"THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA"

A classic Hollywood movie in that it appeals to its audience by offering visual thrills that it later denounces. Or does it? An action film blows a lot of shit up and kills a lot of people, usually to restore peace. A horror film gets its jollies from the different ways that the killer kills his victims, but all the time ostracizing him as a psycho or deviant. The cowboy has to kick ass before he settles down with the redemptive woman (although, in the best westerns, he never does). Here, a lowly assistant suffers the injustices and shallowness of the fashion world, which serves as a way for us to ooh and ahh at all the glitz and the glamour of that fashion world.
But is that really what’s going on here? The film never actually tries to tell us that “inner beauty is what matters,” or that high fashion is frivolous. In fact, it implicitly tells us that what we wear does matter. Such a moral is a bit disturbing, but at least it’s new. However, it doesn’t exactly fit the protagonist selected—which may be a sign of the discrepancy between the novel and the movie. Andy Sachs is presented to us as a hard-working girl who doesn’t care about Runway or the fashion world—she just wants an in in the journalism industry. That’s the whole point of her character—through her we can all see with big eyes how crazy the realm of Runway is. Given her apathy to fashion, we then find it silly when she raids Runway’s closet to impress the boss with new threads. Sure, she’s ambitious, but when she parades around for the rest of the movie with these ridiculous clothes on, we can’t help but think she looks foolish. If she cared about fashion before but was just misguided, we’d care. If she was horribly unattractive before, in desperate need of a makeover, we’d care. But she’s Anne Hathaway.
And so it seems a more accurate moral for the movie is “leave time in your life for people you love.”……..and “Don’t be an asshole.” This moral is not completely incompatible with the high-profile fashion world, but the film still forsakes it for the drooling mouths of its fashion-interested viewers. For example, Andy reaches a point where she can either stay with her boyfriend or go to Paris with her boss Miranda for Runway’s biggest two weeks. Now, it’s been established that they love each other, she’s already missed his birthday because she was at a Runway event, and so she’s very conscious of what her career is doing to people she loves. Presumably, she could also care less about fashion. For all intents and purposes, she doesn’t need to go to Paris. It’s implausible to think that she wouldn’t have already realized the film’s moral imperative at this point. BUT….she MUST go to Paris, so that we get to see her in more outfits, and see her sleep with the other attractive romantic possibility in her life, and see the glitz and glamour of a runway show…she must have her epiphany there, after it’s all done.
This really just underscores the fact that the fashion world is divorced from the emotional conflict that Andy has. This movie is really about ambition, and as such her epiphany is that while she is ambitious like Miranda, she doesn’t want to be Miranda. Fashion is just the background. My inkling is that in the book, fashion was a more integral part of Miranda, part of her satanic nature. But the Miranda here is played by Meryl Streep, so she is no caricatured devil figure. The emotional turmoil under the surface of her make-up foundation comes to the fore, which fits the aforementioned dynamic sought between Miranda and Andy.
The downside is that she’s not evil! We want her to do awful things, truly terrible things, and she never quite reaches her potential. It’s not Streep’s fault—she’s great, delivering her lines with wonderfully hushed calculation.
Despite Miranda’s less-than-devilish nature, the shortcoming with Andy’s character is, ironically, that she doesn’t seem to struggle enough. A boss doesn’t need to be Satan for the job to take a horrible toll on his or her assistant, especially when working 16 hour days in the office. But Andy seems to breeze through all the requisites of such a job, plus the ridiculous errands that Miranda requires of her. There is real individual pain—besides the pain of distancing yourself from friends and family—in that kind of job, which is hardly even hinted at in the film. Where are the anti-depressants? The bad sex? The addiction to adderoll, or at least caffeine?