#102: The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a corporate real estate psyop
All the glam, sass, and crushing late-stage capitalism a girl could want!
Death by Consumption
5/12/26 - 5/18/26
I returned from my month of travel and immediately got sick, and therefore spent most of the week couch-ridden, trying to get caught up on my 300 Bravo shows (I’m finally becoming a Summer House gay; the cultural FOMO from seeing but not understanding the Amanda/West/Ciara/Kyle drama was killing me… watch this space), only to emerge and discover it’s randomly 100 degrees outside already. I feel like I fell through a wormhole — when I was last in NY it was 30 degrees out, we had a zillion-dollar gap in our city budget, and the Gen Z girlies were still obsessed with the West Village. Now my shoes keep getting stuck to melting sidewalk tar, Zohran did some sort of financial wizardry/money laundering to keep libraries open, and Taylor Swift went to Bushwick. I’m scared of change!!!!!
This week: I watched four movies including one of the two new Anne Hathaways (but failed to find a showing of Mother Mary — was that in theaters for like, 2 days??), and read three books because, again, I didn’t really leave the couch. Yuck!
The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
I’m starting a conspiracy theory that this movie is a propaganda campaign waged by corporate real estate — everyone in this movie loves being at the office!!! The Devil Wears Prada 2 is pro-billionaire, pro-corporation, pro-RTO, and anti-work-life-balance. I disagree with pretty much everything the film stands for. And yet? I had a lot of fun!
It helped to go in with the lowest expectations possible; I really thought this would be fan-service slop, and though it was extremely fan-servicey (I can’t imagine watching this without having seen the first movie… it would be literal gibberish), it wasn’t slop. The bar is painfully low, and yet The Devil Wears Prada 2 cleared it. Great job, team!
Weirdly, this movie is heavily in the weeds of the media business. We’ve got discussions about page views, metrics, CRM, even Miranda Priestly saying “social pins.” The film keeps one foot firmly in reality — in its world, like ours, the media industry is rapidly dying — but its other foot is in a bizarro version of reality. In the world of The Devil Wears Prada 2 no one reads articles anymore, and yet if you’re a reporter literally everyone you run into somehow knows, off the top of their head, exactly how many views your most recent article got.
This funhouse mirror reflection of our own world makes for a somewhat strange viewing experience. The overall tone of the film is escapism — the fashion! the hijinks! the cameos! — and yet the story is mostly about how our society is crumbling, and every industry is being hollowed out by greedy, tasteless billionaires who want to gobble up everything and then bury their spoils with them when they die, like a pharaoh. Throughout the movie the plot swings wildly in tone and substance, from the horrible feeling that there’s no longer a future in your chosen career, to “yay, it’s fun to dress pretty!”
And yet this discordant tone is what I liked most about the movie — it would have been very easy for The Devil Wears Prada 2 to phone it in, to basically just be an 80-minute fashion montage intercut with Meryl Streep saying all her old lines from the first movie while winking at the camera. So the fact that they really went for it, and took some wild swings and tried to actually say something about the modern media business and the horrible economic circumstances we’re all trapped under — I’m kind of impressed! The overall message is fairly incoherent (the best way to fight an evil billionaire is to find a good billionaire? Cool, thanks!), but it’s better than nothing. I love seeing a movie try something. (Again, the bar is horrifically low.)
Weirdly, the big business parts of the film are the most compelling, while the worst parts are the frivolities. There’s an absolutely god-awful romcom subplot that could and should have been completely cut from the movie; it’s easily the most random forced-romance storyline I’ve seen in a film in ages. The movie is practically dripping with sponsors and brands — a huge difference from the first film, which reportedly brands didn’t want to be seen working on, out of fear of pissing off Anna Wintour. Now, the concept of “selling out” is dead, Anna Wintour is in on the joke (or, at the very least, knows it’s good for “the brand” to be seen as in on the joke), and as a result The Devil Wears Prada 2 has more ads crammed inside than the latest issue of Vogue. Some inclusion of brands make sense, to add real-world color to the film, but some are unclear if they’re spon-con or not (Emily Blunt’s character works for Dior, but she’s kind of the villain and uses the company’s power in nefarious ways, which seems like a weird thing for the brand to sign off on). It’s all a bit strange, but, like everything in this film, in a way that feels fairly true to life — every moment of our lives is dripping in brands now, so why shouldn’t a film like this? There’s a brand name in the damn title of the film, so I really don’t know why I was shocked by all the cross promotion.
All those real-world details, though, are mostly fun; if nothing else, they make you do the Leo-DiCaprio-pointing-at-the-screen meme when something or someone pops up that you recognize. The “celeb” cameos in particular are hilarious — if you’re wondering what kind of person I am, I’m the guy who laughed at the cameos from Kara Swisher and Jenna Bush Hager, literally gasped at the Tina Brown cameo, and stared in confusion at the random NBA guy (who google tells me was Karl-Anthony Towns, who I guess is a Knick? I’ve never seen his face in my life). For a NYer, it’s always thrilling when a modern film shoots here and you get to see places on-screen that you have longstanding relationships with. I scoffed when they went to Jack’s Wife Freda (of course they did), and I celebrated afterward when I realized that Long Island Bar — where Anne Hathaway was seen filming, and which I’ve been in a blood feud with since last summer — didn’t actually make it into the film. How’s that cutting room floor taste, Long Island Bar?????? See you in hell, bitch.
So, look, don’t go to The Devil Wears Prada 2 looking for escapism from our miserable world. But it is a half-escape, at least. It’s a little fantasy version of our world, one where every industry is collapsing but can still be fixed if you just have enough gumption. A world where billionaires look like Lucy Liu and have benevolent hearts of gold. A world where your asshole boss can also turn out to have a benevolent heart of gold — she’s an asshole because she cares, you see? A world where Anne Hathaway calls herself fat and no one bats an eye. A world where Stanley Tucci is actually, finally, truly gay for once! We can’t fully escape from our awful, crumbling world, of course, but it’s nice to at least live in a more dressed-up version of the hell we’re creating, for just a little bit.
Clockwatchers (1997) — on Criterion
Unintentionally the perfect follow-up to The Devil Wears Prada 2, this anti-work, anti-office, anti-upward-mobility masterpiece. Clockwatchers is such a bleak look at the ways work can crush you if you let it, but it’s also about how girls just want to have fun! Lisa Kudrow is unbelievable in this, all hair and 90s glamour, her character a little bit Phoebe, a little bit Valerie Cherish, but sharper-edged. Parker Posey is the effortless cool girl, as always, with a devastating sadness lurking just underneath. And Toni Collette is perfect as the naive newcomer, until she’s suddenly not. I can’t believe Office Space got all the attention back then, when this was right there for the taking. Misogyny has taken so much from us!
Undertone (2026) — on Apple
Horror movies need to take a good, long look at themselves before going out there and claiming to be the scariest movie anyone’s ever seen. This was fine, and I wouldn’t be so annoyed by it if it hadn’t promoted itself to death. It’s not as scary as it believes it is. It relies mostly on jump scares, which are lazy and obnoxious, but it’s best when it’s slowly ratcheting up the tension — even if the story is deeply stupid.
There’s something absolutely unbearable about watching a movie about podcasters that I’m never going to get over, so the movie was kind of fucked from the start, if I’m being honest. A movie about podcasters??? If you’re going to make your main characters in your horror movie podcasters, I’m going to have to root for them to die, and there’s simply no way around that!
Magellan (2025) — on Criterion
If you’re in the mood for a slow-moving, absolutely gorgeous and bleak 3-hour film about colonialism, Magellan is a masterpiece. Every frame of this film is spectacular, a true visual painting, and Gael Garcia Bernal is possibly at a career best. This is the kind of film you need to be in the right mood for, and your phone absolutely should not be anywhere near you lest you let it suck you away from the screen in the slower moments, but Magellan kept me enthralled for all three hours. Beautiful, stunning, moving, and indulgently slow — the perfect cure for scroll-induced brainrot. Give it a chance!
Nova Scotia House, by Charlie Porter (2025) — library ebook
There are a few things I absolutely loathe in a novel, stylistically: not using quotation marks, run-on sentences, “train of thought” writing in general. And that is all Nova Scotia House is, its sentences tumbling at you in a nearly unbroken rhythm for 200 pages, as if someone just sat down next to you on the bus and just started rambling. I absolutely hate this kind of writing style, so much so that I nearly gave up on the book. But I’m so, so glad I persevered, because the deeper I got, the writing style started to make sense, until it felt integral to the story. This is a book about the AIDS crisis, after all, and how else are you supposed to capture the feeling of being trapped in a living nightmare you can’t escape from? The writing feels urgent and desperate and almost coming from a constant state of disbelief:
We were at the clinic it specialized in HIV anyone could get an appointment it was where Jerry wanted to go. Jerry was weak but Jerry was still Jerry in the room where we waited there were men who were no longer themselves I had not known them did not know them would never know them but they were no longer themselves, they had been someone else, someone other before this, they should still be someone else, this parallel universe that should not be this universe, they should not be here, we should not be here.
I’m glad I did push through, because this was one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in a while. When was the last time a book made you actually cry? Like, tears running down your cheeks cry? Maybe Nova Scotia House can do that for you! Sure, it’s a little schlocky and sentimental, but what else are you supposed to feel when men — who were literally just like you, except they simply happened to be born a decade or two before you — are endlessly dying for no reason at all? It’s not every day you want to sit and really feel the devastation of the AIDS crisis; I get your hesitation. But you also shouldn’t forget it, and this book is a lovely, brutal way to remember.
Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, by Rax King (2021) — paperback
This is a quick, zippy little collection of personal essays that mix memoir with odes to the tacky cultural touchpoints we grew up with in the 90s/2000s. There are essays on Creed, Hot Topic, Meat Loaf, and Guy Fieri (you can read that one here) that are intertwined with Rax King’s recollections on growing up alongside these cultural moments. She’s a great, fun writer, so I flew through it all, reading it the same way I used to gobble up personal essays like this, back on the messier internet days of 15-ish years ago. As someone who finds earnestness fairly tacky, I appreciate a writer unashamed to share even her most embarrassing thoughts and feelings. This is what the internet used to run on!
Butter, by Asako Yuzuki (2017) — paperback
I found this silly and fun, if a bit long. It follows a Japanese journalist who becomes obsessed with a female serial killer in prison for murdering the men she dated. The women bond over food, and get caught up in a twisted cat-and-mouse game all around eating and sex and murder. It’s fun and pulpy and deals with misogyny and body issues and sexuality in conservative Japan, but I’m not really equipped to talk about all that stuff since I’m famously not a Japanese woman, so I’ll just say I enjoyed it! The end!
Hi Danny! This is Kallie’s mom. Just here to say I read all your newsletters. Some of your recs are not for me but everyone can say that. I always enjoy your movie reviews and book reports. I am currently in Sicily enjoying a Campari spritz in a bar at an old monastery where they are curiously playing Amy Winehouse covers. Anyway, the world is a wonderful place despite the pending destruction. Btw have you read The Vegetarian? You HAVE to. Ciao!