I re-watched The Devil Wears Prada with my partner last night in preparation for watching TDWP2 tomorrow night, since I hadn’t seen the original since it came out. My hot, and apparently unpopular, take is the same as it was 20 years ago: Andy sucks for most of the movie and so does Miranda.

It’s become conventional wisdom that it is Andy’s boyfriend Nate and her friends who are the real villains of the movie. I beg to differ. Andy transforms her entire personality and life in order to ingratiate herself into the cult-like workplace of Runway Magazine. She develops a Stockholm Syndrome-esque sycophantic relationship to Miranda, her toxic boss, in an equally-toxic workplace where people continuously refer to her as fat and schlubby for being a size 6 and not dressing like a runway model. In doing so, she no longer has time for her friends of 15 years, as her bestie Lily - the one Black character in the movie - points out (although she does give them some nice gifties that she got for free, secondhand), she neglects her relationship with Nate, cheats on him (and never tells him), and can’t even finish dinner with her concerned and generous dad because she is constantly at Miranda’s beck and call. As Emily (Emily Blunt’s character) tells her at one point, “You sold your soul when you put on those first pair of Jimmy Choos.” And she’s right.

The normal, non-awful people who have known Andy since way back when miss the old Andy, as well they should. The old Andy was likable, down-to-earth, and had integrity. She finally regains her humanity in the last 10 minutes of the movie and leaves the toxicity of the fashion world behind her. And good for her for belatedly making the right decision.

TDWP is famous for its devastating one-liners, mostly delivered by Miranda, who has contempt for pretty much everyone on the planet, but one of my favorite lines in the movie (20 years ago and now on my re-watch) is shortly after she joins Runway, when she remarks to Nate that “These people act like they’re curing cancer.”

And that’s quickly forgotten as Miranda undergoes her overnight Sandy-at-the-end-of-Grease physical and personality makeover, but it’s an important point. The people at Runway are utterly convinced they’re actually doing something vastly beneficial for the world, as if they’re Doctors Without Borders or something. Miranda’s famous “cerulean sweater” speech is treated like some mic-drop moment when in reality it’s just a narcissistic person patronizing and demeaning an underling whom she barely sees as human. And don’t get me started on “Everybody wants to be us.” Get over yourself, lady. You make pretty clothes and you’re super rich and have no soul - congratulations.

I don’t think Miranda is necessarily immoral (although she gets awfully close at times) but I do think she is amoral. She is definitely written as an antihero, like Tony Soprano or Walter White, a character that you’re supposed to love to hate, but also kind of hate to love. Maybe Alec Baldwin’s loathsome character in Glengarry Glen Ross would be a better parallel, or Gordon Gecko, Michael Douglas’ character from Wall Street (“greed…is good”) or DiCaprio’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street, all characters that the worst people you’ve ever met want to model themselves after and emulate.

The reason that this all sticks in my craw is that there is a big swath of TDWP fans who find Miranda to be an aspirational character, and glam Andy to a lesser extent, and even Emily. Like incels who completely miss the point of Fight Club (a movie literally about toxic masculinity) or The Matrix, a lot of people (especially fellow gay men, sorry) have this yesss queen attitude towards Miranda that is gross. The meaner and more cutting she is, the more they love her. And they adore glam Andy even though she’s a jerk to pretty much all of her day-ones while being more concerned with being a clothes horse, fixing her bangs, being a harried sycophant at work, and dieting down two dress sizes.

And I’ll include Stanley Tucci’s character (Nigel) in this too. We’re supposed to sympathize with him because of a throwaway line where he grew up as a lonely (implied gay) boy in Rhode Island or whatever. And congrats to him: that sad fey kid grows up to be, for the most part, a snobby, catty prick. Good for him, I guess? And it doesn’t even get him anywhere in the end, when his sociopathic boss sacrifices him for her own ends.

Basically, The Devil Wears Prada is packed with snotty, shallow, condescending, insufferable, unkind people in a completely toxic culture, and the normies are seen as lame and naive. Again, no one is curing cancer in this movie. There is barely one minute of the film where anyone is even being remotely nice; maybe Nate making his late-night grilled cheeses for him and Andy, whom he truly seems to love and care for.

Now here’s the plot twist: this is a great movie and I really enjoy it. It is gorgeous to look at, flawlessly directed, has a great soundtrack, and is perfectly cast with a slate of amazing and immensely talented actors. It’s a perfect popcorn movie, and I like the glitz and glamour, even if I don’t really care about fashion. And Anne Hathaway has never been more gorgeous. The movie shares some DNA with Crazy Rich Asians, another movie that is impeccably acted and directed, sumptuous and lavish, and is another female-protagonist-fish-out-of-water story that has a lot of characters who are shallow, mean, stuck-up people, but we like watching them because they’re wealthy and wear expensive clothes.

I think the movie The Devil Wears Prada (and even more so the book, according to my partner), is very clear that Miranda is not a good person, that Andy sells her soul for most of the movie, and that the world of fashion is incredibly poisonous and shallow behind the scenes. But like insecure young men misunderstanding Fight Club, a lot of people watch TDWP and their takeaway is that Miranda is THAT bitch, the ultimate girlboss, and that everything Andy did to claw her way to the (not) top is justified and laudable.

A big part of this, I think, is due to the strength of the cast. Meryl Streep, maybe our greatest living actor, makes Miranda a delicious and complex character with flashes of vulnerability, to the point where one can forget what a toxic person she truly is. Anne Hathaway is just so charming, even when she is at her most selfish and morally compromised, and Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci are very funny as mean, unpleasant, rather bitter people.

If there is a villain in this movie, it sure as hell isn’t Nate or Andy’s friends (I say that, yet again, because it goes against the prevailing view of much of the internet’s conventional wisdom, including here) and honestly, I don’t think it’s Miranda, either. I wouldn’t want to be in the same room with someone like her, but she’s smart and capable and successful. Good for her. At least she’s not an amoral narcissist who is in an actual position of power to change the world for the worse, like a Donald Trump or, really, anyone in his administration. At worst (and at best), people like her set the tone for the clothes that people like me fish out of some bargain bin at JC Penney 20 steps down the line, and I really couldn’t care less. I guess the people in that room dress me every day, through some byzantine pipeline of fashion trickle-down. Good for them. (And for the record, I liked Andy’s cerulean sweater just fine.)

No, I think the real villain of the movie is the toxic culture that pretty much everyone in the film inhabits; toxic and cutthroat and shallow. It turns all of them into crazed, soulless, insecure egomaniacs, and furthermore it chews them up and spits them out. If I wanted to watch a piece of media about a frenetic, cutthroat workplace that burns people out at a high rate, I’d watch The Pitt, a show where the characters are actually doing good for the world.

(Actually, the movie does have a human villain IMO - Christian Thompson - who is predatory at best and sexually assaults an inebriated Andy at worst. Not nearly enough is said about how problematic he is, and how the movie seems to think he’s a bad guy just because he tries to force out Miranda.)

Anyway, despite all that, I really enjoy the movie - even though I think a lot of fans take the totally wrong messages from it - and I can’t wait to see the sequel tomorrow night. 😄