The singularity does not wear Prada
Benji Barnes was right
The Devil Wears Prada is from 2006 which means I watched it when I was a teenager and a complete idiot whose head was filled with dreams about falling in love. At the time I didn’t really distinguish it from the other rom-com slop I was scarfing down like Love Actually or - would you count Knocked Up as a rom-com? Legally Blonde? My main takeaway was that Anne Hathaway has an absolutely devastating smile, sweet fucking lord, incidentally the same takeaway I got from The Princess Diaries. And have you seen how big her eyes are? Some people’s faces have more gravity than other people’s, when Anne Hathaway frowns it’s a humanitarian disaster and when she smiles it’s God’s rainbow in the sky after the flood.
Now it’s 2026 and I am old and my dreams have been crushed and The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a movie for old people like me about how everything is dying. They didn’t know about death yet in 2006, they didn’t have the subprime mortgage crisis and the iPhone and Twitter, the technology wasn’t quite there. In 2006 you could still believe that the main plot of the human story involved humans making human choices. In 2026 the main character of reality is the machine god, who eats you through the screen and replaces you with more of itself.
I have to do a little plot summary now, I can’t stand writing this sort of thing but we need the context. At the end of the first movie Andy (Hathaway) decides not to sell her soul to the devil (the Prada-wearing one, Miranda) and quits her job at Miranda’s fashion magazine Runway so she can stick to her principles and pursue real journalism and speak truth to power. The second movie needs to come up with a way to get Andy and Miranda back together.
In the beginning of the second movie Andy has been working as a journalist and is about to receive an award at a fancy dinner with her colleagues when they are all simultaneously fired via text. Meanwhile, Miranda gets the news that Runway ran a puff piece about some company that was caught using sweatshop labor. This is a problem because it makes Runway looks bad on Instagram. People are making memes making fun of Miranda on Instagram. There are many shots of people looking grimly at Instagram in the first half of the movie. Miranda is too old to understand Instagram, but Andy goes viral on Instagram for defending journalism at her fancy dinner, which is why she gets hired to smooth over Miranda’s PR disaster.
For me this was like being slapped in the face by the weight of the intervening 20 years between the two movies. Everyone is older. We, the audience, are older. Instagram is more powerful than Miranda now. Old media is dying. Halfway through one of the scions of old media actually dies suddenly at his 75th birthday party, in case the point wasn’t clear enough yet.
The most interesting reviews of this movie are from journalists who were inspired to pursue journalism by the first movie (or similar movies, or Sex and the City), and by interesting I mean suffused with agony about what happened to their dreams over 20 years. Here’s Patrick Lenton:
Like many elder millennial journalists, I was sold a particular, rose-tinted version of what working in media would entail. Carrie Bradshaw, Bridget Jones, even the titular Sally from When Harry Met Sally all poisoned my weak developing brain with a fantasy of wearing cute blazers and smoking cigarettes in my apartment and writing silly little stories that somehow saved the day. No movie exemplified this fantasy more than The Devil Wears Prada, a film that weaponises millennial hustle culture into an aerosol and through its protagonist, Andy Sachs, sold me the dream of becoming a journalist and impressing Meryl Streep through my hard work and can-do attitude. I was good at writing and I wanted to write for a living and maybe change the world for the better.
Now, many years later, not only is smoking passe and apparently bad for you, but the millennial journalism fantasy has been transmuted from a dream into a depressing capitalistic reality, dominated by mass layoffs and redundancies, constant media buyouts and endless ruinous tech pivots, all in a field owned by ridiculous amoral billionaires and fascist-leaning media monopolies.
The ridiculous amoral billionaire in this movie is named Benji Barnes, and (this is the first meaningful spoiler so stop reading if you care about that) the second half of the movie is instigated by him being persuaded by his girlfriend Emily (Andy’s rival for Miranda’s praise in the first movie) to buy Runway so she can usurp Miranda. I love Benji Barnes. Objectively the best character in the movie. They give him a line that goes something like fuck going to Mars, I’m gonna build a rocket to take us all the way to the Sun. We’ll call it Icarus.
Every scene with Benji in it is there to convince you that Benji sucks and is a loser and he can’t sit with us and somehow he’s sitting with us but it’s only because he has more money than God, but not the good kind of more money than God you get in NYC from marrying a Rockefeller, the bad kind you get in SF from kidnapping children and harvesting their adrenochrome to build datacenters. He dresses like shit (I am inferring this from context using the power of Bayesian updating, I can’t actually tell). He smiles and laughs too much, unprompted, just like a fucking Californian. He talks to strangers at fancy parties about how in the future you won’t need your neck anymore. He’s not written remotely like a real person, which is correct, because he’s a skinsuit avatar of the machine god.
Benji’s job is to personify the forces destroying old media - social media algorithms, ruthlessly optimized capitalism, uncultured tastelessness - while also being a punching bag in some sort of east coast vs. west coast Biggie vs. Tupac ass beef. The one time I was directly exposed to the east coast status ladder that I assume produces this nonsense was at a party in NYC in 2018 thrown by a crypto startup, and it was the first and only time in my life I overheard conversations where people tried to impress each other by describing where they had recently traveled and where they were planning on traveling in the future. I was confused and bored. Why weren’t people trying to impress each other by describing their AI timelines or their discovery of an entirely novel form of suffering for effective altruists to get neurotic about, like normal people? Like Benji?
There’s a second billionaire in the plot, Sasha Barnes, Benji’s ex-wife, the MacKenzie Scott to his Bezos. Earlier in the movie Andy’s gumption and the quality of her writing are responsible for scoring Miranda an interview with Sasha, and in the climax Andy cajoles Sasha into saving Runway by buying it before Benji can close the deal. Sasha dresses much more tastefully than Benji (I am again inferring this from context, she gets a Runway cover and everything), collects tasteful art in her tasteful mansion, and is played by Lucy Liu. She is the good billionaire to Benji’s bad billionaire, the one who gets it, who understands the pursuit of true beauty, who is willing to preserve and protect the tastemaker Runway from the tasteless Benji. Ultimately the thesis of the movie is that humans with good taste working together can keep the world recognizably human in the face of inhuman optimization.
But - and the movie pointedly avoids drawing the audience’s attention to this during the climax - Sasha’s money is Benji’s money from the divorce. That’s datacenter money. Silicon Valley still runs the brave new world. Sasha’s control of Benji’s money is a temporary aberration, a glitch in the Matrix, not a structural force that can counter the structural forces eating old media and everything else alive. The business model still doesn’t work. In the long run Benji wins.
The word “AI” is only used in the movie a single time that I can recall (by Benji, obviously, contemplating using AI to replace Runway’s models) which makes it somehow already hopelessly dated even though it released a month ago and is set in more or less the present (the script was written in 2024). Andy worries about having to degrade her writing to lowest-common-denominator trash for clicks, not about being completely replaced by GPT. Meanwhile, in the actual 2026:
Depending on whose projections about the future of AI progress you trust, it’s not unthinkable that most of the characters in the movie lose their jobs in another year or two except Benji. If you aren’t glued to AI twitter all day you have no idea how insane things are getting and how insane things are going to get. I don’t even know how to talk about it. Either we all have AI psychosis or it’ll be obvious sooner or later anyway.
The one time in The Devil Wears Prada 2 where Benji gets to talk remotely like a person is in a pivotal scene in the middle of his attempt to buy out Runway where Miranda asks him, more or less, what his fucking deal is. This is what he has to say in his defense:
The future just comes rushing at us like... well, like the lava of Pompeii. Our job is just to let it take what it wants to take. One day it’s going to come and it’s going to smother us all.
wait what i messed this up, how do i delete this (edit: nvm seems to be okay now)
really enjoyed this & i miss your non-twitter writing :)