Although The Devil Wears Prada 2 has been largely praised by critics (with Time going so far as to call it “better than the original”), there’s no denying that it lacks the same sparkle and even edge that the first film did. This is in no small part because the 2000s were sparklier and edgier in general, but also because the publishing and fashion industries themselves have lost their luster. Not to mention clout, influence and erstwhile big budgets. This being the crux of the overarching “motif” of the sequel. To be sure, there’s a lot of highfalutin attitudes about “the value” of what New York’s so-called elite do. Or rather, the elite of the “Old Guard” publishing and “arts” world.
Though what the movie really wants to say, in the end, is a message that only reinforces what bootstrap capitalism is all about: those who truly want to find a way to make money/stay afloat will do so. No matter what. No matter how unfavorable the conditions or how much the odds are stacked.
Before that message comes to the fore, however, the audience is reintroduced to Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) at a journalism awards ceremony where, just as she’s about to be announced as one of the winners for a “hard-hitting” feature she wrote, all of her colleagues (who work at a fictional newspaper called The Vanguard) are sent a text blast informing them they’ve been made redundant. So it is that Andy takes the stage looking “shocked and upset” rather than “shocked and happy” before going into Hollywood Left mode and speaking on the importance of the worker specifically and journalism in general.
Naturally, her speech goes viral. Just in time for the chairman of Runway, Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman, reprising his role from the original), to “magically” discover it when his son, Jay (B. J. Novak), shows him the clip as the two are discussing the disaster of Miranda Priestly’s (Meryl Streep) decision to publish a glowing article about a brand called Speedfash (“speed fash,” “fast fashion”—get it?). In the aftermath of the public and media “unearthing” that Speedfash’s business practices are, quel choc, atrocious for the environment and humans alike, Miranda’s credibility is called into question as the threat of being full-tilt “canceled” looms large. And yes, of course someone like Miranda would be at risk of getting cancelled in today’s cultural climate. Of course a reckoning for someone like her would be long overdue.
But before the viewer is made privy to that threat, as another part of the movie’s opening scenes meant to show and counterpoint where Andy and Miranda are at in their lives, the camera is sure to pause on a giant Runway banner outside the Met touting “Spring Florals” as its Met Gala theme (because, needless to say, Runway is but an alter ego of Vogue). This being not just a nod to Miranda’s beloved, “Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking” line from The Devil Wears Prada, but also an indication of just how much Miranda has both 1) “slipped” when it comes to her consummate taste and 2) been forced to make concessions to her formerly impossible standards in an era that favors only what “feels good” and “easy.”
And what certainly doesn’t feel good or easy to Miranda is Irv not only threatening to take away the long-promised promotion of making her Global Chief Content Officer across all of Elias-Clarke’s publications (which is what happened to Anna Wintour), but also going over her head to “fix” the backlash against her by hiring Andy as the new features editor. This meant to virtue-signal that Runway not only still values “sterling journalism,” but that it’s willing to pay top dollar for it too. Something Andy is sure to mention to her fellow unemployed colleagues, as well as her longtime friend from the first movie, Lily (Tracie Thoms), whose main purpose in this incarnation is to serve as the art gallery world conduit that will roundaboutly connect Andy to an excessively wealthy divorcée named Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu). Not to mention thrusting Andy upon a new apartment and, at the same time, a rather non sequitur love interest, Peter (Patrick Brammall). A man who, at times, shows flickers of the same dickishness as Nate (Adrian Grenier) behind that “niceness,” with Brosh McKenna clearly wanting to overcompensate for how unsupportive Nate was in the first movie).
As for Lily insisting on Andy checking out (and soon after renting) a more luxurious apartment, it’s meant to align with how her salary is now “double” what she made at The Vanguard. So maybe that’s why she felt obliged to “sell her soul” yet again to Runway and Miranda—as Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) accused her of doing in the The Devil Wears Prada, telling her she did so “the day [she] put on that first pair of Jimmy Choos.” And if Andy thought the job market was bad/soul-compromising then, she had no idea what she would be in for twenty years on, with nothing but a wasteland where once print media reigned supreme.
Indeed, one of the starkest contrasts between the first movie and its sequel was how much print magazines were still operating, in 2006, as if no reckoning was coming despite the fact that the internet had already taken over. Something that Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) remarks on as he finds himself in the cafeteria anew with Andy, who still has no problem ladling “goo” (how Nigel refers to the soup) into a bowl. As he recalls, there was a time when the budget for the magazine was high enough to send him to Africa for four weeks for un petit photo spread, whereas now, he’s lucky if he gets two days’ worth of shooting time at Milk Studios. Such is the modern-day lack of budget for “the arts.” Ah, but that’s the other annoying thing about The Devil Wears Prada 2 that stands out far more than in the original: the attitude that what Miranda, Andy and co. do is art. Even though that’s a laughable notion when they’re being told how to make that art by Elias-Clarke (the alter ego of Condé Nast), as well as their coterie of advertisers. Chief among them being Christian Dior, where Emily is now a big kahuna executive with the power to make or break how an issue of Runway looks with her advertising money clout. And clearly, she’s loving the newfound power she has to lord over Miranda, at her mercy more than usual after the Speedfash snafu.
Funnily enough, Emily has no problem remembering who Andy is when she walks into the Dior offices with Miranda and Nigel, though Miranda seemed to have no memory whatsoever of “that sad little person” (as Nigel once called her when she came in for an interview twenty years prior) when Andy walked in for the “second first time” to let Miranda know she would be happy to be working together. When Andy sees that not only does Miranda not remember who she is, but also has no idea that Irv hired her, she grasps that this new tour of duty at Runway could be just as rigorous as the first.
As for those who find it difficult to believe Miranda wouldn’t recall her most indelible assistant, director David Frankel said that it could be “a little bit of a ploy on her part,” though, at the same time, “it’s that thing you have when you have your first boss—they mean everything to you, you never forget them and the boss has had a million assistants. You came and you were there for a year, who remembers that?” And Andy didn’t even last a full year. Nonetheless, how could she forget the girl who secured her the unpublished Harry Potter manuscript for her terrible twins? Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna also added, “It’s been twenty years, how many assistants do we think she’s had? She has two [at a time] so probably fifty, I would guess. She definitely doesn’t remember [Andy] on sight, which I think is understandable.” Well, certainly, when you’re a self-important “tastemaker” who’s more concerned with famous people’s names and faces than someone like Andy.
As for other notable callbacks to the first movie, not only does Andy rock a repurposed version of her cerulean sweater that launched one of the most iconic rants in movie history, but Madonna’s “Vogue” still makes an auditory cameo as the Milan scenes commence (that’s right, Paris is swapped for Milan in this case, giving Tucci an excuse to speak his bad Italian and feign being “at home” there). But now, “Madonna protégée” Lady Gaga (who wasn’t even a thought on anyone’s mind in her pre-fame days of 2006) gets plenty of time, both sonically and visually, in the movie as well, having recorded three songs for the soundtrack, “Runway,” “Shape of a Woman” (which she performs “live” at the Runway fashion show in Milan) and “Glamorous Life.” And no, despite the contentious relationship she has with Miranda, played for ultimate comedic effect during their brief exchange in Gaga’s dressing room, it’s not her that Miranda tells a new iconic line to: “You’re not a visionary, you’re a vendor.” That major dig is instead reserved for Emily, after the two get into it about a fresh betrayal and Emily brings up the way that Miranda pushed her out of Runway and all but forced Dior to hire her so she would leave. The “visionary/vendor” line being Miranda’s explanation for doing so.
In the scenes and plot points leading up to this big reveal, Brosh McKenna borrows a bit of plot and scenery from Succession (i.e., all that conniving and dealmaking with Lukas Matsson [Alexander Skarsgård] in Lake Como) and 30 Rock (i.e., the way Don Geiss [Rip Torn] goes into a diabetic coma just before he’s about to announce Jack’s new role as his successor). Though that’s hardly the most “appalling” thing about the movie. Nor is even the fact that Andy’s loyalty to Miranda feels even more out of place in the sequel than it did in the first movie, with Miranda needing to be the one to encourage her to take the tell-all book deal she’s been offered (for Andy was “coerced” by her friend, Tessa [Rachel Bloom], to pitch the idea of a Miranda Priestly exposé in book form). This being a nod to Lauren Weisberger’s own fictionalized tell-all, released in 2003, that served as the source material for The Devil Wears Prada (though Brosh McKenna, for whatever reason, didn’t seem keen to adapt Weisberger’s own sequel to that book, Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns).
Miranda reminds Andy that just because they’re working together “for now” doesn’t mean they’re not both still clinging to the last viable piece of wreckage to float them next to the sunken Titanic, and that one of them might have to throw the other over (Rose with Jack-style) at a moment’s notice. So instead, maybe what’s most appalling is that the “read” on the movie is that it’s “a love letter to female ambition” (as Grazia called it) when, ultimately, it’s another love letter to capitalism. And, more to the point, bending over for it whenever it wants to fuck you in the ass. For it’s your job (yet another unpaid one) to “adapt or die” when it comes to its whims and means of exploitation.
So it is that, to mitigate that sense of exploitation, Miranda matter-of-factly tells Andy toward the end of the movie, “I love working.” This meant to be proof of that trite adage, “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” And while Miranda is in her late seventies (if one is to go by the same age that both Wintour and Streep share), she would essentially rather “die” than not work. Equating not working with death. Which is, to this day, the “American way.” Mostly because it has to be. And with movies like this to help glamorize the idea that “staying the course” and continuing to work at any age is “all worth it,” it’s entirely probable that Americans (and American women in particular) just might be brainwashed into believing they truly like what capitalism has left to offer: more enforced backstabbing and ensuring everyone feels resources are scarce, therefore must be brutally competed over.
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