← Cannonball with Wesley Morris
Cannonball with Wesley Morris
The Devil Wears Prada, Workers Get Nada
00:13:34
Wesley Morris liked “The Devil Wears Prada 2” more than he thought he would. He didn’t need this sequel, but it captures the spirit of the original well enough. Miranda and Andy, played by Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, are the same. Miranda still queen and Andy still a grunt. But this time around Andy is a grunt with a staff and a little bit power. She moved on up! This got Wesley to thinking: What happened to the stories about working class people? Ones about folk with basic, common man smarts being just as good (if not better) than elites at the top? Blue collar workers and the middle class used to dominate the screen. Now their bosses are taking center stage. And so, Wesley looks back on how one onscreen trend led to the other.
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This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Spring always feels like a reset, clearing things out, simplifying what you don't need. Apple Card is built with that same idea in mind. No annual fee, no late fees, and no foreign transaction fees. No fees, period. Get started and apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.49% to 27.74%, based on creditworthiness rates as of January 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or@car.apple.com Apple Card issue by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City branch terms and more@applecar.com I'm Wesley Morris, and this is Cannonball. Today. I got work to do. I got a job, baby. So I saw this Devil Wears Prada sequel together again. Hello? Well, look what T.J. maxx dragged in. Sorry, who is this? And I liked it more than I thought I was going to. I mean, I didn't need this thing, even though all the money it's making is saying somebody does. But I do like how it figured out a way to repeat the original conceit. And in the first movie, Anne Hathaway plays this aspiring journalist who reluctantly ends up at a fashion magazine. I came to New York to be a journalist and sent letters out everywhere and then finally got a call from Elias Clark. Basically, it's this or Auto Universe. And now she's an unemployed journalist who reluctantly makes her way back to the same fashion magazine where her old fabulously terrible boss, Miranda, played by Meryl Streep. Miranda, took you long enough. Is still queen. Andy's still a grunt, but now she's a grunt with a little bit of staff and some power. And somebody on her staff caught my eye. His credited name is Mack, and he's played by Larry Mitchell. Mack got laid off with Andy from their last job, and she brought him with her to this magazine. And. And you know, he's kind of an average guy for the Devil Wears Prada. Like a little schlubby in his real beat up, probably funky Yankees cap. It seems like it's molding. And he's got a dress shirt that's loaded with pens in the chest pocket. There's nobody with pens anywhere in the Devil Wears Prada. So, I mean, he kind of stands out. And all I could think while I watched this guy during his five minutes of screen time was, why is this movie not more about him? I mean, I could have watched a whole comedy about this guy. Coming to work, being ridiculed for his masculinity, his love of sports and sandwiches, his utter lack of interest in the fashion world. What do his story pitches even look like at a place called Runway magazine when he looks like he's throwing out a pitch in the fourth inning of a baseball game? I don't know. These are just thoughts that I was having watching this movie. And, you know, once upon a time, this guy would have been the Anne Hathaway of the sequel. He'd have been a version of what we call a working stiff type. Maybe he would have been played by a Kevin James or a Charles S. Dutton. Oh, come on, Ella. I'm not going to Florida to relax on the beach. You know, I'm going to a sanitation workers convention. You know, we've got business to conduct. It could have been a guy who knew who he was because he worked. There's an entire history of American popular culture you could tell simply through the depiction of work. And the working stiff was a crucial part of that history. Think of like Marlon Brando playing that longshoreman in on the Waterfront. You don't understand. I could have had class. I could have been a contender. Or him as Stanley Kowalski and A Streetcar Named Desire. Hey, Stella. For decades, the depiction of working people was a mirror for the rest of the country. This. This period when blue collar labor was a central and crucial part of the country's identity. We made things, we worked for a living, and our art dramatized the lives of laborers. You probably saw the most sustained depiction of working people in the 1970s, when just about every show and every movie involved somebody with a labor or service job. And, you know, an obvious example of this is Norman Lear's TV universe. Oi the way Glenn Miller played All in the Family. And Maude, Maude, Sanford and Son and One Day at a Time. Good Times, the Jeffersons. On those shows, having a job was a source of pride for sure. But, you know, for Archie Bunker, it was an ethos. I mean, I never saw him at his doc job. He worked from that armchair as far as I was concerned. Edith, it's nothing. It's just that, well, the company announced that they're having a 20% cutback in personnel. That's all. And I think it's going to hit my department pretty hard. Oh, Archie. But other characters needed to work, to live. When Florida or James Evans lost a job on Good Times. What's going on? Well, I told Daddy I can get a full time job at the county hospital and I'll Sell my art supplies. And Michael's trying to get a job at the drugstore delivering orders. I remember thinking as a kid that this is my mother's worst fear. And I don't know if I can handle the stress of seeing this go down. And I was like, six. They're all willing to sacrifice to keep you home. But this art also valorized work. It took it seriously, at least as a subject. In Urban Cowboy, we watched John Travolta work in the oil fields. 6309 engages for me. Will you? Bet you. And then there was Sally Field and Norma Ray. You stop what you're doing right now. Standing on a piece of factory equipment, holding up that union sign. It's gonna take you and the police department and the fire department and the National Guard to get me out of here, you know. Characters had manual labor jobs. They wore uniforms. Their hands and faces got dirty. They had ambitions for the workplace, but also beyond it. Rocky, I mean, that's basically a movie about a loan sharks debt collector who meets a nice girl who works in a pet store. I mean, that's what the movie is. Where's your hat? I love you. I love you. And by the 1980s, you could see that depiction of work kind of starting to change. Factories were closing and certain kinds of labor started to disappear. I mean, the 80s moved from the streets to the skyscraper and things got real glamorous. I mean, this was the period that saw the beginning of a show called Lifestyles in the Richmond of today's winners who really know how to enjoy the great things of life. Big business in corporate America were the new dockyards, y'. All. Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Stories about working people's despair and sense to ethics became tales about young, charismatic people lying and scheming their way to the top and winning. We just wanted to give our blessing to this little merger. Michael J. Fox going from his Kansas farm to a New York City office tower. And the secret of my success. First, the idea. The idea of this merger made me as nervous as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. But then I realized I was wrong. Melanie Griffith and a working girl hoofing it in from Staten island every day, running this game where she pretends to be her boss. This woman is my secretary. She's not. Oh no, Ask her. These movies were about people with basic common man smarts being just as good and more authentic than somebody with a Harvard Business School education. The scheming was better than having your job handed to you. Because your grandfather grandfathered you in. But there was always a seed of doubt about the moral soundness of these operations. Back then, there were so many movies about corporate evil, and they usually involved some kind of new technology. I have a future. It's not gonna be the same as time. Parker, Denzel Washington in Virtuosity, Sandra Bullock, and then. Give us the disc, Angela. You have the wrong person. I don't. I don't know what you're talking about. Angela, we're not offering an option here. Just give us the disc, and we'll give you your life back. But by the time the 2000s roll around, there is this identity shift. Not away from the worker and working, but definitely toward a more humane depiction of technology genius and CEOs. And I'm gonna say that Iron man was that shift. Is it better to be feared or respected? And I say, is it too much to ask for both? This is 2008. I mean, we already know who Mark Zuckerberg is at this point. Steve Jobs is a God. We have Facebook on our iPhone. And here was a whole movie about this guy named Tony Stark. But I did you a big favor. I have successfully privatized world peace. This conceited tech genius who doesn't listen to. To anybody and reluctantly agrees to save the world, basically, this billionaire asshole. What was new was that the movie was sure we would love him. I don't understand why it's so difficult to confirm an appointment. I know. I'm so sorry, Miranda. I actually did confirm. It's funny. Miranda Priestly arrives two years before Tony Stark. She's as unyielding a boss as he is a colleague. That first Devil Wears Prada movie doesn't need her to be warm. But 20 years later, after four seasons of succession and many, many seasons of Shark Tank, of superstar founders and CEOs, of billionaire politicians and the venture capitalist moguls who back them. Men. All men. This sequel wants us to see Miranda brought a little bit low, so we can appreciate that she could have always been worse. But in the meantime, in the background, on the verge of extinction, there's Mac and a lot of people. They don't do the work they used to do anymore. I know it. This is blue collar work I'm talking about. But another part of this history is a belief in the middle class. That's what the home part of all those sitcoms was there to advertise. That hard work could get you a nice house that anybody could barge into because you never have to lock the front door. The shows about the life of a guy like Mac, they're dwindling. And we're getting increasingly more shows and movies about the people he works for and the companies that own their work. Now look, I'm not saying there is no work about regular people working. There's even a show about journalism. It's called the Paper and I see you Abbott Elementary. I see you the Bear. I miss you, raunchy English teacher. But that is not quite enough for me. What I'm talking about is that I think we need a revolution. I think we need to see the construction workers and the app delivery guys and the Uber drivers and baristas, shows with characters who do that work. How do they live? How are they living? I don't know. It wouldn't have to be grim. I talk to all kinds of people who do all kinds of hard work, demanding, physical work, and they do it amid all kinds of uncertainty. And they still make jokes and smile and show videos to their homies between gigs. Popular art about work has always been a kind of fantasy of what's possible, and I'd rather watch something about the dream of how things could be for working people than let all serious depictions of employment be taken over by the people trying to fire us. This message is brought to you by Apple Card Spring always feels like a reset, clearing things out, simplifying what you don't need. Apple Card is built with that same idea in no annual fee, no late fees and no foreign transaction fees. No fees, period. Get started and apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today, subject to credit approval. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.49% to 27.74% based on creditworthiness rates as of January 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their Variable APR in the Wallet app or@card.apple.com Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more@applecard.com this podcast is supported by Neon and the film the Christophers from Academy Award winning director Steven Soderbergh. The Christophers stars Ian McKellen and Michaela Cole as painters facing off over an art world forgery in an escalating game of playful psychological cat and mouse. Nick Shager of the Daily beast raves, Ian McKellen is superb and calls the Christophers a front to back delight. And further proof that Soderbergh remains one of American cinema's most adventurous auteurs, the Christophers is now available everywhere you rent or buy movies. This is the Chase Sapphire Lounge at Boston Logan. You got clam chowder in New York, dirty martini over 1300 airport lounges and one card that gets you in Chase Sapphire Reserve. Now even more rewarding. Learn more@chase.com Sapphire Reserve cards issued by JP Morgan Chase bank and a member FDIC, subject to credit approval. This episode of Cannonball was produced by John White and Janelle Anderson. It was edited by Austin Mitchell, Lisa Tobin and Sasha Weiss. It was also engineered by Daniel Ramirez and recorded by Sophia Landman. Features original music by Dan Powell and Diane Wong. Our theme music, as always, is by Justin Ellington. Bobby Doherty, he took the photo for our show art and our audience team is Katie o' Brien and Maria Abdulkoff. Our video team is Felice Leon and Brooke Minters. This episode was filmed by Daniele Sarti and Chica Gonzalez. It was edited by Jeremy Rothlin and Amy marino. We're on YouTube. Y' all knew that. Please subscribe and we'll be back next week to talk about Saturday. Saturday. Thanks for listening and yeah, see you next week. This is the table, the one with the view. This is how you reserve exclusive tables with Chase Sapphire Reserve. 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