You may not be interested in communicative capitalism…
…but communicative capitalism is interested in you.I was a bit surprised to see that Meryl Streep has been nominated for an oscar for her impersonation of Glenn Close doing Cruella DeVille. The whole premise of The Devil Wears Prada doesn’t really make any sense – surely PA to a magazine editor isn’t an entry-level job for someone who wants to be a journalist, but a job for someone with a lot of experience in being a PA? Still, there are two pretty great scenes in the film, and Streep is in both of them. One is towards the end, where Streep explains the dialectic of structure and agency to Anne Hathaway (who misses the point of course by running off and getting a different job, where she’ll still have to screw people over but will be able to pretend she’s doing it for a good cause).
The best scene in the film, however, occurs near the beginning, where Streep explains the way in which the fashion industry has determined down to the smallest detail the “unfashionable” outfit Hathaway’s character is wearing. It’s a beautiful reminder of how much of our world is made, and who made it. And of course, that a communism that ignores and so thinks itself exempt from fashion (or TV or films or…) is “sort of comical,” or rather, absolutely blinded by capitalist ideology.