‘Under the Bridge’ Dares to Look at a Different Side of White Girlhood
Hulu’s “Under the Bridge,” which premiered on the streamer last month, could be another drop in the true-crime dead-girl television canon of which there are many varying outings, until it swerves into another direction when telling the horrific true story of Reena Virk. Based on Rebecca Godfrey’s book of the same name, in 1997 the 14-year-old Virk was murdered by a group of teenagers in British Columbia, Canada, after previously being bullied at school.
The television show, helmed by Quinn Shephard and Samir Mehta, delves into Godfrey’s book about Virk’s murder with Riley Keough playing Godfrey and Lily Gladstone as Cam, a fictional character who is a police officer and Godfrey’s estranged friend from high school, who both investigate the Virk case.
In wanting to create a fleshed out show, and to pay respects to Virk, Shephard and Mehta used Godfrey’s book as a jumping off point. In order to expand the show and feel like they were telling as much of Virk’s story as they could, they reached out to the Virk family and also optioned her father Manjit Virk’s account of his daughter’s murder “Reena: A Father’s Story.”
It was important for Mehta to contextualize Virk’s place in her community and school as a first-generation Western teenage girl. Her father was an Indian immigrant and her mother an Indo-Canadian Jeovoah’s Witness — they were already minorities within another minority group.
“One major aspect of the story that allowed it to not be about the crime, but about Reena as an individual, as a first generation Western-born girl with an immigrant parent and that cultural divide and the need to then want to belong inside of the majority white community that was something that I related to as a first generation American,” Mehta said. “And from the teenage mind, there’s a reductiveness to it where the power dynamics at play are maybe not as in your consciousness as, ‘I don’t look like that. Because they look like that, that’s why they’re afforded so many of these opportunities’ that the way that she perceived it.”
“Under the Bridge” does something seamlessly that other shows struggle to do: look at the insidious nature of white girlhood and womanhood. It’s something that abounds in our culture but is still rarely dissected. A large part of that comes from Shephard and Mehta establishing Reena’s story — getting the audience inside the Virk house, learning about their family dynamics, and putting together as much of Reena’s inner life as they possibly could.
What we’re shown of Reena is a girl who is almost too aware of her surroundings and the ways that she doesn’t fit into them. She finds delight in the secret presents her uncle gets her, like a Notorious B.I.G. CD and Steven Madden boots. She loves her parakeet. Vritika Gupta, who plays Reena, shows her desperation to fit in and be someone else through lashing out at her parents and her friendships where she’s tagging along with a relatable naiveté.
There are scenes with Reena and her family that show their difficult dynamic, like Reena being excited about her birthday and then crestfallen when her parents, due to their religion, won’t acknowledge it. We see the ins and outs of the house — how Reena has to sneak out to see friends, when her parents take her bedroom door off of its hinges so she can’t have any privacy. It was important for Mehta to get the audience in the house with Reena, to see why the situation escalates to her living at Seven Oaks group home for a while.
“We wanted to get inside the home and feel what Reena’s home life must have been because there was a reason that she sought refuge in these girls,” he says. Episode 4, which aired May 1, looks at the girls coming over for dinner at the Virk house while simultaneously telling the Virk family story. Suman, Reena’s mother, (Archie Panjabi) and her family just wanted to belong and the only people who didn’t show them racist vitriol were the Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to their door. The episode functions as a way to understand the family dynamic that trickled down to Reena but also the community context that an Indian family would have in British Columbia.
Learning the context of Reena’s family is imperative in the ways that white girlhood is shown in the series. We get Reena’s friendship with Jo, Kelly (Izzy G), and Dusty (Aiyana Goodfellow) told in flashback. When she meets Jo for the first time in Episode 2, at a store looking for a razor after being made fun of for body hair in the locker room, Jo tells her to use a men’s razor because the blades are sharper, calls herself a legend, and starts rapping her favorite song when it comes on the radio. You can see Reena’s face recognize, whether she’s cognizant of it or not, just how much easier it is for her to exist in this world than it is for Reena.
As she’s brought into the fold of the Seven Oaks girls, she gets more examples of that, especially with the wealthy Kelly, who can use her parents to get her out of just about everything. But the Reena and Jo relationship particularly — with its constant push and pull — echoes the tension that can happen in teen girl friendships. Do you want to be them or be with them? For Mehta, that was important to show.
“The way I really like to write is to come up with a thematic spine and then loop back to that. You can see that echoing in the Jo and Reena relationship in that Reena wants to be Jo literally in many ways, but she also can never be because she’s an Indian girl. And so it’s like, well, if I can’t be you, close to you is a way to approximate that craving.”
That dichotomy is also explored in the relationship between Rebecca and Cam as well. Established as childhood friends, with Cam having spent time at Seven Oaks, Rebecca is able to flit in and out of investigating Reena’s murder — having easier access to the teenagers at the center of the crime. Being young, pretty, and white allows Rebecca to both not be taken seriously (getting information that the police couldn’t because perhaps she was seen as someone who wouldn’t do anything with it). There’s a tension between Rebecca and Cam because despite Cam’s authority as a police officer, there are things that are easily accessible to Rebecca that Cam can’t do, like go have some cigarettes and gossip with the Seven Oaks girls.
While the character of Cam is an amalgamation of different people working on the case, they wanted a relationship with Rebecca to show her the other side, and to also echo the Reena and Jo relationship. “When I was having the first ideas about bringing Rebecca in, as a lead character in the show, it immediately became really clear to me that there was a need to foil her within like, kind of opposing perspective,” Shephard previously told IndieWire. “I think that Rebecca’s book is very beautiful, but it’s also written through the lens of white girlhood. And I think that it was very important that there was somebody else, who was a massive perspective in the show, who really did not feel seduced by the allure of the accused teens in the way that Rebecca was. I think it’s very interesting how fascinated she was by the kids who did this. I also think it’s a really valid perspective to be sort of put off by that and to not want to engage with that, because you’re so disturbed by the crime.”
They also wanted Cam in some essence to be able to explore issues that they explore through Reena —generational trauma, the erotic aspects of the draw of white womanhood. You can see Cam struggle with wanting to solve Reena’s murder, going behind her father and brother in order to do so. You can also see her repulsion of Rebecca’s fascination with the teenagers at the center of Reena’s murder, especially Jo who Rebecca seemingly sees herself in.
Most of these relationships clearly have a societal core, which is one of the reasons why Shephard wanted to adapt “Under the Bridge.” “I don’t think that this crime would have happened, and I don’t think that Reena would have been brutalized in the way that she was during the murder had she looked like Josephine,” Shephard said. “Because I do think, especially in the late 90s, there was this immense pressure to achieve this white, thin, beautiful ideal. And I think that that’s really tragic. I think it’s a tragic story. And I also think that it was an important one to be able to explore on television.”
Additional reporting by Erin Strecker.
“Under the Bridge” airs Wednesdays on Hulu.
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