I just watched The Devil Wears Prada 2. It stunk. I fully expected it to stink. But it wasn't a fun stink, like The Room or Twilight, where you can enjoy it regardless of what it is. It was a forgettable kind of stink, like a dead skunk you drive by on the highway, and would have faded away without making any lasting memories if not for one particularly enraging moment in that movie.
Early in the movie, Anne Hathaway’s character (Andy) goes to an open house at a renovated apartment building. She ends up complaining to a guy at the open house about how bland and boring the apartment is – it’s the epitome of every house that’s been given the landlord special, shittily flipped and painted a uniform shade of greige as to ensure that the place doesn’t even have a sliver of character or soul left – and of course, the man she’s talking to ends up being the owner of the apartment building. He explains that the city was going to tear it down, and it was in really bad shape, so he got some financiers together to convert it into “luxury” housing. This way, the beautiful exterior of the building would be saved. He’s a hero, the movie explains crassly, not someone exploiting the world through rentseeking but doing a noble thing for mankind. (This isn’t the enraging moment, it’s just important context for the enraging moment.)
Later on, the owner of the magazine that Andy works for dies, and his nepo baby son takes over. He wastes no time in bringing in McKinsey suits to gut the place for spare parts. Andy then gets drunk and vents to her now boyfriend, the apartment building owner from before. She complains how everything in this world is getting torn apart, how things are being ruined in all facets of life. The magazine she works for doesn’t do respectable journalism anymore (it’s unclear if it ever really did) and has instead chosen to pander to low-brow philistines who scroll fashion feeds on the toilet for clicks and ad revenue. And, anyways, the new owner, who has no love for journalism, art, or fashion, will come along and destroy the place, leaving Andy without a job. Culture marches forward, converting everything in its path into a simulacrum of free market capitalism and extracting the value – and more crucially, the soul – from all it touches, like some perverse technoghoul Midas.
Andy’s boyfriend then points out that this is essentially what he did with the luxury apartment building: hollowing it out while leaving the exterior as a sort of cultural patina. It’s not all bad, he argues. If he hadn’t done anything at all, we would have lost the building entirely.
“Is this it?” I thought, “Is there actually going to be a genuinely interesting philosophical moment and reflection in this stale pile of nostalgic mush?” The answer was, sadly, no – Andy is immediately a total bitch to her boyfriend for absolutely no reason, and he leaves.
What a disappointment that was. See, I immediately and eagerly connected the lines here, lines that I’m not even sure that the writers of the movie intended to be there. (If they did put them there, they definitely didn’t want to let them grow into anything that might accidentally be taken as a coherent artistic message.) Andy was describing the movie itself. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a poorly written, tasteless cash grab begging for you to expose yourself to improperly-used zoomer terminology, aging actors, and a strange fixation on using pan zooms where they don’t make sense cinematographically in the hopes that the nostalgia and love for the first movie will blind you to these issues. Our society has all but exhausted its ability to create new ideas, feeding on existing intellectual properties in a grotesque ouroboros and sucking out well-crafted storytelling for another few pennies. The movie was the renovated building; it looks like the thing you expect on the outside, but the inside had been stripped of anything that made it interesting or authentic, leaving only a sense that something intangible had been lost along the way.
I have recently been reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, which attempts to put a name to this beast. He declares that centuries of imperialism and worship of technology have put us on a path of spiritual stagnation and decay; not just that our modern empires will come to an end, but that they already have, and we just haven’t realized that they’re dead yet. I have my own issues with the book (namely, that fucking off to the wilderness to reclaim some unnameable virtue isn’t a productive or effective way to spiritually reclaim either ourselves or society), but Kingsnorth’s general identification of the existing problem is sound. Something has come along and eaten us from the inside out, and we can only watch ourselves in horror as the rot surfaces and festers.
You might think I’m overreacting to a single throwaway scene in The Devil Wears Prada 2, but I think you’re not concerned enough. It’s incredibly infuriating for a scene to be on the razor’s edge of a legitimate philosophical reflection and then throw it away to go tell a forgettable story which goes against the themes and morals from the original movie. How close the writers were to stumbling into something legitimately interesting and still be unable to recognize it for what it was.
Or maybe they’re secret geniuses because I actually connected all the lines in the giant web they wove for me, like I've followed all the clues and I finally discovered the National Treasure room at the price of my sanity. I don’t know anymore.
I think that, to continue the analogy, it is in fact not heroic to save the building through renovation. There’s a time and a place for restoration and preservation of history and culture, sure. But we can’t preserve everything – nor do we want to. If we can’t ever build any new buildings, how are we supposed to get new, interesting architecture? How are today’s architects supposed to express themselves, to show their abilities and ideas to the world?
To ask perhaps the more important question: why do we value the past in the way that we do? Let me be clear – old things can be super cool. Museums aren’t just interesting, they’re cultural keystones that help us stay in touch with our roots and access more fundamental portions of our humanity. But preserving a building for the sake of saving the outside while gutting the interior is a different story. You aren’t preserving the thing, you’re warping it into some zombiefied husk of itself, propping up its skin so that it may resemble something that it once was, while secretly contributing to the decay of society. For this reason, I don’t think the apartment owner was a hero; I think he was a crook.
When the buildings of the past crumble and wither away, only then will we be able to build our own structures on those ashes. Only then will we be free to construct our own churches, factories, and houses, in the way that we wish, open to experimentation without being laden by the whims of our ancestors, who have had their chance and now haunt our walls with insidious murmuring that tradition is king. While being able to learn from those who came before, we are no longer burdened by the past. Free to create the future that we can see just over the dusty, vanishing horizon. And, when our time has also passed, may our buildings likewise turn to sand.