marfa and i have a date with destiny

I saw The Devil Wears Prada over the weekend and I just want to say one thing.

Well first of all it's a very entertaining movie--although let me stop right there. Probably 50% of my pleasure in watching this movie was looking at the clothes, and that is not a universal pleasure. I love high fashion but I don't really have an explanation for that. It's some kind of genetic fluke. Anyway, be forewarned that part of the fun of the movie is the clothes, in case prolonged montages of one character walking down the street in many different outfits is not your idea of a good time.

Another, say, 10% of my enjoyment of the movie was witnessing other 20 somethings' post-graduate angst (and I would have squeezed in 5% for Anne Hathaway's bangs, but it got cancelled out by her -5% fire engine red lipstick in the denouement--no no not with her coloring).

That leaves a good 40% chunk for Meryl Streep's performance. In some roles I think she can come across as too mannered--I'm thinking of Clarissa in The Hours [which I think is just miscasting: you wouldn't cast Johnny Depp to play a mousy character who has a tendency to fade into the background, would you?], but here she practically underplays Miranda Priestly, it's awesome, the cerulean blue scene is awesome, she's compulsively watchable for every second she's on screen.

So with that, I have gotten to the one thing I want to say.

***Ahem. Spoilers Ahead.***

How many movies do I have to watch about women feeling guilty about their careers? HOW. MANY. There's supposed to be all this dramatic tension in the narrative about protagonist Andy (Anne Hathaway) sacrificing her relationship with her boyfriend, and her integrity, by working in a high-powered, demanding environment. Well, her boyfriend is kind of lame, you know--judgemental and whiney and passive aggressive--which most of us are at 22, and we have to learn how to be otherwise somehow, right? By getting dumped by our boy/girlfriend, for instance, or alternatively shaping up and realizing we will survive if our boy/girlfriend occasionally comes home late from the office. But in the movies, we never grow up because our boy/girl(read:girl)friend realizes the error of her ways and tosses her Blackberry into a fountain and apologizes to us all chastened over our morning coffee.

Also, Andy never sacrificed her integrity. In the last act she agrees to accompany her boss on an important business trip, taking the place of one of her superiors. This was supposedly a cut-throat move, for which she had to redeem herself. I call bull. If that superior were a friend, then there would have been an ethical dilemma, a conflict between her personal and professional life, in that decision. But her superior had always treated her like shit (in fantastically funny and endearing ways for us the viewers, since Emily Blunt is totally great). Andy got offered the trip because she was better at the job. Therefore, the conflict is between being a professional and being self-abnegating. That is no conflict.

The real conflict that a 22 year old woman working at Vogue would be subject to? Would be at least partly about class. About how worth is generated in the fashion/beauty industry by scarcity, and how that impacts us socially and culturally, and what it would feel like to be in the trenches of that machine. To me high fashion is a lot like, say, slasher movies--it's a hyper-real theatricalization of our society's anxieties and dysfunctions--but we don't really make movies about class in the US. So, yes, that is the thing I wanted to say.

P.S. The picture at the top of this post is of an art installation outside Valentine, Texas called "Prada Marfa." It is a replica of a Prada boutique in the middle of some ranch land. It must have been a trip to be one of those first people driving down that empty highway and then suddenly seeing that thing along the side of the road, huh? Here's an interesting Houston Press article about it.