I read The Devil Wears Prada on my vacation. It is good trash. Quite funny. I have no idea how the movie will look, but that is one of my observations in this blog.
The Devil is not a character in the Torah. He appears first in pre-European literature as the Greek Mephistopheles. The relevance of the title of the book to the issue of the Devil is that the book is the simple story of a Jewish suburban New York princess who works for a year as the assistant to a powerful fashion editor who is a yenta. It is a story about endless whining and self doubt.
Jews aren't very good at ...
Jews aren't very good at understanding the Devil. It is just a good
book title. The descriptive title would have been The Princess and the
Yenta. That tells you the whole story if you understand both characters.
Both characters are neurotic cultural artifacts the result of a millennium in ghettos. In the early 1960s the president of the American Psychological Association, Donald T. Campbell, gave a paper on the origins of the modern yenta in the European ghetto as a defensive social psychological construct.
Four elements come to mind as I read this book. First, the Catholic
Church inadvertently created the modern world by making Jews landless
outcasts. That left Jews to survive at the bottom of the social barrel
with money lending, the rag trade, traveling entertainment and healing
voodoo. Today, those fields are banking, fashion, theater, film, the
arts and medicine. Today, the Church is an insignificant vestigial
farce. Nice reversal.
The book is about a purely Jewish field: fashion (with plenty of goyish Vogue models).
In making a film about a purely Jewish ghetto subject, it had to go through the Jewish filter of Hollywood. My guess, from some experience, is that 82% of Hollywood Jews are self-hating Jews who want to assimilate. Consequently, the foolish Jews in Hollywood decided that this film, like so many others, was really about a universal subject. So they further concluded that it should have a cast of goyim.
This happens all the time. Books about Jewish professors' affairs with
their students, Jewish writers' perpetual angst and the neuroses of
Jewish concert musicians become vehicles for Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn and Warren Beatty. Jewish neurosis is not a universal subject, but the Hollywood
self-haters see it differently. They have to, they can't be honest
enough to accept Jewish neurosis as their unique and unfortunate heritage.
The third thing that comes to mind is the question of when will the princess and the yenta disappear? The answer is: not soon. We now have had three generations of Israelis serving in the IDF and I still find a few yenta qualities surviving in older native Israeli women (not much admittedly). However, the modern Israeli is not neurotic, is strong, honest and supremely competent. A truly wonderful human being.
Lastly, we have the endless viciousness, tribal vindictiveness and total dishonesty of the standard Arab to thank for the wonderful modern Israeli. The incessant Arab threat and ceaseless attacks, for more than a century, have created the modern, powerful and competent Israeli.
Postscript: I saw the movie, it was just as I expected, a Jewish story changed to become a universal story. From a story of anquish and pain to one of doing the morally right thing with integrity... it was turned into a more universal story of a lust for wealth with a modest touch of moral concern.