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Thursday, August 03, 2006

The Devil Wears Prada (or, Anne Hathaway Please Be My Girlfriend)

Went to see it over the weekend, and really enjoyed it--one of the best movies I've seen in a while. In particular, I think it's a really distinguished contribution to the genre of Movies About Work. One of the easiest mistakes to make in thinking about TDWP is to think that because it's about fashion it's a chick flick--far from it. Indeed, the movie that it most resembles is Wall Street, except that it's set in the fashion world rather than the financial world, and its main characters are women.

I think it probably had an especially powerful inpact on me, since I'm also an ambitious young person starting out in a career. What it really made me think about was the power of the aesthetic as a motivator. The distinguishing thing about Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly (the titular devil) isn't that she demands that people produce a very high-quality work product (although she certainly does)--it's that she demands that her entire world conform to a particular aesthetic. Everyone who works for her has to be perfectly dressed, her office always has to be laid out exactly how she likes it, and everything has to always run like clockwork. One of the first scenes in the movie has her arriving at her office ahead of schedule, and her staff rushing frantically to transform the office from how it actually is--a working space with clutter strewn everywhere--to how her aesthetic demands it be. The business purpose of Runway, the magazine she runs, exists in the background but is never talked about--the real apparent purpose of the organization is to create and sustain an aesthetic, an imaginary world of perfect taste and perfect female beauty.

It's easy to assume that this is peculiar to the fashion industry, but I really don't think it is. I think that aesthetic is a more powerful motivator than money in most business fields. I think that most young finance workers are motivated less by money than by a dream of what it's like to be a financial titan--by an imagination of themselves as Kirk Kerkorian or Carl Icahn, being noticed when they go to lunch, sitting in boardrooms, making big deals, and generally being Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. I think you could pretty easily generalize to other careers too--I know for a fact that most people in politics imagine themselves on The West Wing. When I was working on a campaign in 2004, I would work sixteen-hour days, then go "home" to my fold-out couch and watch West Wing episodes on DVD; they were a big part of motivating me to go do it again the next day.

Since aesthetic is such a powerful motivator, the consequence is that it's very easy to start making decisions that are based on chasing that aesthetic. You see this in business all the time when CEOs make ill-advised acquisitions--their main motivator is a desire to run a bigger company, not a conviction that their acquisition is necessarily a good use of capital. One of the smart things about TDWP is that Andy's decision to buy into Miranda's world is signalled (very dramatically) by a change in her wardrobe--in this case, a substantive change and an aesthetic change are identical.

Now I'm not trying to say that aesthetic considerations are a bad reason to do something; far from it. If we don't have dreams, what do we have, right? But the thing is that there is a real world out there, and the danger comes when one rejects what's real to chase an aesthetic. Indeed, that's virtually a dictionary definition of sin. Thus, the Devil of the title isn't really Miranda, it's the force that tempts us to reject the real world, in which we have to do things we don't want to do in order to satisfy our obligations, in favor of an ultimately unreal ideal of beauty--the glamour of evil, if you will. That's not exactly a new theme, but I think it's laid out very well here, in a way that will hopefully make young people think about it.

Also, Anne Hathaway is teh hott.

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