The Devil Wears Prada and the Concept of Choice

(This article was published in winter of 2014 on my old blog oliviahoang.com, now parked at oliviahoang.tumblr.com.)

It was a cold winter night made for movie and a blanket.

The movie was “The Devil Wears Prada” with Anne Hathaway as the heroine and Meryl Streep as the high-profile antagonist. The year was 2013 when news of high college graduate unemployment rates has become blasé, and underemployment was the new normal. In my quest for entertainment, I left the confines of reality and immersed myself in the scenes playing before my eyes.

There was one scene in particular that captivated my attention from beginning to end. It was one in which Anne Hathaway, after a chaotic day at work with her impossible boss (played by Streep) declared to her boyfriend on the phone that she would quit that day. When her boyfriend came home to find the job retained, the two broke out into a quarrel, with Hathaway finally yelling out, “I don’t have a choice!”

That line held a distinct impact when seen within the context of the new economic norms where there were too many grads and too little tenable jobs. In its curtness, its certainty of defeat, it spoke to me more than the most protracted monologue ever could. On the occasion in question, the scene gained added profundity by reminding me of a book I had read a month or six weeks previously.

The book focused on story structure, and was authored by Alan Watts. The passage of interest in relation to the scene in discussion read something as follows: “At the heart of every good story is a dilemma. A dilemma is different from a problem in that a problem can be solved, while a dilemma can only be resolved through a shift in perception. Our hero doesn’t have a problem—she only thinks she does.”

At the movie’s ending, Anne Hathaway realized she had options outside of working for her impossible boss and finally quitted her job to traverse the path towards a journalism career. The arc of character development intrigued me at the time, and it was not until two months or eight weeks later that a fuller explanation emerged.

I had sought out some books on the mind to better understand human behavior. One of these books focused on NLP and hypnosis, written by Richard Bandler. A distinctly interesting passage centered on the issue of lacking choices. Virginia Satir once told Bandler that if people have a choice, they will make the best one. The issue is that they often do not have choices. So all of his clients came to him to explore or create the choices that they were previously unaware of.

We can explore the lack of option awareness within the context of “The Devil Wears Prada” when contrasting Anne Hathaway’s character development throughout the movie. In the beginning, she takes the assistant job because it was the better alternative. Then her colleagues schooled her on her ingratitude to her coveted job and she began immersing herself into the fashion world. Anne’s newfound dedication to her job dulled her appreciation for her old interests—including her friends and boyfriend—and she began to forget her original dream of becoming a journalist in NYC. It was not until Meryl Streep betrayed a trusted associate that Anne looked for another career path.

We can mark important milestones in the heroine’s character arc by counting the number of choices within her awareness at different points in the story. At first, two choices lay in her conscious awareness: the assistant job or a job at some comic publication. Then she got the assistant job and her choices narrowed to only one, which chained her to her job (“I don’t have a choice!”). When she grew weary of Meryl Streep’s cruel ways and decided that her “only option” was not satisfactory, she allowed herself to discover other routes to her goal.

It was not until she decided that there was another way, and she would find that way, that she found the journalist job she originally wanted.