“I was so pleased to see a movie that explained the situation in a way that was really generous to the people who had really done a lot for newspapers and magazines,” said Jong-Fast, 47, an MSNBC analyst and host of the “Fast Politics” podcast. But the film “also really explained how tech had basically killed the magazine.”
Ah yes, tech, as personified by Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), the menacingly oafish billionaire who tries to buy Runway for his new girlfriend, who turns out to be Emily. Though Brosh McKenna wrote the “Prada 2” script before rumors surfaced that the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was interested in buying Condé Nast (parent company of Vogue), the parallel is uncanny. Benji, a cinematic mix of Bezos with a dash of Elon Musk, was quite familiar to the veteran tech journalist Swisher, a host of the “Pivot” and “On With Kara Swisher” podcasts.
“Justin just really got to the essence of what’s wrong with these people: the carelessness, the sudden laughing at things that aren’t funny, just the complete obliviousness and the destructiveness of them,” Swisher, 63, said. “It could be a cat playing with a ball or an investigative piece by Julie K. Brown, they don’t care. It’s all the same to them.”
Amelia Dimoldenberg, host, producer and writer of the popular web series “Chicken Shop Date,” was 12 when she saw the original “Devil Wears Prada,” which inspired her to eventually study fashion journalism at Central Saint Martins college in London. Before receiving a degree in 2017, she experienced pushback from her teachers for wanting to create a video for her final project instead of a magazine. “I said, ‘I love print magazines, I grew up reading them, but at the moment I can see that things are shifting to video,’” she recalled.
Dimoldenberg, 32, actively sought out a cameo in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” (“Just the back of my head could have been in the shot and I would have been fine with that”), and riffed with Theroux in a birthday party scene for the Runway publisher Irv Ravitz. “I’ll always be someone who will champion print journalism, having a degree in journalism myself,” she said. “But I also obviously am at the forefront of digital media too.”
As someone who came up in magazines in the aughts — and visited “The Devil Wears Prada” set as a young reporter the day they shot the “antibacterial wipes” scene — I found that the death-of-journalism plotline in the sequel hit hard. The movie was more realistic than it needed to be about the media (d)evolution, and that gives the bubbly comedy surprising heft. The closing crane shot showing Miranda, Nigel and Andy buzzing with activity in their offices (a tribute to the final scene of “Working Girl,” according to Brosh McKenna) made me ache with nostalgia for the heady days of magazines, while reminding me why it’s impossible to go back. The characters are, after all, enjoying what is probably just a temporary reprieve.
Still, beneath its sharp zingers and luxurious clothes, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is a big-hearted love letter to journalism and the humans who produce it. “I got teary at the end, because regardless of all the change, they still love what they did so much,” Laura Brown said. “A movie about such a cynical business was in the end so vastly uncynical.”
