Suzanne Harrington: Things are bad when Miranda Priestly is the good guy

Monolithic power accrued by unaccountable, unimaginable wealth means we are living in the age of the techno tyrant, says Suzanne Harrington

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is such a misfire because it reveres something rotten while pretending otherwise, says Suzanne Harrington. 

You know that feeling of sinking cringe you had at the Sex and the City movies? Even if you loved the original series? The Devil Wears Prada 2 delivers that exact same feeling — the original having charmed us — but for a different reason.

It’s not the preposterous plot contrived to shoehorn the original characters back into the same room; we are all adept at suspending disbelief at the altar of entertainment.

It’s not the dull, earnest, unfunny script. It’s not even the reliance on glittery outfits and the queue of me-me-me cameos, or the fact that Meryl Streep’s character has been spayed.

No. All of these things merely make for a lame sequel with high production values. The DWP2 is such a misfire because it reveres something rotten while pretending otherwise: It clings to the dated notion that our aspirations begin and end with wealth, status, glamour. 

Even as it laments the demise of print journalism and print magazines, it glorifies insane consumption. It’s all plastic faces and private jets. Guys, it’s not the 1980s anymore. The world is on fire, hijacked by Bond villain tech-bros.

Jeff Bezos

A while back, we’d have absorbed this DWP2 nonsense the way fans of wrestling absorb its cartoon fakery; none of it is real, and it’s all great fun. But then, Jeff Bezos, having purchased the Washington Post, bought in to the real-life Met Gala for a rumoured $10m (€8.6m).

Bezos has everything money can buy, but the one thing you can’t buy is cultural cachet. Which is something the Met Gala, before becoming its current bloated Hunger Games incarnation, used to have. 

That was until rich, naff Bezos and his rich, naff wife muscled their way in to dominate a spectacle that in recent years has triggered more revulsion than admiration. This year, it outdid itself.

Bezos had to sneak in the back of the Met to avoid furious New Yorkers protesting the obscenity of flaunted ultra-wealth as Amazon workers pee in water bottles. 

Activists placed 300 bottles of fake urine with Jeff Bezos stickers on them inside the Met museum. Outside on the street, the Amazon union organiser Chris Smalls was arrested for protesting.

Mark Zuckerberg

Across the pond, at the British Book Awards, Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams and the late Virginia Giuffre jointly won the Freedom to Publish prize. 

An injunction from Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyers ensured the cover image of Careless People, Wynn-Williams insider expose of Facebook, was blurred as it was projected above her head at the award ceremony. 

It was blurred out while she was accepting an anti-censorship prize.

Wynn-Williams — who is liable, thanks to another Zuckerberg injunction, for a $50,000 (€43,000) fine every time she speaks about the book — said at the awards: “We are all living in a world that now, more than ever, is dominated by networks of powerful elites, whose wealth too often puts them above the law. 

"As they rewrite the rules, they grow arrogant with entitlement and impunity.”

The award was presented by Yulia Navalnaya, widow of the poisoned Putin opponent Alexei Navalny.

Monolithic power accrued by unaccountable, unimaginable wealth means we are living in the age of the techno tyrant. 

For these 21st century robber barons to be presented in popular entertainment as nothing worse than harmless rich nerds — like Emily Blunt’s unlovely love interest in DWP2 — is kind of depressing.

And while obviously a fluffy film about sparkly outfits cannot do much to challenge the intractable power of the billionaire death cult, it does not have to include fictionalised, humanised versions of them.

You know things are bad when Miranda Priestly is presented as the good guy.