The Devil Wears Prada 2 Is the Try-Hard Sequel Millennials Deserve |
The Devil Wears Prada 2 Is the Try-Hard Sequel Millennials Deserve
In the 2006 movie, a ruthless fashion world ground down young ambitious women. The sequel is kinder, more human—and less confident.
Getting into generational discourse is not unlike diving deep into astrology: Every vague, contradictory statement feels true, especially when it’s what you want to hear. Are millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, lazy or hardworking? Are they romantics or cynics? Are they poised to overturn the chaos in American politics, or is Gen Z going to be left holding the bag? It all depends on who you ask.
But if there is one millennial archetype that the media cannot resist, it is the try-hard girl-woman. Just this spring, writer-performer Lena Dunham published Famesick, a memoir about how being the “voice of a generation” meant working her mortal, chronically ill body into the ground. And earlier this year, in Life After Ambition: A “Good Enough” Memoir, writer Amil Niazi lays out the particularities of being a Pakistani Canadian millennial in a family without money, navigating atmospheres that left no room for error. “Did those gold stars or participation trophies really warp me,” she asks, “or did the promise that anything was possible if I was ambitious cause me to self-destruct?”
Looking back to the 2000s and 2010s, no one raised her hand higher or completed more extra-credit assignments than Anne Hathaway. Breaking through in 2001 with The Princess Diaries and going on to play a Cinderella figure in the 2004 Ella Enchanted, Hathaway came on the scene as the girl next door ready for her makeover montage. This positioned her perfectly to play the role of Andrea “Andy” Sachs in the 2006 film adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s Anna Wintour–inspired roman à clef, The Devil Wears Prada. Under the unwilling tutelage of first assistant Emily (Emily Blunt), journalism grad and second assistant Andy struggles to gain the approval of Runway magazine’s Wintour-esque Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). “This place that people would die to work, you deign to work,” scolds Runway’s fashion director, Nigel (Stanley Tucci). “And you want to know why she doesn’t give you a kiss on the forehead and put a gold star on your homework?”
Here we go again with the gold stars. The Devil Wears Prada had all the favorite tropes of the 2000s: a women’s magazine writer who aspires to serious journalism; a cute boyfriend who, subsequent rewatches reveal, is a self-absorbed jerk; an older woman supervisor-mentor whose tough love inspires the heroine to be true to a new and improved version of herself. It is also relentless in its attacks on women’s bodies, with Hathaway’s character flippantly referred to as the “smart, fat girl” in the office. It’s a satire of the fashion world, fine, but it also bought into many of the........