The Devil Wears Prada
Aug. 3rd, 2023 07:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretOh, gosh. In the interview scene from the book The Devil Wears Prada, Andy (Full name Andrea Sachs) is asked if she speaks any foreign languages. She says she speaks Hebrew, and her future boss Miranda (full name Miranda Priestly) says that she was hoping for a useful language, like French. It later emerges that Miranda is the child of an impoverished London Orthodox Jewish family who rejected her family heritage out of a desire for success in the secular world. And changed her name from Miriam Princhek to Miranda Priestly, to boot! Priestly! This identity stuff is not super-subtle. When not mis-calling Andy Emily after the name of the former (very goyish) assistant, Miranda insistently calls Andy "Ahn-dre-ah", a sort of Frenchified desemitification which is more of Miranda's nominative rejection of both her own Judaism and also Andy's. Miranda's whole mission could be explained as trying to teach Andy that if she becomes less Jewish, she can succeed in the world of Western letters and literature. In the novel's conclusion, Andy rejects Miranda's abusive tactics, but she does not abandon her hopes of succeeding in New York magazine culture.
That's the paradox of Andy. Her family is deeply, substantially Jewish- in the sense that they eat an 'expertly ordered' spread of bagels and lox every year the night before Thanksgiving. And you know, that's not what comes to mind first for me when I think of my Jewish identity, but clearly being Jewish matters to Andy and her family, and that's enough to make her represent a threat to the New York establishment. Her name, the name that so threatens Miranda, is Andrea- certainly a fairly common name for secular American Jews (there were two Andreas in my Hebrew school class), but it's not like we're talking Rivka Sachs here. But it doesn't matter. No matter how full of Jews the New York elite is, our toleration is always conditional. Miranda knows this to her core, and even Andy sort of knows it. So the question Andy is faced with is how much of her deepest self she has to give up. She rejects Miranda's answer, she rejects giving everything up. But she still accepts that she has to give something up. America is designed to force Jews to compromise ourselves. Boy do I feel this.
The funniest part of this Jewish narrative in the book, to me, is that Miranda's boss, the head of the Elias company, is named Irv Ravitz. There's a couple scenes where Miranda goes to meetings with Irv Ravitz and comes back grumpy, and I think it's very funny that Miranda went to all this effort to change her name and erase her Jewishness out of a deep seated conviction that the visibly Jewish cannot rule the secular world, and then she ends up at the beck and call of a man named Irv Ravitz. How it must rankle, especially because Miranda is still not wrong. Weisberger absolutely gets the many paradoxes and indignities of being Jewish in America, and in particular being a Jewish woman. The unwritten rules are never fair.
Also, the whole thing is striking given that the book is widely considered a roman a clef on Lauren Weisberger's experience working as an assistant for Anna Wintour, who is a Christian upper crust Briton who is not in any way, shape or form Jewish. Weisberger made this deliberate choice to imagine an alternate version of Anna Wintour who is covertly a self-hating Jew. This subtext did not need to be there. I find that utterly fascinating, trying to figure out what Weisberger is trying to say about the world of high fashion media by this choice.
Like, is the point that Weisberger realized that she can never be Anna Wintour because she, as a Jewish woman, would have to become Miranda Priestly instead? Is the question of Andy's trajectory as seen through the lens of Miranda as a potential endpoint so important to the novel that Weisberger got stuck on the unattainability of a Jewish woman ever Becoming Anna Wintour, and instead had to write a story where she asks whether Andy could ever become the Jewish version of Anna Wintour? Man, that is bleak.
[Aside: I'm a little nervous about doing this aside, but here goes! Doing the math based on the timeline of her career, Miranda Priestly was born to this impoverished London Orthodox Jewish family with 11 children probably in the early 1950s. (Anna Wintour was born in 1949, I'm comfortable saying Miranda Priestly was also born in 1949). So there are two possibilities, either she was born to an established impoverished London Jewish family (unlikely) or she was born to a family of Survivor refugees from Poland (much likelier). That makes Miranda's story of rejection of her family's heritage much more consonant with the history, and much sadder. Many of those Survivor families never talked about the Holocaust with their children, but they wore it in their every action in a way that drove away their children, who knew instinctively that their parents could never be happy people. You can easily see how a family life like that could help lead to a woman like Miranda Priestly. I have no idea if this is what Weisberger intended but it makes an awful lot of sense. But the most uncomfortable part of this reading is the scene where Miranda stays in 'the Coco Chanel Suite' at a fancy hotel in Paris. Yikes.]
In the film, all of this is gone. Miranda and Andy are played by non-Jewish actresses Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, Andy now has a supportive Midwestern family (she's still called Andy Sachs, though!) and a goyish chef boyfriend and Miranda's upper crust British heritage is apparently authentic. And I hate when Hollywood does this, and they do it over and over and over again, taking texts designed to interrogate the emotional choices forced by Jewish identity and turn them into something less than that, when there are millions of authentic Christian stories out there already. The film felt really flat to me even before I realized the missing Jewish subtext, because nothing it says about fashion is really profound or interesting. Wikipedia has a surprisingly long section on the 'cerulean speech', most of which I think is nonsense, but the final paragraph of the wikipedia article assesses what is so sinister about the nonsense- that Streep delivers that pile of self-centered bullshit dispassionately, with total lack of interest in what Andy makes of the speech, as the ultimate putdown. This is why the movie doesn't work, because it's trying to make you care about the growing, complicated relationship between Andy and Miranda, but Miranda is just a bitch. There's nothing interesting about her being a bitch, capitalism is built on exploitation of labor and Miranda exploits her assistants because she knows Andy is trapped and she doesn't care about Andy as a person, just as a cog in the machine she runs. The most sinister line in the film is when Streep tells Andy that Andy can be like her; It's the moment that shakes Andy to her core and prompts her rejection of the entire lifestyle. There is nothing human about any of this, the moral choice that movie runs on is whether it's acceptable to hurt other people just to benefit yourself. It's not. There, I've said kol torah kulah while standing on one foot.
There's a very funny cold open to an episode of The Office where Michael is watching The Devil Wears Prada a half hour at a time and until he hits the end he thinks that Miranda is the hero of the movie and keeps imitating her at work by asking Pam to perform absurd feats of assistance. It's funny because it recognizes the obviousness of the moral vacancy of Meryl Streep's character, that the whole movie is wrapped up in the idea that Meryl Streep is so profoundly charismatic that many people can ignore that she is just boringly meanspirited.
There's nothing really more morally interesting about the book, it's still a simple book about how capital abuses labor and labor tricks itself into thinking that its work has independent value, but that's okay because the book has these interesting layers of identity play instead of moral dilemmas. Andy has two friends left over from her sojourn in the mires of being Jewish at Brown University- Lily who is now a miserable grad student in Russian literature at Columbia, and Alex who has parlayed his Ivy League experience into a soul-sucking job at Teach for America in a failing Bronx school. They are very specific people in a way that the film versions of Alex and Lily are not. Both of them look at Andy and are horrified at the amount of work she is doing, and that is a basic joke on its own- when a literature grad student thinks you're doing too much meaningless drudgery, something has gone terribly wrong- but it's also a question about identity, because young upper middle class Jews are not afraid of work, but they want their work to mean something. That's the contrast Weisberger is trying to set up, here are three young people who are miserable with their work lives, but there's a difference between them.
In the end, I think Weisberger sees Andy's sojourn with Miranda as a cul de sac that ultimately does lead her to rethink her values and execute an escape: Jacob dwelling with Laban.
That's the paradox of Andy. Her family is deeply, substantially Jewish- in the sense that they eat an 'expertly ordered' spread of bagels and lox every year the night before Thanksgiving. And you know, that's not what comes to mind first for me when I think of my Jewish identity, but clearly being Jewish matters to Andy and her family, and that's enough to make her represent a threat to the New York establishment. Her name, the name that so threatens Miranda, is Andrea- certainly a fairly common name for secular American Jews (there were two Andreas in my Hebrew school class), but it's not like we're talking Rivka Sachs here. But it doesn't matter. No matter how full of Jews the New York elite is, our toleration is always conditional. Miranda knows this to her core, and even Andy sort of knows it. So the question Andy is faced with is how much of her deepest self she has to give up. She rejects Miranda's answer, she rejects giving everything up. But she still accepts that she has to give something up. America is designed to force Jews to compromise ourselves. Boy do I feel this.
The funniest part of this Jewish narrative in the book, to me, is that Miranda's boss, the head of the Elias company, is named Irv Ravitz. There's a couple scenes where Miranda goes to meetings with Irv Ravitz and comes back grumpy, and I think it's very funny that Miranda went to all this effort to change her name and erase her Jewishness out of a deep seated conviction that the visibly Jewish cannot rule the secular world, and then she ends up at the beck and call of a man named Irv Ravitz. How it must rankle, especially because Miranda is still not wrong. Weisberger absolutely gets the many paradoxes and indignities of being Jewish in America, and in particular being a Jewish woman. The unwritten rules are never fair.
Also, the whole thing is striking given that the book is widely considered a roman a clef on Lauren Weisberger's experience working as an assistant for Anna Wintour, who is a Christian upper crust Briton who is not in any way, shape or form Jewish. Weisberger made this deliberate choice to imagine an alternate version of Anna Wintour who is covertly a self-hating Jew. This subtext did not need to be there. I find that utterly fascinating, trying to figure out what Weisberger is trying to say about the world of high fashion media by this choice.
Like, is the point that Weisberger realized that she can never be Anna Wintour because she, as a Jewish woman, would have to become Miranda Priestly instead? Is the question of Andy's trajectory as seen through the lens of Miranda as a potential endpoint so important to the novel that Weisberger got stuck on the unattainability of a Jewish woman ever Becoming Anna Wintour, and instead had to write a story where she asks whether Andy could ever become the Jewish version of Anna Wintour? Man, that is bleak.
[Aside: I'm a little nervous about doing this aside, but here goes! Doing the math based on the timeline of her career, Miranda Priestly was born to this impoverished London Orthodox Jewish family with 11 children probably in the early 1950s. (Anna Wintour was born in 1949, I'm comfortable saying Miranda Priestly was also born in 1949). So there are two possibilities, either she was born to an established impoverished London Jewish family (unlikely) or she was born to a family of Survivor refugees from Poland (much likelier). That makes Miranda's story of rejection of her family's heritage much more consonant with the history, and much sadder. Many of those Survivor families never talked about the Holocaust with their children, but they wore it in their every action in a way that drove away their children, who knew instinctively that their parents could never be happy people. You can easily see how a family life like that could help lead to a woman like Miranda Priestly. I have no idea if this is what Weisberger intended but it makes an awful lot of sense. But the most uncomfortable part of this reading is the scene where Miranda stays in 'the Coco Chanel Suite' at a fancy hotel in Paris. Yikes.]
In the film, all of this is gone. Miranda and Andy are played by non-Jewish actresses Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, Andy now has a supportive Midwestern family (she's still called Andy Sachs, though!) and a goyish chef boyfriend and Miranda's upper crust British heritage is apparently authentic. And I hate when Hollywood does this, and they do it over and over and over again, taking texts designed to interrogate the emotional choices forced by Jewish identity and turn them into something less than that, when there are millions of authentic Christian stories out there already. The film felt really flat to me even before I realized the missing Jewish subtext, because nothing it says about fashion is really profound or interesting. Wikipedia has a surprisingly long section on the 'cerulean speech', most of which I think is nonsense, but the final paragraph of the wikipedia article assesses what is so sinister about the nonsense- that Streep delivers that pile of self-centered bullshit dispassionately, with total lack of interest in what Andy makes of the speech, as the ultimate putdown. This is why the movie doesn't work, because it's trying to make you care about the growing, complicated relationship between Andy and Miranda, but Miranda is just a bitch. There's nothing interesting about her being a bitch, capitalism is built on exploitation of labor and Miranda exploits her assistants because she knows Andy is trapped and she doesn't care about Andy as a person, just as a cog in the machine she runs. The most sinister line in the film is when Streep tells Andy that Andy can be like her; It's the moment that shakes Andy to her core and prompts her rejection of the entire lifestyle. There is nothing human about any of this, the moral choice that movie runs on is whether it's acceptable to hurt other people just to benefit yourself. It's not. There, I've said kol torah kulah while standing on one foot.
There's a very funny cold open to an episode of The Office where Michael is watching The Devil Wears Prada a half hour at a time and until he hits the end he thinks that Miranda is the hero of the movie and keeps imitating her at work by asking Pam to perform absurd feats of assistance. It's funny because it recognizes the obviousness of the moral vacancy of Meryl Streep's character, that the whole movie is wrapped up in the idea that Meryl Streep is so profoundly charismatic that many people can ignore that she is just boringly meanspirited.
There's nothing really more morally interesting about the book, it's still a simple book about how capital abuses labor and labor tricks itself into thinking that its work has independent value, but that's okay because the book has these interesting layers of identity play instead of moral dilemmas. Andy has two friends left over from her sojourn in the mires of being Jewish at Brown University- Lily who is now a miserable grad student in Russian literature at Columbia, and Alex who has parlayed his Ivy League experience into a soul-sucking job at Teach for America in a failing Bronx school. They are very specific people in a way that the film versions of Alex and Lily are not. Both of them look at Andy and are horrified at the amount of work she is doing, and that is a basic joke on its own- when a literature grad student thinks you're doing too much meaningless drudgery, something has gone terribly wrong- but it's also a question about identity, because young upper middle class Jews are not afraid of work, but they want their work to mean something. That's the contrast Weisberger is trying to set up, here are three young people who are miserable with their work lives, but there's a difference between them.
In the end, I think Weisberger sees Andy's sojourn with Miranda as a cul de sac that ultimately does lead her to rethink her values and execute an escape: Jacob dwelling with Laban.
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Date: 2023-08-03 01:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2023-08-06 01:06 am (UTC)"And I will say, what’s changed over the 25 years of my career is before I could not have made any characters explicitly Jewish. Andy Sachs in Devil Wears Prada is certainly Jewish. Sachs is my grandmother’s name, and Lauren Weisberger is Jewish. That’s a story about a Jewish woman, but that’s never mentioned, nor would that have ever been mentioned 12 years ago when the movie came out. And now, we’re writing one of the most unabashedly Jewish female leads, and we’re encouraged to do that. And I think that it is changing in a great way."
There is a lot to unpack there.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-06 02:02 am (UTC)Ohhhh yeah.
Like, from where I'm sitting, I don't see that it's changed (or at least not that much?), but I'm glad she got to make a niche TV show with a Jewish lead? Which I've never watched but at least I've heard of it, unlike most TV shows.
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Date: 2023-08-03 05:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2023-08-05 04:18 pm (UTC)