Just a few things about the film version of The Devil Wears Prada before moving on to some of the great things that I have enjoyed lately, such as the 90s TV series Northern Exposure.

The cinematic Prada follows a conventional (highly formulaic) dramatization of the literary version but works hard to add some “depth” to the “superficial” fashion industry, as seemingly perceived and “critiqued” by its original author. It is interesting to note the “visual v literal” tension between the two versions. Andy’s dream is to work at The New Yorker, a “literary-sort” of magazine (as the film’s costume designer Pat Fields puts it in the commentary, and what “Miranda” thinks as a place of “no glamour,” only “nuts and bolts.”). Predictably, Andy despises the “looks”-centered fashion world and sees it as a mere stepping stone for her literary career. What disappoints me is that her “critique” is of a more superficial kind than her object, as she seems to prefer a suburban white middle-class kind of politeness and “kind-heartedness” to the maverick-kind of excitement in something “grander,” even if “devil-ish.” (For example, she repeatedly complains about how she’s not greeted with a “Hello, how are you doing?” by her co-workers, which annoys me to no end….)

Here’s where the film producers come in and say: we want to address the importance of fashion (Or perhaps, the significance of culture industry, which is also predominantly visual?)! They have certainly made Andy look a lot more “bumpkin-like” but much smarter in handling the job (just a regular heroine-making scheme). They have interestingly moved her hometown from the East Coast to Ohio and added quite a few “impressive” items on her resume. They also made her buy clothes from Good Will rather than Ann Taylor, so that her position in the fashion “food chain” (as the director puts it) was even lower so as to contrast better the high-power dominant role of her boss.

Dramatization aside, the montage of her outfit transition is fantastically done, which matches the film’s aim to celebrate a major part of the visual turn of modernity that is the mass dissemination of fashion imagery (I honestly had little knowledge of how what we wear is actually derived from the work of top designers). The film at least gives us a glimpse into what design means to our (post)modern everyday life. (Btw, Corcoran’s exhibition Designing a New World is a fabulous one!)

However, if we want to bring Adorno back into the picture, it can still be argued that both the film and the fashion industry it endorses are products of capitalist standardization that work not to nurture but to impede the development of our individual autonomy. We are left with only the choices that are given, whether it is shows or shoes, most of which contain mere variations of the same (here I keep thinking about the intelligent words in 杨德昌’s 《麻将》: “in today’s world, people want to be told what they want; they are confused if they have to decide what they want…”). However much the filmic Prada wants to empower Andy in her decision to quit the job and to pursue her own career path, it is no more than an attempt to please the teenager-audience with that Hollywood-style dream world, which is just as mediocre as what the literary version of “Andy” perceives Runway to be.

In this sense, while the film sheds insight into the visualization of media and points to an old-fashioned hierarchy of the literary over the visual, it fails to bring out the dialectic of culture industry that the Frankfurt School had so powerfully spoken of.

Well, whether or not I’m valorizing the academic over the popular, there are cultural products that are of no less critical value than the thinking of those philosophers we read about. Moko just introduced me to Northern Exposure, an Emmy-winning show (I wonder why and what it means) that was loved by many. (Some have called it a fun version of Twin Peaks, which in its fifth episode was directly referenced through an imitated rendition: the waterfall, the synthesizer theme-song, the mist, the log lady, the finger-snapping sound...) The spectacle of an imagined Alaskan town called Cicely is so fascinating that I really want to devote more energy to it in a separate posting.