Final Project: A Feminist Critique based on a Film

Devil Wears Prada

A Feminist Critique

I wanted to carefully analyze certain clips from this film that did not sit well with me. At first there was an existing fog when watching the movie for the first time. Looking back I thought to myself hey this is completely empowering, women can achieve great things but apparently it isn’t so.

Andy Gets a Makeover

The main character Andrea Sachs “Andy” wanting to get her “foot on the door” by being herself was not going to make the cut especially at a high fashion career which most women would thrive to have. Andy felt strongly the need to change her entire look in order to be taken seriously in the fashion Industry. After doing so, she got a boost of confidence, was praised and looked with envy by one of her co-workers. Her co-worker was astonished to see Andy wear such high brand clothing. This type of situation can simply be understood as “She’s doomed if she does doomed if she doesn’t.” She wants to be taken more seriously but the drawback behind that action is receiving more critiques and attracting envious people.

“By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste-indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura.”-John Berger (46)

"I'm not your baby"

I associate this scene with Johns understanding of The Surveyed female.

“One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object-and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”-page 47

“I’m not your baby” says Andrea connects with women being seen as an object. Because she has slept with this man, he now believes he has the right to call her baby, already proclaiming territory.

John Berger (English art critic) stated in his readings Ways of Seeing that “Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated” (Berger, 46).

“Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as a bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”-Mulvey (British Feminist)

Miranda Arrives

In this scene, Miranda Priestly is portrayed as a cold-hearted woman who others fear. She is a woman of high standards so for that reason she presents herself with a demeanor that is unsettling for most. She acts just like a man would with authority, one who shows no weakness.

Her very existence is hooked on male power. She holds a message but does not create the message for it is the designed morals that have placed these messages on display.

Both Women had one thing in common and that was selling their soul just as Greta Christina, a blogger described. Somehow no matter what circumstance a woman is bound to, her body image, her persona, her very presence is pulled by the patriarchal norms and a slight part of her is taken away.


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Sources

Berger, J. (2003). Ways of seeing. The feminism and visual culture reader, 38.

Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In Visual and other pleasures (pp. 14-26). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458352/

http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2007/08/professionalism.html