Something doesn’t feel right
A Review of The Devil Wears Prada 2
Something Doesn’t feel right - young woman overlooking shipping containers on Southampton Water.
Watercolour by Sarah Keen - all rights reserved.
Lord! I am seething. What have they done to Miranda Priestly? This steely queen of an Enchanted Kingdom? Once a semi-divine or a Baba Yaga from a fairy tale. She set our young, naïve heroine Andy a series of impossible tasks that - with the help of friends - she managed to complete. Andy won Miranda’s grudging respect. So much so that Miranda wrote Andy the most graceful of references that put her onto a stella career path.
My only grudge with the original is that Andy gives up so much of herself for clingy boyfriend. However, I bring the only good news to you dear reader, from TDWP2. Andy ditched useless boyfriend, put her eggs on ice and became an award winning journalist. Sadly at peak award she learns she has been dumped by her company via text. (how v.v rude).
Fortunately on taxi home she receives random text from man offering her a feature editors job on Runway. Which she accepts so she can get her fellow sacked journalists a job on the team. Arrives at Runway like a young girl in love where Miranda fails to recognise her, unlike former colleague Nigel who sneers at the TK MAX look.
Here it starts being plain nasty. Miranda is now rather like a captive Mary Queen of Scots. Nobody is reading Runway magazine anymore and her fortunes are solely reliant on corporate men who surround her. Miranda Queen of Runway has been abducted, screwed over and held in ridiculous isolated positions. Meanwhile male billionaires squabble and manipulate Runway for their vanity products. She does her old best does Miranda but power has left her Uncomfortably we are encouraged to laugh at the modern constraints that now beset her. Not only is it unkind, it is careless. One scene where Miranda (shock) has to hang her own coat on a stand is poorly executed. We see her complete this impossible feat but in the close up - the place where we should see the coat hanging- nothing. So what happened? Did she hang her coat up or is it some crazy dream?
Meanwhile Andy is shown to a beautiful office that she somehow thinks is not good enough. She writes serious articles that are taxing for Runway’s readers. Never mind! Andy’s PA trots after her with coffee and meets her every demand, saying she wants to be just like Andy someday. We note a second-hand Gucci dress the assistant wears has been bought cheaply because the seller failed to list it correctly at an on-line auction. An absolute steal. Hmmm
Emily, thank God - has become a successful Mary Queen of Shops and making beautiful projects that I would have liked to have seen in real life. Yet this can’t last. Emily has rich billionaire lover and they with an witless Andy conspire against a helpless Miranda. When this is revealed, Andy is informed by Miranda that they are basically all mean girls who will kill each other to get the smallest advantage. Andy aghast - although we know (as does Miranda) that she will write a tell all book exposing Miranda as a queen bitch for £350K Anyway…who cares- the plot (rather like the Babington one) unravelled. Emily loses billionaire boyfriend (or sponsor) as she chillingly refers to him and oh - honestly whatever. Emily is still permitted to be friends with Andy as Andy tells her she is good enough even on her own. An Icon (pass sick bag).
Runway is rescued by a Deus ex machina female billionaire. This can’t end well as the film concludes with Miranda saying women can never be friends or good business partners . Worse, working has made Miranda a bad mother. Finally it is revealed that Andy did not become features editor on the strength of her work. Nigel tells her almost gloatingly that he had recommended her for the job. ‘you didn’t think you got this job on your own did you?’
Somewhere I heard that the reason for Miranda’s collapse is that Streep wanted her character to be more human.- whatever that means. Well OK. Why could this sequel not explore why she became such a steely ruthless creation (with a kind heart underneath it all ). In TDWP2 the Hampton scene could have shown Miranda hosting her party with grown up daughters who loved how their mother managed to get them the new Harry Potter novel before it was officially launched.
The level of misogyny, lazy and depressing tropes running through this movie reached bingo like proportions.
Working mothers bad (tick)
Women can’t be friends (tick)
Men are pulling the strings behind the scenes (tick)
Women must dress in certain way (tick)
Women sleep with men for professional favours (Tick)
Women must not age (tick)
Who you know, not what you know, is the only way to get a job (tick)
However hard women work and however competent they are - men hold the purse strings (BINGO)
Don’t get above yourselves little ladies.
The one thing left for Runway was its equivalent to the Met Gala Ball and shows Miranda gazing bemusedly at a human sized phallic shaped object wrapped up in a bow. Ha, Bloody Ha. Last month Vogue introduced the Met Gala ball saying - with its theme Fashion is Art - there would be a lot of naked dresses around.
Ah yes. That art would be the beautiful rape scenes that decorate our great galleries. Where fine nymphs wearing gauzy nothings, slide away from buff young gods. Happy days. Mean while - thanks to Kanye West, Bianca Censori and the Kardashians this pornographic anti-fashion has slipped down into our poorest of communities. I sketched the young woman above - aged roughly 14 - and included the shipping containers dependent on the oil industry that makes this fabric. She is a product of fast fashion and fast food. She is wearing the equivalent of the cerulean blue . To paraphrase Miranda ‘she is wearing a style that was selected for her by the people in this room... from a pile of stuff.'
But my young woman, with her wardrobe malfunction, shows how fashion turns her into prey. She is worth more this ‘tragic casual corner'. This fashion and this movie closes down her options.
It is truly disgusting.