Prada, Schmada. No Devils Here.

Did you know that fashion magazines invented the color cerulean?

I didn't either, until I listened to the absurd disquisition on the color given by the Anna Wintour avatar, Miranda Priestly (played brilliantly by Meryl Streep) in "The Devil Wears Prada." Amazing, huh? Like, whatever! Cerulean was not invented by Vogue. Fashion never toppled a government. It's the self-aggrandizement of the superficial. And it's the perfect disguise for cautionary tales about women's ambition.

I went to see this movie the other night with a couple of my friends who enjoyed it thoroughly, while it left me sickened at Miranda's behavior to her assistant, Andrea—a young woman who's been accepted to Stanford's law school but wants to be a journalist—and disgusted with the debilitating subtext of the movie. What a subtle piece of nasty feminist backlash this is, all candy coated with beautiful clothing and glam girls. Don't let appearances fool you. This is not a movie about fashion, or even, particularly, about evil bosses. It's about punishing smart, ambitious women and teaching the up-and-coming ones to sacrifice their dreams for what they supposedly do best: relationships.

When I was first discovering feminism in high school, one of the things I hoped it would do was change the way corporations did business, within and outside of the corporate halls. I hoped that not everything would be about the bottom line, that there would be some compassion mixed in with the profit motive, and perhaps some ethics as well. I still hope this. But the first wave of proto-feminists who broke into men's professions and blazed the trails for the rest of us weren't allowed that luxury. They had to be just as tough as, or even tougher-minded than, their male counterparts, just to prove themselves. There's a fine line between that kind of take-no-prisoners lack of coddling and sheer narcissism. The only difference between hard-nosed female executives and male executives is that the women are less likely to sexually exploit their assistants/secretaries/admins. Everything else is fair game. And they can certainly be equally unreasonable and insane. The only difference is that I feel (and I suspect other women do too) more betrayed when I'm used and abused by another woman, than by a man. I sort of expect it from male executives, though I don't like it any better. But shouldn't the sistahs be helping each other out? Making an Old Girls network? Or at least not binding each others feet?

Still, I'm willing to cut professional and executive women of a certain age something of a break, because I know they ate a lot of crap to get where they are. This is especially true in the sciences, where there are some extremely tough and alligator-skinned women who had to claw their way into being accepted, even grudgingly. And yet, I'd have bitch-slapped Miranda any number of times, and probably the next person who told me that "a million girls would kill for that job!" (That's akin to the starving orphans in foreign countries our parents used to blackmail us into cleaning our plates with. Look where that got us: mandatory cardio workouts.) After a while, I wanted to bitch-slap Andrea for not sticking up for herself. Grow a spine, woman!

On the other hand, Andrea adapts beautifully. She knows she's got to pay some dues to get what she wants, and she's smart enough to do the job well. It's just that fashion thing that gets in the way. Fortunately, she cleans up smartly and learns to camouflage herself well enough to fit in. She weathers the catty remarks (Andrea: "But I'm a six!" Nigel: "Six is the new fourteen!") and starts to enjoy her new-found fabulous looks and sexiness. She is still, however, a slave to her narcissistic, solipsistic boss.

And I digress. I spent most of the movie fuming at Miranda for being such a bitch, and at Andrea for being such a dutiful doormat and then, at the benefit scene, where Andrea is called away from her boyfriend's birthday party to shore up ailing senior assistant Emily's (Emily Blunt) duties, I realized just how nasty the movie was turning. Racing down the steps of the Metropolitan Museum to get to her boyfriend's birthday bash, Andrea bumps into successful writer Christian Thompson who offers to introduce her to the editor of the New Yorker, who's also at the party. What does she do?

Now, Andrea's already dead late to the boyfriend's bash. She's taken this job precisely because she hopes it will open doors for her and give her these kinds of connections. Does she say to herself, "Self, Boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier) will have another birthday that I won't be late for. He's a chef who works shitty hours and he's probably already mad anyway," and go off to be introduced to the editor of the New Yorker by someone who's read and liked her work? No. She dutifully hurries home to already-pissed-off boyfriend who tells her he doesn't know who she is anymore. Subtext: Women should subordinate their desires and ambition to the emotional needs of their men. He's equally unsupportive when she's offered the opportunity to go to Paris with Miranda. And yet, she's supposed to be happy for him (and is!) when he informs her he's moving to Boston to be sous chef at the Oak Room. So his ambitions are okay, but hers are not. I can't help thinking that if they hadn't already broken up at that point, he would have expected her to give it all up and move to Boston with him.

And this is where the movie really gets down to the business of being a Victorian cautionary tale for ambitious women. The first hint is the glimpse we and Andrea get of Miranda and her husband fighting about her long hours and the fact that she's never home. Now there's a role reversal! How often do you hear women complaining about just this trait in their Type A husbands? To which the usual reply is the gunslinger's "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." But a powerful Type A female executive with the same dedication to her business is still expected to come home at a decent hour and take care of hubby, kids, and dinner. Take note that Miranda's hubby only complains about her not being home for him. It's clear she doesn't neglect her children in the scene where she pillories Andrea for not getting her out of Miami in a hurricane to get back for her twins' recital. No, it's all about him.

I'm not a fan of the Type A work ethic myself. I think Americans give far too much importance to and tie up too much of their identity in what they do for a living. Few of us are lucky enough to have work that we really adore, but if you do, it's not unusual to pour your heart and soul into it. And if you are a man who has work you love, your wife is expected to support you in that career, no matter how long the hours you work. Why can't men give that same support to their high-powered wives who have jobs they love? This is not a rhetorical question. I'd love a reasonable answer. Anybody game?

If Andrea wants to keep her job, she has to hop to every time the boss says frog, regardless of her own plans. This is hardly pleasant, but it's not all that unusual for assistants of high-powered execs. Her mantra, every time she has to explain to why she's giving in to her boss's demands is "I don't have a choice." In a way, that's true, if she wants to keep the job. But the only reason  for subjecting oneself to this kind of indentured servitude is the access to power and the connections, which Andrea doesn't seem to take advantage of. Why is she sticking with this job then? Not economics. Her parents are still helping her out with the rent. The clothes? Perhaps. There's an uncomfortable tension in the movie between stereotypical femininity and success, as though they were mutually exclusive. And yet, women are judged on their appearance all the time in a way men never will be. Andrea seems to like her new glam image, and her pals certainly like the freebies that come with the job, so what's the harm?

Until Andrea starts moving in circles that might lead to her getting some real power. Then everyone but her friend Doug (Rich Sommer) the stock analyst turns on her. As Andrea grows in her job, using her smarts to become efficient and chic and accomplish the apparently impossible, rising in favor over the catty Emily, her personal life goes down the tubes. Lilly (Traci Thoms) spies her being smooched on the cheek (on the cheek!  So what?!) by Christian at her show and decides unreasonably that she's cheating on Nate. Nate claims she's sold her soul and that he doesn't know her any more. Andrea's friends (all but Doug, who's undoubtedly working the same kind of slave hours Andrea is) have some really unrealistic expectations of what it takes to get ahead. And if you've read Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential you'll probably have as hard a time as I did seeing what Nate's complaining about. When is he home? At 4 AM? If Andrea were working in a law firm, would anybody be telling her they don't know who she is anymore? She'd be working just as hard and making a hell of a lot more money. Well, maybe the this crew would have the same complaints.

So what's the subtext? Is it that fashion is shallow and stupid. Hardly a subtext. So are the kinds of puff pieces Andrea would probably be writing in her early years as a journalist, unless she were very, very lucky. Ya gotta start somewhere. Or is it that you shouldn't exploit those connections you're making? (Dr. Em will no doubt be laughing at me right now, but I have learned the error of my ways, though I was once young and proud and stupid too.) Or you should only exploit them if they don't belong to the opposite sex? Why is Lilly so suspicious (and how'd she managed to get a big one-person show in a gallery at her age, anyway)? Why isn't Nate happy that she's getting a chance to go to Paris? What is the big conflict here?

When Andrea and Miranda go to Paris, it gets really vicious. We see Miranda in melt-down mode: on the couch in her suite late at night, in a frumpy, nay, hideous gray robe, sans maquillage and dignity. Her husband, (Number three? Four?) is divorcing her. But she's worried about her kids suffering, not so much herself. She's the Dragon Lady and she knows it. So be it. Still, you get a sense of the heavy toll her success has had on her life. And you get to see just how wily (some would say "manipulative" or even "Machiavellian") she is, when she threatens to start a competing magazine with all the photographers and fashionistas she's acquired over the years if he tries to replace her with the French editor. It costs Nigel his dream job, but Miranda retains her position of power, and that's what it's all about. This is different from the way men do business how? And that's the sad part.

In some ways, though, Miranda's right to be disappointed in Andrea. Andie might be smart, but she doesn't have the self-awareness or self-confidence to realize that she's won her way into Miranda's good graces, displacing Emily, through her abilities and dumb luck: being the right person, in the right place, at the right time. She's appalled at Miranda cutting Nigel out of the opportunity he deserves, but can't see the difference between Emily's hard luck (she's hit by a car, for Pete's sake!) and Miranda's power plays. She's right when she says that she's nothing like Miranda, but doesn't seem to see how. Nigel got screwed—and not just by Miranda, I might add; Emily got beaten out by somebody better. Did Andie miss that part of Sesame Street? You know, the "One of these things is not like the other" jingle? Is she going to chuck her new job every time she's promoted ahead of someone else who's been there longer?

And instead of wising up, she quits, driven out not by Miranda's selfishness, but by fear of her own success. Subtext: See? Women really don't have what it takes to get ahead. And when they do, they're bitches like Miranda.

Here's how I wanted the movie to end: Andie has another epiphany by the fountain, takes Miranda's call, and goes back to work with a vengeance. She's broken up with the BF, so she's free now to use her connections with Christian, though not necessarily having to sleep with him again. The movie ends with an up note of Andy getting a story accepted at the New Yorker.

Instead, she ends up working for a tabloid. This is a good ending how?  She paid her dues and got very little out of it in the end except a backhanded recommendation to a second-rate paper. In the end, the lesson she learns is not to try harder, work harder, reach farther without guilt, the way men do, but to settle for less because <whine!> it's too hard! That's fine, if that's your philosophy and you just want a little niche for yourself, but if you've got big dreams, there's always a cost. Men taught this to women a long time ago. But why should we be the only ones to pay it?