Saw “The Devil Wears Prada” lately and was surprised at how different the movie was compared to the book. The movie makes the ‘devil’in question—a nasty female boss– much more sympathetic than in the book. In both works, Amanda Priestly, the editor of a fictional fashion magazine, treats her staff cruelly, expecting them to satisfy her every whim. She is arrogant, petty, uncaring, and ungrateful. Her personal assistant is expected, without any encouragement or thankyous involved,to function on minimal information, with maximum speed. On top of various desk jobs, she is expected as well to fetch anything that Amanda wants. Most of this is personal stuff: coffee, her lunch, her dry cleaning, things for her twin daughters, for example, and involves her assistant schlepping across town laden with junk, while trying to assure Amanda on her cell phone that she’s going as fast as she can. At one point she’s even expected to obtain two copies of the as-yet-unpublished new Harry Potter for Amanda’s twins.
The difference is that in the book, the Harry Potter book has to be flown from New York to Paris–in the midst of a storm– for them to read. In the film, it simply has to reach the kids before they board a train. There are other similar changes, each making the devilish act performed by Amanda Priestly less extreme. She is also shown sympathetically to be suffering from marital problems. I think the film is milder because Meryl Streep, who plays Amanda, probably wanted a role with more depth. And perhaps Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, who is the probable original for the character, may have threatened a lawsuit, since the author of the book once worked for her
Watching Amanda terrify her assistant reminded me of my worst bosses. One was a real Dragon Lady, wh o was the head clerk at the branch library where I worked one summer as a student shelving and checking out books. She was very large, and dressed dramatically in black, with long strings of pearls around her neck. She reeked so much of perfume that I would start to choke asthmatically just at the sight of her. And she ruled that library like her own little domain. All she did all day was sit at the front desk, going through the library files in a leisurely fashion. Or at least, that was her excuse to sit there, talking to the customers. As for the rest of us, we were her slaves. We clerks were expected to work in a back room repairing library books, while at the same time working at the check-out desk. This created a schizophrenic situation where you had to keep looking up from your work to see if anyone had come to check out a book, in which case you were to leap up and run to the desk to serve them. If you by chance didn’t see the person the moment he or she arrived, the Dragon Lady would hiss at you, or swoop down and pinch your arm, making me in particular feel guilty and very nervous. Of course, she should have been the one binding books in the back, while I went through the files, ready to move easily sideways to the checkout counter if the need arrived, but no, that would have removed her from her perch where she could see everything that happenedand chat up everyone in a very superior way.
She made me so nervous and stressed out that I started sleepwalking at night. I was looking after an old woman’s apartment for the summer while she went to Europe, and I was supposed to sleep on a cot in her kitchen (her bed was too personal for me to use.) Several times I awoke in the middle of the night to find myself standing at the sink, passing my hands back and forth under the taps, the same way that, at work, I had to pass a library card under the checkout machine. I must have dreamt that I was at work, lept out of bed, and rushed over to the sink; the distance from cot to sink was about the same as from my desk in the back room at the library to the checkout counter.
Another bad female boss I had was Personell Director at Woolworth’s, where I worked Friday nights and Saturdays while going to high school. She had a beady eye and a dark mood, and was always staring at us and criticizing us clerks. And she fired me because she thought I was stealing from the till. I was in reallit the last person on earth who would steal from a till. I was, in fact, so afraid that she’d think that I’d steal that my very nervousness around the till was what made me seem suspicious and got me fired. And she didn’t just fire me directly; on the day she was planning to fire me, she made me stay two hours later than closing time to try to untangle several strings of Xmas tree lights. Then she fired me. And I never was paid for those two hours, either.
However, in that case I got revenge. Several years later, when I was a university student and was employed in taking the census from door to door, I found myself one day at her door. We were supposed to make a very full census every ten houses, asking things like the people’s ages, incomes, the price of their house, and so on. Right then and there I decided to make this a tenth house. And I got to enjoy watching her squirm as I asked her these questions, too. You could see her wondering if anything she said about her income would get back to the Income Tax people, for example. And she was the kind of woman who hated to say what her age was, too. Normally I’m not mean, and if the occasion hadn’t presented itself, I would never have done anything in the way of revenge, but it seemed fair at the time. She had hurt my pride so much in firing me without reason or proof, without letting me defend myself, that it seemed right that I should be able to pin her down and make her pride crumble for a while.
Anybody reading this have any ‘bad boss’ story to relate here? If so, please add your comment
In any case, there have been many articles about the film, defending the Amanda character as being the typical woman boss, made that way in order to survive in a man’s world.
