The Devil Wears Prada (Dir. David Frankel) is a 2006 comedy/drama of some note. In the world of (the unfortunately named) “chick flick” genre, it stands as a major achievement of the oughties. It is remembered for its defense of fashion culture, Meryl Streep’s performance as a coolly sociopathic magazine mogul, and the archetypal struggle between generations, mothers and daughter, values, and class.

The film should also be recognized for its non-self-congratulatory escape of most chick-flick tropes. It passes the Bechdel test with flying colors and in fact fails the reverse Bechdel (there are no scenes with more than one speaking male character — ever). It is a female dominated movie about a traditionally female world, and thus it is able to side step the patting-yourself-on-the-back-for-having-a-strong-female-character that was prevalent for the second half of the last decade and follows us up to this present day. In a similar vein, it is a film about women where they aren’t shoehorned into acting “masculine” in order to be respected.

But these aren’t the reasons we’ll be diving into the film today, though they are perhaps reasons why the film should be analyzed further. What concerns us here is a major emotional feature of the film: the experience of rising in social class as an intoxicating experience and its connections to the female in our culture.

The [Discrete] Charm of the Bourgeoisie

When the film begins, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is a recent journalism grad who, after diligently chasing down any and all job openings in New York publishing, has finally decided to try her hand at being an administrative assistant to the most powerful person in fashion Miranda Priestly (an odd entry level position, but there it is). This is despite her goals of doing “real” journalism and finding fashion a ditzy girl’s game. At this point, Andy is poor, dating a line cook, hanging out with other friends who hate their j-o-b-s and who early on in the film toast to the notion of “jobs that pay the rent.”

Andy gets the assistance job, obeying every whim of Runway magazine’s leader Priestly (played famously by Meryl Streep). And the whims are, from the beginning, regularly impossible for all but the most intrepid and dedicated assistants. Andy begins her journey wearing the frumpy uniform of Northwestern University smart people who see themselves as above fashion, a uniform she pulls over her porcine size six body. But after a couple of rants about the importance of fashion made in her direction, and after the realization that Priestly will never acknowledge Andy’s successes as long as Andy refuses to respect fashion, the young protagonist dons the Versace and Jimmy Choos to fit into this new role, even working herself down to a size four (which gets her a celebratory toast from Runway’s art director).

This metamorphosis creates the strongest emotional tones in the entire film. Andy emerges confident, sexy, powerful. This is euphoric. Andy, along with the viewers, drink in with delight the shocked look on her coworkers’ faces (who only minutes of runtime earlier were snickering at Andy as a walking, talking faux pas). This new wardrobe prints the ticket for her acceptance into the fashion world. Now she has respect as she runs errands for Priestly that trace through the world of high society, including a “real” journalist who tries to bed the well dressed Andy and even asks her to send him some of her writing. It appears that by shedding her old self who was too focused on “real” journalism to be concerned with petty things like style, she acquires the tool to enter the realm of “real” journalism — that tool being style.

In summary, fashion (the ultimate class signifier) gives her purchase into the chic realms of the culture-generating bourgeoisie.

Meanwhile, hangouts with her old group of friends take on an increasingly bitter tone. They resent her constantly being late due to work, leaving early due to work, not showing up at all to her boyfriend’s birthday party due to work. So for a while the film jumps between the swirling adventure and excitement of the fashionista set to the resentment of the working class who stupidly continue in their proletarian existence without understanding the hard work Andy does.

The climax, of course, is that Priestly’s sociopathy knows no bounds, and when Andy finally confronts this in an extraordinary manner, she abandons Priestly and reconnects to her boyfriend. Thus, she realizes that there are things more important in life, yadda yadda, so on and so forth.

At the end, as she is interviewing for a “real” journalism job (though still dressed to the 9’s, proof not all was for naught), her prospective employer tells her that Priestly faxed a resounding endorsement (not all for naught indeed). Despite everything, the mother figure really did respect daughter though she did not openly admit it, and through the power of the mother, Andy gets what she wanted all along. [1]

The Moral of the Story

The Devil Wears Prada is not about the cruelty of the fashion world and the importance of staying true to who you are. It is about the necessity of the fashion world (including the cruelty of it) and the importance of adjusting who you are to meet its expectations. By impressing the fashion world (mother), doors will open up for you. But that isn’t even the true moral of the story.

Film is an emotionally resonant art. And the emotions it creates stick with you long after the nuts and bolts of the plot and what the plot is “trying to say” dim in the memory of the viewer. The memory of the emotions might fade and simplify, might coalesce around a general feeling, but that simplified feeling imprints. That’s why you remember how exciting Indiana Jones is even though you haven’t watched it since you were eight years old.

For the majority of The Devil Wears Prada, the emotion is one of intoxication felt when entering the realm of high society. While the particulars of the story locate the viewer inside fashion, it is still a move into the world of the bourgeoisie. That is the main emotional impact of the film, and also the promise of the trailer, which focuses entirely on the protagonist’s makeover/ascendancy and the charismatic dictatorship of Priestly (there are maybe two or three seconds devoted otherwise). That is because the draw of the film is entirely in the vicarious glee we viewers feel to witness a commoner like us (albeit a well educated commoner) gain access to the upper echelon of society.

Andy’s newfound powers after her makeover are one expression of the thrill, but consider the love of Priestly’s character. She is cold, demanding, unapologetic. The entire office trembles at the news that Priestly will be arriving early one morning, and they scramble to reshape the space to her exacting preferences. An entire industry watches her face for the smallest tics (raised eyebrow, pursed lips) to determine the trajectories of careers and the trends of the upcoming season. Priestly’s role is not to show the rise to power, it is to show unbridled power long since secured. Viewers love her character because there is nothing quite so intoxicating as imagining yourself with such control over the world around you all while immaculately dressed and quaffed. She shows us who Andy could become if only the pesky little cinematic necessities of having a protagonist “grow” and do the “right thing” didn’t make up the last reel. She is the way we get to eat our cake and stay a size four. Andy takes us from where we are to where we want to be, and while she has to “grow” and give up the pleasures of the life we want, we get that story of keeping the life too, in the form of Miranda Priestly. In one of their final exchanges, Priestly tells Andy that she sees a lot of herself in the young assistant, an implicit promise that if we don’t like the ending, we could imagine ourselves continuing on with the devil and one day filling her Prada.

In this way, the film is a female power fantasy. It’s about the intoxication of class in our society from a female perspective.

Here is where one could insert a rant about neoliberalism and how its subjects are psychically led on through their miserable lives by the empty promise of class mobility. Perhaps. Maybe there is something to that. But I think more than this, there is a deep truth about class being explicated here. Sexiness, power, influence, glamour are not being lied about here (of course there is a class mobility lie here, though Andy is from a prestigious university anyway). These are desirable states, and these are the definitional grounds by which class operates on the level of personal expression (of course, every good little Marxist knows class operates fundamentally around ownership of the means of production, but let’s hold off an analysis of Capital Volume I for a different 2000 word blog post). The Devil Wears Prada offers people who do not have access to those states some spectral whiff of the good life. Furthermore, it does so by giving Andy the most stereotypical female form of ladder climbing: she succeeds as the over-achiever — but one who actually gets somewhere through that form of hard work.

Andy’s character is that same gold star, all A’s, nervous energy fueled female character we’ve seen time and again, but her success as the tenacious secretary builds a bridge over to the opposite form of female success in a patriarchal society: sexual desirability and fashion sense. What if wearing Dolce & Gabana was the homework assignment? What if knowing the history of cerulean blue fabrics was the essay topic? What would a 4.0 grade point average look like in that world?

The original Andy, with her sterling academic record and college paper journalism, is blocked off from a major element of female expression and the female sphere in our society (i.e. fashion). But it is through the very same tenacity and direction that got her one kind of success that she is able to have it all. And what is her reward for conquering both roads to feminine success? Membership in high society.

The Devil Wears Prada is, purposefully or otherwise, about the limitations of female power, the taking of power in ways culturally codified as “feminine”, and about the intoxicating rush of jumping class division and gaining that feminine form of power. While the film may not necessarily critique the limitations of female roles inside of our society nor the class divisions (a division it sends its protagonist magically hurtling over), it does trade in these facts about our society. No, it is not a proletarian feminist film. But in its lack of critique it ends up accidentally saying a lot of what a film with such political goals might, only with inverse values. And, but inverting the values, ends up accidentally revealing a lot more about the dominant ideology than any politically-motivated film could.

Notes

[1] It is interesting that, given Priestly’s role as the mother-figure, Andy’s success in college is related to approval from the Father. But for Andy to fully self actualize and thus succeed in “real journalism”, she needs to return to the Mother’s realm of the feminine (fashion) and get approval. Once she has both of these, she can proceed through the door to her “real self” as a “real journalist”.