The Devil Wears Prada 2 strutted to the top of the box office in the first days of its theatrical run — a surprise to no one who saw the first Devil Wears Prada twenty years ago, then watched its popularity grow over the decades from a brisk, lively comedy fave affectionately skewering the fashion industry to a kind of classic status as people viewed it over and over again, delighting in its characters and committing its best lines to memory.Not all people though. The films — which can now be called a franchise — are firmly “geared toward women” in general descriptions, and the sequel has been drawing women as 75 percent of its audience. The sequel is a long-awaited one and had been hotly anticipated. During the March and April run-up to the May 1 opening, streaming numbers for the first Devil Wears Prada went up 8 percent.I’ve personally explained to five different straight men — all deeply invested in movies in general and all blankly unaware of The Devil Wears Prada 2 as the major filmgoing event this month — that it might be worth a moment of their attention. They might even consider watching The Devil Wears Prada 1 or 2 or both. The sequel has made a bit of film exhibition history in a modest way, after all:The Devil Wears Prada 2 holds the formidable distinction of becoming the first female-driven movie in modern history to kick off the summer box office, a duty that has almost always gone to a Marvel superhero pic or a Fast & Furious title.Let me just note that, when I think of all the goddamn stupid superhero movies “geared toward young men” that I’ve had to sit through and review because they’re big-event flicks that a lot of people are talking about with absurd seriousness, I get a little ticked off. How is it that superhero fantasy entertainment pitched to men continues to rate so highly while anything angled toward women is considered ignorable? What year is it — 1955? 1985?The grimness of The Devil Wears Prada 2 is startling for any moviegoer assuming they’re in for a light comedic romp. But the movie is bracing in the way a good dystopian film is. (20th Century Studios)The Devil Wears Prada 2 even makes it easier to take a short trip out of guyville by tackling surprisingly grim and topical subject matter in a doomsday tone amid the comic scenarios. In the world of media increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence, influencers, and online commentary, whole professions are collapsing, and the collapses that particularly concern the characters in DWP2, those of fashion and journalism, stand in for all the other professions — academia, the performing arts, the movie business — that are going down the chutes in the world as we know it.DWP2 kicks off on a dark comic note with earnest, socially conscious Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway) getting a prestigious journalism award at an awards dinner and finding out she’s been fired just before she goes up to collect it. In fact, everyone’s phones at her table light up as the message comes that their publication has been put out of business by some CEO of a conglomerate who bought it and they’re all out of jobs. Andy unleashes a profane and impassioned rant in defense of everything that seems to be devalued and getting jettisoned — art, craft, truth-seeking, human expression.The new job she gets as a result of this rant-gone-viral isn’t much more promising when it comes to stability or longevity. She’s hired by the CEO of Elias Clarke (read: Condé Nast), the conglomerate that owns the fashion magazine Runway, where Andy was employed in her mid-twenties. In those days, young and poor and high-minded in the first DWP, Andy was just trying to make a living while aspiring to greatness in journalism. At Runway, she was dismissively called the “smart fat girl,” though she was a lean size six, by legendary ice queen and editor in chief Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep).But in DWP, gawky, badly dressed misfit Andy learns the ropes of the insane fashion industry, gets a fabulous new look, and in the end, before returning to journalism, arrives at a hard-won mutual respect with Miranda. Miranda’s hilariously viperish first assistant Emily (Emily Blunt), who’s “just one stomach flu away from my goal weight,” tells the new second assistant replacing Andy, “You’ve got some big shoes to fill.”Now in her mid-forties in DWP2, Andy the prestigious unemployed journalist is made “features editor,” tasked with writing Runway magazine back into the good graces of a dubious public that will signal with clicks whether she succeeds. The magazine, once so rock solid, is now so shaky its future was in doubt even before it got embroiled in a serious scandal. Print publishing is dying, advertisers no longer clamor for space in Runway, and the last issue, as Miranda puts it, “was so thin you could floss with it.” On top of that, it seems Runway has been unwittingly working with a company that employs sweatshop labor and is now facing a threatened boycott.Andy’s mission is immediately undercut by Miranda’s refusal to admit she even remembers her former second assistant, and Andy has to go through another process of hazing as the once-again-clueless newcomer to the fashion industry. Magazine publishing has almost completely changed, and not for the better as corporate chaos overwhelms it and the last survivors of the old days are hanging on by their fingernails.Andy and Miranda have to go begging at Dior to hang onto their advertising account, meeting with Emily, who’s now a big shot there. “Remember when magazines were a thing?” snipes Emily, who’s got a long-running grudge. She’s gunning for Miranda’s job and wants to use the vast wealth and company-buyout tendencies of her crass tech billionaire boyfriend (Justin Theroux) to get it for her.The Devil Wears Prada 2 strikes a bleakly wised-up tone almost like 1930s noir, whose characters were so cynical, hard-boiled, and on to the corruption and precariousness of their world that they wouldn’t put up with any pearl-clutching naïfs in their midst. (20th Century Studios)In short, all prospects are dire. And that’s true even when Miranda and Andy, with the ever-loyal help of Miranda’s second-in-command, Nigel (Stanley Tucci), manage to reach a place of relative security for the moment. One of the last lines uttered by Miranda Priestly to Andy describes them as “clinging to the last piece of wood next to the Titanic.”That’s as much of a happy ending as this comedy can come up with. It’s startling, but it’s also bracing in a dystopian sort of way. The mandate for making this long-awaited sequel, according to the essential actor twosome of Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, was that, in order to get them to sign on, it had to deal fearlessly with what’s happening to the world of media.DWP2 strikes a tone so bleakly wised-up by the end that it reminds me of certain tendencies of old Great Depression–era films, when characters were so cynical, so hard-boiled, so on to the corruption and precariousness of the world they lived in, they wouldn’t put up with any pearl-clutching naïfs in their midst. Everybody scraping, everybody hustling to survive, everybody aware of the likeliness of getting the shaft from some other desperate soul even more determined to survive, and nobody having any use for “chumps,” “saps,” or “dopes” who couldn’t keep up with the state of ongoing catastrophe.It’s not a hopeful tendency. There’s no solidarity in it, other than a perverse recognition that when things get bad enough, everybody’s going to equalize in desperation and start clawing for room on that last piece of wood next to the Titanic.

This post was originally published on Jacobin.