the chutry experiment

What do you make of the moment where the Miranda characters as played by Meryl Streep offers the audience one of those elegant mise en abyme moments (in a limo in Paris): Everybody wants to be like us. Everybody? The film is asking another question: like us? Not you or me but "us". To be like us is to be in a position to choose. So nicely evoked in cinematic terms by exits from opposite sides of the car. And this is a very intimate moment. Like us means like the characters as they have been played i.e. Miranda sans makeup, in a robe, eyes puffy from weeping. Us covers a lot of ground. Both Miranda sallying forth and Andy opting out of sallying forth in exactly the same direction. Intimate moment in the back seat of the limo which in digetic terms is overheard by the driver, the chauffeur -- the character to whom the last lines of the movie are addressed and by identificatory magic line addressed to the viewer: "go." Like us means transformable, open to change and able to return from the makeover wisened.

Boy is in Boston, girl in New York. The film doesn't refigure the heteronormative couple. It ends with the women being driven and in one sense driving.

Doesn't that cell phone flung in the fountain remind you of the folded grades sent gliding at the end of The Paper Chase. There it's law school; here, fashion, one of the culture industries, part of the consumerist industrial complex. The boyfriend is a foodie -- another branch of the same complex.

To thine own self be true may be trite and indvidualistic but emotional autonomy is the sure foundation of solid relations. This is a far more subversive movie -- when a woman character says "everbody wants to be like us" and every man in the audience, every man gay or straight, identifies, well that is an homage to the discipline of acting. It's a film about acting: the hours in wardrobe, the practice to hit the mark on cue...

Francois, first, I'm going to use your comment as an excuse to link to Dr. Crazy's passing comments on the adaptation from novel to film. But your comments have me rethinking the film to some point.

You know, that's the one scene that complicated my initial review entry on Prada. It's a compelling scene, as your observations illustrate, and Miranda's "us," especially, is a more complicated term than I originally implied. I read it more narrowly as the "us" of the fashion world, te very specific tastemakers who get to go to Paris and hangout with supermodels. Reading it in terms of Miranda and Andy's (relative) autonomy does give the scene a slightly more interesting edge.

I haven't seen The Paper Chase, but tossing the cell phone in the fountain did recall similar scenes from other films.

Your reading the film in terms of performance, noting that "it's a film about acting" might be a better reading than mine (which read the film as being about surfaces). In a sense, any film with Meryl Streep is about performance, but I'm wondering about the degree of identification you describe. To be honest, I didn't find myself to be included in that "us," but that may reflect more on what I desired for the Andy character and my predilection for blue sweaters.

It may also be that I was feeling grumpy because I didn't have any movies that I wanted to see that night.

ah, the sweater. Every read William Gass's essay On Being Blue? "Furthermore, like those logical layers I touched upon earlier (blue the color, 'blue' the word, and Blue the Platonic Idea), our feelings have levels, and many are metapathetic."

It was Kaja Silverman's The Acoustic Mirror that made me more sensitive to how sound and sight align in the construction of gendered subjectivities. Plus Teresa de Lauretis has some fine essays in Alice Doesn't that help one train for the entertainment of resistive/subversive readings.

One last detail: the owner of the magazine is a man who is set up as being concerned about minimizing expense (this information is communicated through the character of Nigel who combines pragmatic good sense with fashion flare). The counterforce is in the "list" a metonymic reference to the network of relations that sustain cultural work from production to consumption through recirculation. By the movies's end three women have found their places (pretty much on their own terms). Nigel will live in hope for another position and with the knowledge that he held his cool publicly. These are mandarin values and they are set up in this movie against petty petulance (the husband reports that he was kept waiting in the restaurant and was irked by what people might be thinking) the publisher ("how much is this costing me?"). Nigel, Jacqueline, Miranda and Andy represent a "me" in check. It is a question of discipline. Andy begins to come into her own when she is confronted with the phrase she utters so often "I
have [or had] no choice." Having vs being. Old theme. It's not the sweater that is critiqued by Miranda. It is the laughter that betrays a lack of knowledge. And worse, a refusal to acknowledge one's connectedness to the world, even the aspects of the world that one despises. William Gass again "It is intriguing to wonder whether the difficulties children have with color, the quickness with which they pick up forms and functions and lean the names for bye-bye, truck, and auntie, yet at a late age (even five), without qualm, call any color by the name of any other, aren't found again in the history of our words, [...] Children collect nouns, bugs, bottlecaps, seashells, verbs: what's that? what's it doing now? who's this? and with the greed which rushes through them like the rain down gulleys, they immediately grasp the prepositions of belonging and the pronouns of possession. But how often do they ask how cold it is, what color, how loud, rare, warm, responsive, kind, how soft, how wet, how noxious, loving,
indiscreet, how sour?" I would ask that the questions that children ask come from the culture of adults. and that culture is not one bigh hegemonic whole. sometimes that Runway is a a beacon for the run away. But where do they run to, the run aways?

Kind of overdetermined that Ms. Andy ends up on a gig with the Daily Mirror. Quotidien reflection. And all the questions. Everybody wants to be a reporter. Well, everybody is not anybody and certainly not somebody and definitely not nobody. :)

Haven't read the Gass essay, but the fact that Andy's sweater was cerulean reminded me of an ex-girlfriend who liked cerulean, and the sweater also reminded me of the casual style of university students (a comparison made later by Miranda).

I've read both Silverman and DeLauretis, but haven't revisited either book in a long time. I liked DeLauretis quite a bit, especially because she was a powerful corrective to Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure" essay, which read Hollywood purely negatively. And I do think it's worth reading "Prada" for those subversive moments.

Interesting reading of Andy's unwillingness to acknowledge her place in the world (i.e., the infamous blue sweater) and conclusion that all three of the central women do engage the world on their own terms.And maybe the Daily Mirror gag isn't as overdetermined as you think. I missed it until you mentioned it (but love all the references--the mirror's relationship to fashion, quotidan reflection...

You may be interested in noting that Laura Mulvey revisited the famous essay/article in a 1989 book Visual and Other Pleasures (Indiana University Press).

Francois, I like her "updated" essay quite a bit, and some of her more recent material (she's just published a book on time and cinema that I have been wanting to read, but because of my recent move haven't yet tracked down).

Now that you mention the great theme of time travel, ever notice how The Devil Wears Prada relies on trips through the archives to construct character? Andy's journalism track record and passion for justice is establish in those shots where she is seen perusing her own personal archive of clippings. Nigel takes Andy on a tour of another archive (the costumes houses at Runway) and selects various bits and pieces to refashion Andy's self preservation. Interesting use of the archive to both conduct a makeover and to anchor authenticity and integrity.

Judith Thurman in the July 3, 2006 issue of The New Yorker in an article on the house of Balenciaga touches upon the adept exploitation of the archive by Ghesquiere for the 2004 showing "[He] had given these elderly ghosts an elixir of youth that made them more desirable -- at least to look at -- than the originals."

Not that the Devil Wears Prada will make it soon into the corpus of time travel films. Yet there may be an analogy between deft use of the archive and superlative time travel. Thurman may provide a key when she writes about the perfect stiches of a Balenciaga original: "A machine doesn't suffer from the terror of failure and exposure inherent in virtuosity. Fashion plays upon the same fear when it attempts to persuade gullible women that a dress can meke them as unassailably lovely as the inhumanly perfect tean-ager who models it. But Balenciaga, who refused to cheat, took the true measure of a woman's sins, and forgave them."

Low tech time travel machines demand a virtuosity ... interesting premise.

I didn't really think of the closets as "archives," perhaps because the clothes in the archives were so recently new (though the scenes did remind me of some of Benjamin's comments on fashion), but that's an interesting read.

Thurman's invocation of fashion "ghosts" would probably feel right at home in Benjamin's Arcades Project.

The notion of collections as possible time-machines leads me to reflect upon the possibility that all machines that permit time travel are of a composite nature (I have a vague recollection of the assemblage in the film of The Time Machine -- makes one want to check the Wells text). In any event this was sparked by reading (in the shadow of Chuck's mini review) of this snippet:

R. Rawdon Wilson, In Palamedes' Shadow: Explorations in Play, Game, and Narrative Theory (1990) p. 168

Indeed, to understand one such collection may make the others tenuous: their boundaries, to use one of Derrida's images, may begin to tremble. The tenuousness and uncertainty of boundaries are, always and already, implicit in the notion of a collection.

In terms of The Time Machine, are you referring to the scenes that depict time travel itself? If so, in both films, the Time Traveler's gaze is affixed to a female mannequin in the window of a clothing store across from his laboratory. Anne Friedberg has a wonderful Benjamin-inspired analysis of the Time Travel scene in the 1960 George Pal version (one that would more or less apply to the 2002ish Simon Wells version).

I just skimmed the Wells novella and there the Traveler describes his maid appearing "to shoot across the room like a rocket" (page 16 in the Dover version). He also describes seeing "huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams" (16). No mannequins in sight there, but interesting that the Traveler's trips through time are always marked by women and/or fashion.

Yes, indeed it was the 1960 film version. The machine I recall looked like a sleigh equipped with an oversize walking stick as the control lever.

Very interesting the gendered markings that seem to be emerging in relation to the diegetic mechanisms of time travel.

Can anyone tell me where the black and gold dolphin fountain from the movie is located?