Hulu’s miniseries “Under the Bridge,” adapted from the novel of identical title, delves into the chilling narrative surrounding the tragic murder of Reena Virk.
Reena Virk is a 14-year-old Asian girl who immigrated from India to Canada. In many ways, she was different from her predominantly white classmates.
Unlike many Asian families in the community, Virk’s family were not practicing Sikhs. Virk’s family became Jehovah’s Witnesses after moving to Canada. They were described as a minority within a minority, making Reena feel like an outsider. Reena wanted to fit in with her predominantly white peers, who had a fixation on Los Angeles gang culture. Reena was bullied relentlessly for being overweight and for being different; she was often called a “beast” or “bearded lady.”
On Nov. 14, 1997, Virk was invited to a party. As a small crowd watched, a classmate approached Virk and put out a lit cigarette on her forehead, accusing her of trying to steal her boyfriend.
Eight teens gathered around Virk; they kicked her and burned cigarettes out on her skin. She reportedly cried out, “I’m sorry.” The attack stopped, and then Reena staggered away. Two classmates then approached her, 15-year-old Kelly Ellard and 16-year-old Warren Glowatski. They then punched her and bashed her head into a tree until she lost consciousness. Then they dragged Virk’s body to the edge of the Gorge, where they allegedly held her head underwater and drowned her.
Even though the police stated that race was not a motivating factor in Verk’s murder. it seems like an important aspect to bring up. Starting with when she was attacked, one of the girls extinguished a cigarette on her forehead. Sheila Batacharya compares the placement of the burn and a picture of Reena and her traditional Indian clothing, where she has a blue dot in the middle of her forehead.
The miniseries does not focus on the racism or bullying that Virk faced or the senseless cruelty of her death. Instead, it spends the majority of its time framing her murderer as a cool, troubled, bad girl who fantasized about a gang lifestyle. At the same time, Virk is framed as a wannabe “bad girl” who failed to fit in.
Yes, Virk was a girl who wanted to fit in, but more aspects of her life and subsequent death are essential to explore, such as the reasons why she struggled so badly to fit in, i.e., racism and sexism. Her death is not just girl violence. It’s about the multiple oppressions that she faced.
Reena is not part of this narrative. We see her in passing or in small snippets. The miniseries does not seem interested in her; instead, its main focus is her murder and the author who wrote about the crime.
This adaptation of the book is heavily fictionalized, but the miniseries feels like a waste of potential. They could have told a greater story about racism and bullying. Its critiques about young teenage girls being viewed as disposable fall flat. Because it only focuses on the main white girl’s feelings of disposableness. Even though Virk was treated as disposable by the police and community, it took them eight days to find her body. Even though there were rumors spread around the school, no one felt it was important enough to call the cops.
It also fails to acknowledge the way that the narrative, being the face of how shocking it is for suburban white girls to lash out and to violence, also has an element of racism. Where white women are viewed as demure and need to be protected against other races, most often a man of color. With this mindset, violence against someone of color is rendered invisible except when a man of color perpetuates violence against a white woman. This thinking leads to the erasure of violence against women of color.
This miniseries is inspired by the book written by a white woman who previously lived in the town and wrote about the investigation of Virk’s murder. In an interview in Interview Magazine in 2019, the author stated, “I went home soon after [the killing] and went into the prison; I was just stunned because the girls all looked like normal, cool, young teenage girls, not particularly like killers.”
This quote summarizes the author’s view of Virk’s murderers, the cool young people who, by her depiction in the show, want them to like her. She finds it easy to empathize with them because she is more like them, a white woman from suburbia who partied where they party, compared to Virk, whom she is very different from.
This miniseries is a missed opportunity to show the multiple forms of oppression that Virk faced; instead, it chooses to highlight the white women who were affected by her crime. If they had wanted to make a miniseries about how violent girls can be in suburbia, they could have left Virk out of it.
