the circle

Revenge Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

The second movie comes out next month... The Devil Wears Prada 2: Maybe This One is Jewish?

I mean, scriptwriter Aline Brosh McKenna said in an interview a decade ago that she had wanted to make the first movie Jewish but in early 2000s Hollywood that was unthinkable. So maybe this time is different? lololol of course not.

Anyway in preparation, I checked out Weisberger's sequel, which is set 10 years after the first one and is even more subliminally Jewish because Andy has made herself even more subliminally Jewish. She has dumped her Jewish boyfriend Alex from the first book and marries Max, a WASP millionaire who went to Duke and Harvard Business school.

Andy is a culinary Jew and one of the quiet coded ways Weisberger suggests marrying Max is a mistake is with very subtle culinary signifiers. When she is hanging with Jewish BFF Lily they eat rugelach, when she is commiserating with her mother they talk about the Federation luncheon in the City. But her first date with Max is eating steamers. And when she is in Max's world there are shrimp and crabs galore. Weisberger never uses the word Jewish in Revenge Wears Prada, but at some deep inchoate level culinary Jews are still Jews. They feel the wrongness of the shrimp in their bones even as they eat them by the pound.

Max does step on a glass at their wedding, but it's buried in the middle of a paragraph that starts "The rest of the ceremony was a blur". It's a signifier that in marrying a non-Jew she is drifting further away from her authentic self.

They have a fight over an insistence that she change her last name from Sachs to Harrison upon marriage. She likes the idea of sharing a name with her husband, but Sachs *means* something to Andy in a way she cannot put words to. The final compromise is that she will change her name but continue to use Sachs professionally. Her body physically rebels against the idea of losing her Jewish name; her mind tells her she's being irrational but her body wins. Of course, Miranda waged the same battle decades earlier and rejected her Jewish name... the whole point of Revenge in the book's title is not quite Revenge, but it is a sort of repetition. Andy will once again get the opportunity to work for Miranda and she will have to decide if she is the same person she was a decade earlier, or if she has become a better, stronger, more moral person.

And in the end, her Jewishness wins. She divorces the WASP after he betrays her ambitions for his own (and she frames it in generational tribal terms: what Max has truly betrayed is Andy's ability to transmit her values to her daughter) and the final chapter is swathed in the signifiers of her return to the fold: all of the food of her grandmother's shiva, to start, as a hint that she is finally ready to return to Alex, her Jewish ex-boyfriend and true love.