'The Devil Wears Prada' Has No Villain
It's not Nate. It's not Andy's friends. And it's certainly not Miranda. Fifteen years later, you all have to let it go.
My life was changed the day I saw The Devil Wears Prada, newly 13 years old, and sat in a sparsely populated theater in the Mall of America. I had never seen anything quite like it. Every frame was so sumptuous, every performance so rich in thought and character. The film’s vitality jumped off the screen, the perfect mixture of easy, breezy Nancy Meyers fare and the fascinating, Haute world of New York fashion and publishing. I saw it three more times before it left theaters, purchased the DVD the day it came out, and have racked up hundreds of watches since—I lost count after 205.
There’s a comradery among everyone who loves The Devil Wears Prada, which is everyone. Everyone with taste, at least. It is famously a movie that one might see playing on television (before we all became cord-cutters) and immediately stop in their tracks to watch the rest of it, no matter how far it is into its runtime.
But the resounding love for this film and its major success has resulted in something deeply troubling, a nightmare that often forces me awake in a cold sweat, parroting the sentiments of endless, ridiculous viral tweets into the void…
“NATE IS THE ACTUAL VILLAIN IN THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA!”
This sentiment follows me everywhere. I hold my breath while scrolling Twitter for fear that I will stumble across a photo of Adrien Grenier with 57,000 likes, a sure sign that I’m about to be tormented by this idea that’s as nefarious as it is boring. I’m afraid to say my favorite movie during small talk or group introductions, worried that I’m going to have to avoid a coworker or friend of a friend at a party if they try to chat me up about “Andy’s shitty friends and her asshole boyfriend.” Refreshing my email is a jumpscare waiting to happen, Medium won’t leave me alone until I’m inundated with 15-minute-read essays on the subject. I do not want to hear it. I simply cannot fathom spending another second listening to it.
Even Entertainment Weekly’s recent oral history of the film in honor of its 15th anniversary included a question for Grenier about whether or not he thinks Nate is the villain. The memeification of this movie has gone too far. Why are we wasting time on this?! It’s not only threadbare but it’s also incorrect, and anyone who’s actually watching this movie should be able to see that.
Apparently, I must make something plainly clear: not only is Nate not the villain, The Devil Wears Prada has no villain. That’s quite literally the point of the whole movie. The reason that The Devil Wears Prada is a film known to be the rare adaptation better than its source material is because it looks deeper into the thinly-written characters in Lauren Weisberger’s bestselling novel to find their humanity, instead of aiming for a juicy, Boss From Hell comedy that would’ve fallen out of public favor after six months.
What’s almost equally—if not more—frustrating is that as a society we have now exhausted the Nate Is The Villain complex so much that it has been thrust into the endless crevasse that is the zeitgeist, where the idea is doomed to spend eternity ricocheting between sincerity and irony. I can no longer tell if someone is tweeting Nate Is The Villain discourse because it’s their steadfast belief or because they just think it’s funny to recall the oft-repeated, mind-numbingly basic statement. Unless I know you personally, I can’t tell what side you’re on. But I can tell you that I want to grab you by your shoulders and shake you with every last bit of strength I have within me that hasn’t been depleted by years of having to muscle through this absurdity. Either way, you’re my enemy.
The meme ignores one completely obvious truth: literally, no one has ever come away from The Devil Wears Prada actually thinking that Miranda Priestly is the villain of the film. That’s the movie’s entire conceit: flipping the satirical, semi-truths of the source novel to embody the reality of the character at its heart. She’s not a bad person nor is she necessarily a good one; she’s complicated and beguiling, unquestionably powerful in most spaces but reduced to the deepest parts of her humanity and psyche when it comes to matters involving those closest to her. The face Andrea sees when entering Miranda’s hotel room in Paris is one that she was never supposed to witness. The icy, ultra-influential editrix, now stripped of makeup and couture after learning that no matter how well she can make all the pieces and pages of Runway fit together month after month, it doesn’t mean anything at the end of the day if she can’t provide a sense of familial comfort for her daughters. “I don’t really care what anybody writes about me,” Miranda says. “But…my, my girls. It’s just so unfair to the girls. It’s just-…another disappointment, another letdown, another father…figure.”
It’s the first time Andrea sees any part of herself in Miranda. These are two women who hold their relationships as close as their work, something Andrea never realized until now. It’s the very same reason why Andrea ultimately decides to leave Paris and quit her job: this level of sacrifice isn’t what she wants, at least not right now. All of the power and notoriety and beautiful, shiny things won’t mean anything to her if there’s no one to share it with at the end of the day. The same isn’t true for everyone, certainly. Many viewers would disagree, finding their comforts in self-fulfillment without complaint. But The Devil Wears Prada wouldn’t be such a fascinating film if it didn’t leave so much room for intricacy with characters and stories like this, a fact that filmmakers often ignore for a more simple-minded viewing experience. Villains and Heroes, Losers and Winners, Bitches and Saints—those are dichotomies that are much easier to depict. They are also much triter.
If you’re watching a film like The Devil Wears Prada and spending the whole time desperately looking for a villain, you’re watching movies incorrectly. Film is an art form that has no rigid structuring, even when it’s a multimillion-dollar studio production released during the height of summer blockbuster season. This is a film that has all the trappings and style of genre-similar selections but is deceivingly far more sophisticated than them. This is not How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, where Kate Hudson (also playing a character named Andie) quits her job at a prestigious glossy and gives up a dream position in D.C. when she realizes she really did love Matthew McConaughey all along. The Devil Wears Prada does not share those banalities. Andy wants the guy and the career, and she wants both on her own terms.
But sure, I’ll play your game. Nate is the “villain.” Now explain to me why, and I don’t want to hear any projections about your shitty deadbeat boyfriends of the past! Nate and Andy are young and in love, and when he sees Andy begin to compromise her character for all of the glitz, he’s rightfully a little suspicious. And yes, he should be pushing Andy to fly and work hard and succeed, but god forbid anyone tries to see a story from the perspective of all its participants! The person he fell in love with is changing, and he can see her becoming less caring and more calculating. Anyone with a brain and a heart would feel a little wary of that. I also believe the complaints about Nate always gloss over one thing: it’s perfectly fine to be sad that your girlfriend missed your birthday party, especially when you never get to spend time with her anymore! Push back at me all you want, I’m not budging on this. Sure, Nate is a passive-aggressive, grumpy character who isn’t necessarily the best boyfriend in the world and absolutely could be more supportive of his girlfriend’s job, but it does feel like shit to spend your birthday away from the person you love. This isn’t the Andy he fell in love with, he’s got a right to be sad about that.
And the film makes that quite clear as well. In the scene in Paris, after Miranda has just stabbed Nigel in the back by assuring his new position went to Jacqueline Follet instead, Miranda and Andrea sit closely in their black town car on the way to their next event. Before the heavy, invisible smoke of betrayal can clear from the air, Miranda drops another bomb: “I see a great deal of myself in you,” she tells Andrea. “You can see beyond what people want and what they need, and you can choose for yourself.” When Andrea protests, telling Miranda that she could never do something as tactically unfeeling as that, Miranda reminds her that she aaaaalready did—to Emily. It’s the moment where Andrea realizes, in one immediate flash, that Andréa is not Andy. The person sitting next to Miranda may have grown into an incredibly adept, powerful individual under her boss’s quiet tutelage, but she has also lost sight of nearly every value she had less than one year before. She’s not writing, not creating, not making space or time for her friends or family or relationships, and not doing anything in service of a greater Andy Sachs. And she’s seen what that gets her: command, clout, and couture. Idyllic for some, but not for her. In her desperation for entree into this career field, she Stockholm Syndrome’d herself into believing that this door would lead her to success. But success doesn’t always equate to personal fulfillment. It’s a question that writers have to ask themselves all the time: how much of my integrity am I willing to sacrifice for the dream? For Andy Sachs, there are limits.
Confining the characters of The Devil Wears Prada to such rigid, immovable values isn’t just boring, it’s unfair. It disregards the fact that this film is filled with multidimensional people who all have reason and motivation for their actions. They don’t exist in this world to fit traditional models of what these characters can be, they’re the closest to human that you can possibly get. The Devil Wears Prada requires no suspense of disbelief, which is exactly why it’s so beloved and talked about to this day: this film feels real.
So, no. Nate is not the villain. Not only is he not the villain but there is no villain. This need to break down a film’s narrative into rudimentary structures and character archetypes is a disservice to the kind of film The Devil Wears Prada is—an ingeniously stylish, nuanced dramedy imbued with enough life and heart to make it perennially fashionable. Now, if I could just get rid of the Chanel boot memes, maybe it would get its long-overdue Criterion release.