Critic-at-Large Issue 10

Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns 

How The Devil Wears Prada 2 undoes the brilliance of its predecessor

Spoilers ahead. 

The year is 2006. Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep)—tyrannical Editor-in-Chief of major fashion magazine, Runway—turns and enters a car. Her former assistant, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), waves from across the street. We cut to Miranda inside the car: over her face, the passenger seat window reflects the highrise building in which her offices are housed. We get the memo: she is Runway, Runway is her. This is her burden, and she chooses it willingly. Miranda smiles privately to herself; Andy chuckles, and, having come at last to understand Miranda, chooses to walk away. 

Thus concludes one of the finest character pieces in recent memory. That film is The Devil Wears Prada—it’s slick and stylish; replete with great costuming and gorgeously unassuming cinematography, not to mention its quippy screenplay. Its ambition is not revolutionary—it’s not here to overthrow power structures, but rather to understand their purpose. Still, what’s brilliant about it is that, while it begins at the level of the social, diffuse to the particulars of labour and workplace culture, it finishes as a complex morality drama. What’s the price of perfection? What’s the relationship between beauty and money? And how much will you endure for what you believe in?

You’d reckon the film would condemn Miranda—she’s needlessly mean and ruthless; a near-emotionally-abusive boss. But instead we learn, as Andy learns, of the sacrifices figureheads like herself make to uphold their institutions, and of the responsibilities they inherit alongside their power. The now-iconic Cerulean Monologue really cements things. Andy comes into a meeting tutting under her breath at Miranda and her staff for their obsession over the tiniest little details. Miranda, picking on Andy’s frumpy cheap sweater, decides to teach her a lesson: “It’s sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room—from a pile of ‘stuff.’” Ouch. Some part of me reckons that if it were made today, The Devil Wears Prada’s powerfully ambivalent ending would be replaced by something all too obvious: imagine Andy Sachs, I dunno, starting a union and storming Miranda’s office. 

Well, we don’t have to imagine, because we now have a sequel to answer that exact question. If the narrative arc of the first film can be likened to a funnel (where the broad-stroke social questions are slowly trimmed down to the level of interpersonal drama and personal choice), the new film inverts this structure. And it’s in this inversion that it becomes noticeably weaker and less coherent than its predecessor. 

The year is 2026. “Runway hasn’t been a magazine for twenty years,” says Nigel (Stanley Tucci) in a sardonic drawl. Andy’s now an award-winning hard-hitting truth-telling journalist—but her paper’s parent company has just downsized her department, and she’s been cut. Meanwhile, Miranda’s landed in hot water after Runway promoted a greenwashed fashion label that in fact produced its clothing at sweatshops. Andy makes her return to the magazine, this time as Features Editor, to clean up its image. Already so much is going on here—but what stands out is the crushing sense of Runway’s sudden marginality as an artful, glossy, print magazine in a social media age. 

After Andy cleans up the sweatshop scandal, the magazine suffers another blow: the death of its parent company’s CEO. Replacing him is his talentless son who sees Runway as something of a financial burden and hires a number of so-called experts to downsize it. An Elon Musk-type figure intervenes and options to purchase it as a trophy for his girlfriend, the bitter and self-interested Emily (Emily Blunt), returning from the first film. All is resolved when Musk-type’s ex-wife (Andy helped her restore her public image in a tell-all interview) swoops in and buys the magazine in a cash offer. The memo this time around? Capitalism’s actually alright, social media isn’t eating us alive, and AI doesn’t pose an existential threat to the arts: all we need is a good, benevolent CEO. I don’t buy it. 

In a weirdly lucid piece of screenwriting, the film itself ends up offering us this scenario’s analogy in the form of love interest Peter (Patrick Brammall), a charming Australian property developer. Andy goes to view an apartment: it’s in a gorgeous old 1920s building, but the developer has fitted out the interiors in a naff, pre-fab, everything-new sort of style. Andy’s grossed out, and starts joking about the apartment to one of the strangers at the viewing—only to find out he was the developer. 

It must have been mating season, because these two are inexplicably, heterosexually drawn to each other. Andy’s somebody who believes in preserving old things; who learned from her stint at Runway in 2006 that taste is not always democratic; who values beauty and integrity even when it’s not commercially viable. But Peter, having drank the capitalist Kool-Aid, lodges a disturbingly convincing counterargument: the city was actually about to pull this building down—developing it into tacky but sellable luxury apartments was his way of saving it. The fact that these two end up together (with Andy moving into one of his fugly apartments) is entirely incoherent, narratively speaking. Of course, in real life, people make compromises for security and fidelity. But this isn’t real life, it’s a film—and it ties these characters up in an awfully tight love-knot when they in fact represent incompatible views about the relationship between beauty and capital.

I think of the Peter story as analogous to the Runway story because the film goes to lengths to show us a contradictory impulse within capitalism: how something produced by it becomes devalued, shamed, and obsolesced by its terms. And, as with the Peter/Andy pairing, the film is unable to reckon with the tension between Runway and capital, and instead forces them together in the alarming insistence that what we’ve got is the best we’ve got. But the capitalism of The Devil Wears Prada 2 has already begun to eat itself alive: those in charge, keen to optimise the life out of Runway, want to crush the magazine into a consumable online service, extracting value from consumers through data-keeping and digital marketing strategies. Power is becoming concentrated in the hands of “digital landowners”—owners with no vested interest, besides that of profitability, in the businesses that actually occupy their cyberspaces—in a process the economist Yanis Varoufakis calls Technofeudalism. 

Miranda remains, in this sequel, the film’s central and most compelling figure because of how she sees this catastrophe coming and remains steadfast in the face of it, nobly delusional like a string player on the sinking Titanic. Where in the first film, the fantasy of individualism still reigned and questions about power were subsumed to questions about moral character, here nobody has agency: everybody is a victim. The film’s suggestion that the best we can do is hope for angel investors to continue financing our cultural products (with some ounce of respect for the culture they hope to profit from) is an exceedingly bleak, if accurate, assessment. But it’s tied up in the contrary impulse to frame this coupling as narrative resolution. “I love... working. I really do,” Miranda says about the prospect of retiring. The shot is close-cropped, the focus shallow, the screen all Streep’s. I actually find it quite moving—but the world of 2006 has quickly vanished, and the follow-up question we beg to ask this film cannot quite interrogate: “Working for whom?”