There Was Magic, Then...

This post has spoilers for both The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Pretty Woman. Read at your own risk.

Like the canon event it is for graduated liberal arts students, I’m having a career crisis. It has been quite a while since I last had one of those– I used to suffer quite frequently from bouts of career crisitosis back in middle and high school, but by the summer before college I was pretty set on science communication/education. But two recent events have put a wrinkle in my vision for the future. The first has been writing semi consistently for this blog, and the second was watching The Devil Wears Prada 2. That’s about half of what this post is about.

Give Me Back My Dreams

I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 with my family at the local theatre. Some reviews consider it a bland and unnecessary sequel but I disagree. I think it came at the perfect time. In the two decades since The Devil Wears Prada came out, the shape of publishing has changed. The dream that the original sold to you is a fantasy now; print publishing is almost dead, replaced by social media impressions and engagement. Journalism has shifted to content people can consume quickly, not thoroughly.

The sequel begins with Andy (Anne Hathaway) receiving a journalism award as she and her entire table of friends are fired from their newsroom. Miranda (Meryl Streep), in line for a big promotion at Runway, has just caught flak for running an unvetted puff piece on FastFash, a company that hid its fast fashion from her reporters. Andy is called up by Irv, the boss of parent company Elias-Clark, to take over Runway’s communication strategy and recover the brand’s image. She’s tossed back into a job with Miranda and Nigel (Stanley Tucci), and has to balance her doubts about the journalistic merit of her work at Runway with her need to impress Miranda and keep her job (and her pride!). Maybe more so than the first movie, the sequel is a fantasy too. It’s a dream that journalism can be saved, that there is some amount of legitimate writing left in the world yet, that there is a value to it. Andy struggles to write content people want to know, her training has taught her how to write need-to-knows.

I think about my own degree and what I learned, how I was taught to write. My degree at Tech was Literature, Media, and Communication, and in my very first semester, I took an intro class that attempted to tried its damndest to cover all three of these things. I’ve talked to a few people about how few classes in my degree improved my writing. There have been two, and this was one of them¹. It was taught by a walking stereotype of the eccentric professor– a medievalist by training, he would sometimes burst out in an old English accent and recite verse from Robin Hood. His goal was to introduce us to all of the professors and classes in our major to teach us how we can apply this very vague degree in the very real world. It’s been five years since I took that class and most of what we did escapes my memories, but I remember our risk communication assignment.

My degree started right as students were returning to school post-COVID– everyone was still masking and social distancing was enforced here and there. We were the president of Georgia Tech, and were in charge of writing (alone, or up to a group of three) an email informing all students, faculty, and staff that due to a super spreader event of our choosing, campus was pivoting to virtual operations for two weeks. We could choose 150, 200, or 250 words depending on what we thought was most effective.

I won’t reprint our submission here because, frankly, it’s nothing remarkable, but we hit the 250 word limit exactly and wrote a bland, corporate message that hit all the right points. Our introductory paragraph praised Tech’s existing COVID efforts while reminding readers of the resources available, pivoted to the meat of the message, and closed with a sincere thank you to the community for their resilience and patience.

This assignment’s goals were twofold.

• One: perform constrained writing in a team. This was a style of writing we had no experience with. Essays and short fiction– that’s something high school had allegedly drilled into us already. We had a message to convey, a strict word limit with which to do so, and a tight turnaround for submission.
• and Two: write like somebody else. We were advised to look past Georgia Tech communications to get a feel for the style. Look at similar WHO recommendations for content. We were hodgepodging together a corporate message where success meant being formulaic.

We didn’t get to read other folks’ writing, but I’m sure that we all said similar things. We weren’t ever tasked with creativity here, there’s kind of a blanket template for risk communication. This assignment felt like foreshadowing for my degree. From my very first class, I was taught how to write what people need to know; this was the communication of my tri-pronged degree, a very technical communication².

Andy struggles to leave this world of methodical journalism– she’s used to the news, actual news, and not the phone-scrolling crap that Runway is forced to produce now. And every time Andy found herself missing her old job I found myself missing the keyboard too. Writing is fun. Writing is fun. It isn’t technical, it isn’t an assignment or a chore to me now. I like writing for all the opposite reasons of the risk communication assignment. I don’t need to write in a team. I don’t need to write for anybody else. I don’t have a word limit, either a minimum or a maximum. I don’t have a style I need to write in, a syntax I need to mimic. I write for myself and I enjoy it. This blog, too, are little essays I write because I enjoy to write, not necessarily because I enjoy being read.

To be clear, I understand that’s not the writing Andy misses. I think she misses the class of writing the news, working at Runway is a step down from the work she was getting awards for. But oh, I so understand what she is feeling!

It is a funny thing to realize that you don’t fit into the puzzle of the present, as long as you are willing to make it a laugh. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is about changing times, and how easy it is to simultaneously struggle and succeed.

Miranda Priestly is significantly more tame in this movie. Just like Andy is adjusting to a world where journalism is dying, Miranda is coming to terms with working in the 21st century. Gone is the acerbic wit that defined her in the original, it’s been damped by both pressures of political correctness from HR and her desire to not tip the boat before her big promotion. These scenes were some of my favorites– when she’s about to say something deeply stuck in 1990 and everyone in the room looks at her with wide eyes; when she’s struggling to hang up her own coats because making her secretaries do it was uncouth per HR.

I loved how little The Devil Wears Prada 2 touched on AI. I genuinely think its omission made me enjoy the movie more, because there was no resigned acceptance of LLM-infused writing. It dreams of a world where the problem facing writers isn’t AI but writing being devalued as a whole. And only feminist action can combat it, I guess? It gets a bit murky there.

She rescues him right back

The day prior, I watched the 1990 romcom Pretty Woman starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. It’s a Pygmalion adaptation except this time it isn’t a flower girl, it’s the prostitute Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) whom wealthy corporate raider Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) picks up in the red light district while he struggles to drive home. Vivian drives Edward’s Lotus Esprit back to his hotel, and is hired to accompany Edward for the week as he tries to acquire his latest company.

Like most classic American rom-coms, it’s dripping in misogyny and directed for the male gaze. I was trying to gauge the critics’ response to the movie and they seemed to be torn, in some eyes this was a classic and in others it was everything wrong with the industry. I think it’s a pleasant watch iff you turn off your brain and ignore the problems³.

What is the message of this movie? That the price for a girl to fall in love is $3,000 and an all-expenses-paid shopping spree? Or is that only if they’re a prostitute? But that offer’s only valid for hookers with a heart of gold! It’s a strange romanticization of prostitution that ignores the realities of the industry. So many women are forced into sex work; Vivian is a sanitized representation.

This movie is a male fantasy, of finding a damaged woman and healing her through your wealth and love. There’s a point in the film I found interesting when Edward tells Vivian that they’re not that different from each other. He’s getting at the idea that they both sell themselves for their livelihood– Vivian her body, Edward his soul. And on one hand, I get it. It’s poetic. But aren’t these oh-so-distinctly different?

Edward wasn’t forced to do this. At any point he so desires, he can stop selling his moral integrity for money and quit while he’s ahead. I mean, that’s literally what this movie is about– he’s so inspired and enamored by Vivian’s spirit that he does the right thing and dismantles his corporate raiding operation to go clean.

But Vivian can’t quit. Her roommate Kit has just stolen all of her rent money and feasibly the only way for her to earn it back is prostitution. She never finished high school, and despite her knowledge of cars⁴, is characterized as unhireable. She is an incredibly charismatic character– when she’s not being intentionally provocative, eyes frequently turn as she passes. Most are either ogling or judgmental, but some do also see her charm (like hotel manager Barney Thompson).

From the start, there’s a clear power imbalance between the pair. Although Edward tries to repeatedly treat Vivian as an equal (this is conscious, during their fallout near the end he asks “when have I ever treated you like a prostitute?”), Vivian is always on bought time.

But the point of why I’m bringing this up here. One of the iconic scenes towards the end is when Edward fulfils Vivian’s fantasy of being saved by a white knight riding a unicorn. He climbs her fire escape to give her a bouquet and they kiss. When asked what happens after the knight rescues the princess, Vivian responds “she rescues him right back.”

Isn’t that such a wasted line in this movie?⁵ Isn’t it gorgeous? She rescues him right back.

I honestly started writing this post because hearing that line made me upset but I can’t seem to find the words to articulate my feelings. So let me just go on a little tirade about that movie. The movie makes a huge point about how much potential Vivian has (Edward does, at least). Everyone has inherent worth blah blah it just takes a rich white guy to discover it. Why is there a man? Why does Vivian need Edward in her life? Yes, because it makes for a cute rom-com and yes, because that is the way the world works. And I know Pretty Woman is decidedly not trying to be a feminist film classic. But it upsets me nonetheless.

There Was Magic, Then…

There was a point to that interlude, I promise.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a movie about regret and what could-have-beens and shouldn’t-have-beens. The entire movie is about relationships and how they define people– the supportive dynamic of Miranda and her new husband Stuart; the divorce of fashion power-couple Benji and Sasha Barnes; Sasha’s upcoming engagement to F1 driver Karl Müller; Benji and Emily Charlton dating; Andy and Peter the architect. And of course, the complicated marriage of Andy, Miranda, and Nigel to their work.

I want to talk about a character who is getting flak in reviews for being unnecessary and a patriarchal addition to the movie. I do think there is a bit of a double standard being shown on the screen. Sasha’s character exists to show that successful women can exist without relying on the name of their husband, hell, Miranda shows that too. But Andy’s romantic story just has to be wrapped up in a ribbon at the end; like Vivian, she is doomed to never truly succeed without a man. As I walked out of the movie theatre I was inclined to agree that Andy’s love interest, Architect-Guy Peter, was unnecessary to the story. But after a few minutes of critical thinking, I realized he was thematically necessary, I just think his character was killed in the edit.

I want to take a second to look at what each relationship means thematically in the story. Before we directly meet Benji or Sasha⁶, we’re introduced to them as a fashion power-couple who had a messy, heavily public divorce after Sasha fought for an equal share in the company. After the divorce, both people diverge into gendered stereotypes of the 21st century elite. Benji becomes a fitness-obsessed tech bro who’ll do anything to please his new girlfriend. When Sasha is freed of the trappings of her first marriage, her true nature comes out and she is the trope of the reclusive philanthropist. The climax of the movie becomes a battle of the sexes as both Benji and Sasha try and acquire Runway. This is also where the movie’s idealism shines the most– if there is a big fish threatening your cake, find a whale to gulp it up first⁷. Find the bigger wallet that is sympathetic to your cause.

Miranda is married to a new husband Stuart, who is kind and supporting. Whenever Miranda is stressed, Stuart is there– I mean, he flies across the ocean to Italy on a moment’s notice to comfort her! Miranda is more human in this movie, she is less mythical and she needs people to rely on. The end of the movie is marked by a shift in Miranda’s character. In the twenty years that have passed she’s come to regret neglecting her family and taking Nigel for granted.

Benji & Sasha and Miranda & Stuart are opposite ends of the spectrum. One failed and one successful marriage offers Andy two templates for what her life can be, and ultimately she chooses Peter because she enjoys his company and support. Yes, Andy has rewarding friendships in her life, but most of her validation and success comes from her work. Here is where Architect-Guy Peter fits in to the puzzle.

As an architect, Peter is responsible for buying up old apartments and refurbishing them for the market. It’s how Andy meets him, by accidentally insulting his trade. These architects who come in and take away the charm of historic buildings with their renovations remind her of what corporations are doing to journalism. But Peter reminds her that without architects, these buildings would just be torn down and nothing will be saved. At least now the facade can remain intact. Is that a good thing? I’ll let you decide for yourself, but Peter is, in my eyes, the epitome of compromise. Not that Andy is settling for him, but compromising her addiction to work to be with Peter lets her avoid the Miranda Priestly path of misery and regret. Much like the first movie where Andy quits Runway to avoid turning into Miranda, Andy chooses to pursue Peter because she’s learned from Miranda again. It takes a village to take care of yourself.

I saw some articles about how Harriet Dyer, Patrick Brammall’s (Peter) wife, was calling out the edit for removing scenes showing Peter and Andy’s chemistry. There were those teaser photos of the couple on a date in New York that never made the film, surely there was more to their relationship than what was shown. In my mind, Peter was designed as a parallel to the story. I think he was just done dirty by the edit.

Once again, I’ve kinda just plopped a lot of words onto a page without too much consideration for coherence– hopefully this whole post makes sense. I know there are tendrils of thoughts I’ve brought up here and there that kind of just linger without being resolved. That’s something I need to work on in my writing– following a logical argument, making it a simpler argument, and using less words. But in the meantime, I’m going to keep writing in this roundabout way, because I enjoy writing and that’s enough for me.

Title Credits

Give Me Back My Dreams by The 6ths and Sally Timms on the wonderful wonderful album Hyacinths and Thistles, about which I must write something someday. And then There Was Magic, Then… by The Gentle Waves. As a bonus, here is the scene where “She rescues him right back” features.