Under the Bridge: Cam Bentland
Like most adaptations from books - especially ones involving many secondary characters - one of the biggest changes made in adapting Under the Bridge for television is the amalgamation and fabrication of some of the key players. Dusty, played by Aiyana Goodfellow, for example, is a composite of several of the teens in the book who were present on the periphery of Virk’s murder, some who were directly adjacent to the core friend group involved. This is to be expected as there is only so much screen time, and many of the real people involved receive minimal treatment and depiction in the book. Lily Gladstone’s character, Cam Bentland, however, is a complete and total fabrication.
The lead detective in the Virk case, Cam is Rebecca’s childhood friend, now grown and working on the police force in View Royal. An adopted queer Indigenous woman, Cam largely serves as a multipurpose juxtaposition machine in terms of narrative functionality. Read against Rebecca, she has remained in her hometown, attempted handling her troubled youth head-on, and serves as an open acknowledgement of Rebecca’s own queer desires, the deep romantic interest between them eventually bubbling over into a troubled romance over the course of the case. Read against Warren Glowatsky, one of the two main perpetrators of Virk’s murder, she is another person with ambiguous Indigenous identity, her First Nations heritage lost to the foster care and adoption system in ways that are all too familiar to members of those communities in Canada and the U.S. She is a law enforcement officer who, when read against the police force in View Royal, largely uninterested in Reena Virk’s disappearance to begin with, exposes the indifference of the legal system to people of color.
Gladstone talks about these last two aspects of the character in an interview with The New York Times:
“The murder happened just by tribal land. The bridge connects the municipality to a reserve. So inherently, there’s a First Nations presence in the story. I thought it was a brilliant construction to have a First Nations, adopted cop, who feels compelled to Reena in a way that becomes clearer and clearer to her.”
What’s important here is the conscious decision-making that went into this aspect of the character. While showrunner Quinn Shephard has discussed the self-reflexivity in the way she approached turning the book into a television series, Gladstone’s approach to Cam’s identity as “a First Nations presence” in the story, and what that means in terms of narrative subtext. It’s also worth noting that this is self-reflexivity that wouldn’t be achieved without making major changes to the source material, illustrating that sometimes fidelity should be outright ignored in some adaptive practices. Meaning made can be all the richer for it.
