24 minutes into The Devil Wears Prada, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is welcomed home from a long day at work by her boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier) with a grilled cheese sandwich:
This scene commences with a “J cut” (Wikipedia link because I was “today years old” when I learned this term, as the kids say, so maybe it’s new to you too) that cleverly uses the sound of sizzling to signify how badly she has just been burned by her boss Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), editor-in-chief of Vogue stand-in Runway magazine, who delivers a showstopping monologue while putting the finishing touches on an outfit for an upcoming issue with the help of her art director Nigel (Stanley Tucci).
As Rebecca Traister described it in an article for Salon that was published on the day the film premiered:
In a matter of seasons, she explains, a particular shade of blue trickles from her office to magazine pages to couture collections, moving down the fashion food chain until the hue is all the rage in plain-Jane department stores and outlying retail outlets, finally winding up in “some tragic Casual Corner bargain bin,” the very bin out of which a holier-than-thou shopper like Andy has fished the blue sweater she’s wearing. Andy may find her boss’s attention to accessories beneath her but she should understand that on her back she sports a garment that would not have existed save for the decisions made in this very office, by the very person she’s sneering at.
It made such an impression on me that shortly after seeing Devil for the first time I decided the time had finally come to stop dressing like a gutter punk and enlisted the aid of a fashion-conscious friend to help me overhaul my entire wardrobe! But while this explains how the DVD that provided all the screengrabs in this post found its way into my collection, and although it’s almost certainly the shoutout to it in I Love You, Man that prompted My Loving Wife Marion and I to first watch it together, the grilled cheese is what makes it one of “our” movies. The close-up at the top of this post is part of a six-second-long shot that ends with a quick pan up to Nate’s face as he turns to look at Andy:
This is followed by a four-second-long shot of Andy coming toward him from their bedroom ranting about work:
Cut to Nate for three seconds as he laughs sympathetically at her story:
Then back to Andy for eight as she complains that Miranda isn’t happy “unless everyone around her is panicked, nauseous or suicidal”:
Mentioning “the Clackers” in the process, which draws a questioning, “the who?” from Nate.
We return to Andy two seconds later for her explanation that it’s an onomatopoeic reference to the sound of stilettos in the marble lobby, a throwaway description that was the best thing in the book the movie is based on, and which the singer Raye recently co-opted for a studiously cinematic collaboration with Hans Zimmer. After four seconds we cut back to Nate, who pours two glasses of red wine:
And hands one to her two seconds after that:
The camera starts to follow her as she turns to walk away, but to no purpose, and five seconds later we’re with Nate again as he flips the sandwich over with a deft flick of his wrist:
The rhythmic alternation between shots four- to six-seconds-long with shorter ones continues a few more times as Nate hands Andy the grilled cheese:
And she laments the fact that she doesn’t even want to eat it because “that is why those girls are so skinny,” prompting him to rush over because “there’s, like, eight dollars of Jarlsberg in there!”
The scene ends with a helpfully expository declaration by Andy that she just has to “stick it out for one year” and won’t let Miranda get to her in the meantime as Nate chomps on the grilled cheese:
Followed by another J cut to a montage of her boss dropping a series of fashionable coats on her desk:
And that’s it! No food porny oozing cheese or unconventional ingredients, just that initial close-up of a sandwich already on the verge of being over-browned and an admittedly enticing crunch as Nate bites into it later. So why did this become the only way I ever made grilled cheese for over a decade? Simple: it’s good! And simple! You can get great results by mixing and matching aged and mild cheddar or Gruyère, but if you only want to grate once, you aren’t going to do much better than Jarlsberg, which is both flavorful AND melts beautifully. Which is also true of mild Gruyère, to be sure, but Jarlsberg has the advantage of being less expensive, and if it’s not quite as strong, that’s arguably a feature not a bug: just as Nate’s sandwich isn’t actually the focus of this scene, I invariably eat grilled cheese with either Cook’s Illustrated‘s aptly-named ultimate cream of tomato soup (which Deb Perelman also swears by) or Michael Symon’s spicy tomato blue cheese soup, which are respectively extremely rich and rather pungent and therefore cry out for a textually-satisfying supporting player, not a co-star.
The problem with all this is that Marion doesn’t like Jarlsberg. And this is the story of the film for us, because I persisted in making sandwich after sandwich for her anyway in the hope that she’d eventually realize that Nate and I were right. She didn’t, and the joke became that if I Love You, Man was the movie most emblematic of our courtship, this one would be responsible for our divorce. Eventually I wised up and gave in, but even if we’re a cheddar family now, we still talk about Devil every time grilled cheese is on the menu.
We rewatched the film the other day for the first time in awhile and it holds up pretty well, albeit not for reasons that make me excited for the sequel which opens nationwide next week. Miranda’s monologue may no longer strike me as particularly revelatory, but I still find Nigel’s argument in a subsequent scene that the designers featured in Runway created something greater than art “because you live your life in it” compelling.
“Well, not you, obviously, but some people,” he adds, referring to Andy, and this dressing down is actually more narratively significant than its more famous counterpart, given that it’s the one that finally convinces Andy to start putting effort into her attire. If as Martha P. Nochimson put it in her Cineaste review Miranda is “feminine magic,” then Nigel is “Miranda’s human interpreter, wittily explaining her protocosmic mysteries and daring us to deny her importance.” Hideki Fujita also reads the work as a modern fairy tale, noting in his article “The Initiatory Experience of a Fashion Novice” that Miranda’s insistence on calling Andy by the name of her previous second assistant Emily echoes the treatment of Chihiro in Spirited Away, and like her what Andy ultimately learns is how to be her own self.
While many of Devil‘s critics lament Andy’s choice of what Nochimson calls the “dowdy track,” it’s clear to me that in the final scene our hero is indeed “not quite the old Annie” anymore as director David Frankel says in his DVD commentary track. The jeans are back, but “she has more style from having gone through her experience at Runway.”
Even more interestingly, the quiet laugh and small smile Miranda allows herself in the shot immediately after the one above shows that she is both conscious and proud of having mentored Andy.
As Emanuela Barasch Rubinstein says in her book Women Managers in American Popular Culture:
In the very last moment of the film, a softer side of her emerges. Although silent in her thoughts, she appears happy for having contributed to Andy’s career as a journalist. However, to emphasize that this outburst of sentimentality is unusual, Miranda aggressively and rudely commands her driver with a sharp, “Go!” Thus, in the final scene, Miranda appears slightly more nuanced, with her character’s portrayal diverging from the flat, one dimensional image of the woman manager.
But herein lies the problem. Our last viewing of Devil came mere weeks after the New York Times published Julia Moskin’s exposé of René Redzepi’s abusive managerial practices at his restaurant Noma and I couldn’t keep it out of my head. The article begins with a vivid depiction of Redzepi publicly shaming a sous-chef for daring to “put on techno music, a genre that Mr. Redzepi disliked, in the production kitchen” that doesn’t seem too far removed from some of Miranda’s behavior up until the point where Redzepi throws a punch. The question is: where do you draw the line? If it’s at physical abuse, Priestly gets a pass, but Moskin goes on to note that the 35 former Noma employees she interviewed “described lasting trauma from layers of psychological abuse, including intimidation, body shaming and public ridicule.” If that isn’t just a problem because it’s part of a pattern, then what does it say about the offices of Runway where Nigel can get away with “affectionately” calling Andy “Six” after her dress size and where Miranda is able to refer to her even more simply as “fat” without anyone blinking an eye?
A really good sequel would delve into this question, especially one coming out now. Something tells me The Devil Wears Prada 2 won’t, but either way, we’ll always have Jarlsberg.
The Prodigal Cinephile 