villain in this particular story. And she might even want it that way. The dialogue calls for her to mention John Gotti no less than three times, and other references are made to her love of the mob kingpin as well. She’s so clearly trouble.
Feeling stung by Josephine’s barbs, Reena steals her black book. In a world before cell phones, we all used to write our friends’ information down. On paper! It was a wild time, friends. Reena uses this information to call everyone Josephine knows and spread insane lies about her. The most egregious slight is when she calls Josephine’s crush, a burnout weed dealer named Connor, and tells him that Josephine has AIDS. It’s an impetuous act, and there’s a lot of childlike defiance in the way she makes the calls and spouts lies to all these other kids. But there’s also a feeling that Reena is excited to have access to all these other people: She’s lonely, and she’s seeking connection.
Unfortunately, she gets that connection in the exact wrong way. During the ill-fated dinner with her family, she gets a call from Josephine, inviting her to the party. All my brain could show me at this moment was a gif of Whoopi saying, “You in danger, girl.” It feels bonkers that Reena would accept an invite from someone she so gleefully torpedoed only minutes before — especially someone as mean-spirited as Josephine — but the decision-making part of the brain isn’t fully developed in teens, and Reena is seeking friendship at all costs, so off she goes.
At the party, Josephine lies in wait. When Reena arrives, she gathers her crew and confronts her. They chase her to a phone booth where she calls her parents and tells them she’s coming home. But then the girls catch up. As they corral their victim, an explosion lights up the sky. It’s eventually revealed to be debris from a Russian satellite, but an overhead shot focuses on Reena’s innocent and doe-eyed face looking up into the heavens at this unexplained phenomenon as she’s dragged under the bridge.
The next day, Rebecca decides to visit Seven Oaks to chat up some of the residents. Despite getting shut down by the harried house manager, she manages to get Dusty and Josephine to open up by sharing her pack of Parliament 100s. It feels incredibly far-fetched that Rebecca would arrive the day after Reena’s disappearance and align herself with two of the prime suspects, but this story is being told on a magic box and not reality, so I’m willing to go with it.
When Josephine mentions that Reena didn’t come home, Rebecca has a few follow-up questions, but the girls shrug it off with a chilling revelation. The cops don’t really care about them. They’re “Bic girls” because they’re disposable, like the plastic lighters. At the police station, Reena’s father and uncle come up against the reality of this stereotype as they try to report her disappearance. They talk to Cam, but Cam initially brushes it off. After Reena’s uncle has an emotional outburst, Cam seems willing to treat the situation a bit more seriously.
Cam gets her dad to authorize a call to the dive team, and they find Reena’s pants and a pair of underwear. When confronted with this information, her parents are horrified to think of why their daughter was missing her underwear. Suman thinks that her daughter is most certainly gone.
This evidence, along with a list of six kids in the CMC (Crip Mafia Cartel) from Josephine’s black book is enough for the cops to round up all these teens for questioning. As the camera pans through the hallways of the station, we see young, defiant girls staring out through plexiglass. Rebecca approaches the last room and sees Josephine sulking among toys in a room clearly meant for children. With a look of menace in her eye, she gets up and asks Rebecca if she can keep a secret. However, the CCTV footage of Reena also gives up a secret at the same time: Reena limped away from her altercation under the bridge. She seemed banged up, but not dead. So, where did she go?
Random Thoughts
• Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” was the perfect musical choice to end this particular episode.
• The captivating voice over at the beginning of the episode, in which Rebecca expounds upon the garish fates of girls in fairy tales, was actually lifted from the introduction of Godfrey’s book, written by author Mary Gaitskill.
• I have read the book and have lots of thoughts, but I promise to keep them mostly to the final section of each recap. I will not ever not spoil information that hasn’t been revealed in the series, but I will be discussing the nuances of fact versus fiction as well as how certain things were handled in the source material versus in the show. Feel free to join me here for a book club moment or two every week.