But what kicks this off is Andy mentioning that it doesn’t make a difference to her whether they go with Belt #1 and Belt #2, because she can’t even tell the difference — and, in that context, Miranda is just repeating Andy’s point by noting that she fished a cerulean sweater rather than a turquoise sweater out of a clearance bin: it presumably would’ve made no difference to Andy, who presumably wouldn’t have even been able to tell the difference, if a different sweater had been in there.
The whole point of the set-up there is, if Miranda goes with Belt #2 instead of Belt #1, Andy genuinely won’t notice or care — and Miranda’s comeback is, if they’d gone with turquoise instead of cerulean, Andy genuinely wouldn’t have noticed or cared.
You’re welcome. Yes, she could have very easily said. “You’re new here, but you will learn that at the highest levels of any business it’s the attention to subtle details that makes all the difference.” But then she wouldn’t be ‘the devil’
But that’s not really addressing the point. Anne Hathaway’s character isn’t saying “she’s not good at her job” or “the decisions she makes aren’t relevant inside the topic of fashion” or anything, she’s saying “the entire topic of fashion is, fundamentally, unimportant.” And the rebuttal that “it influenced the color the shirt you’re wearing” is easily dismissed if she does not care about the color of her shirt.
Taking a step back, I think there’s at least somewhat of a conversation to have about the human need for decoration/symbolism/tribal identity through clothing, whatever; the role of the fashion industry in that, yada yada yada. It’s probably a bit of an overreach to just dismiss the entire industry as complete and total BS.
But the infuriating thing in the movie is that she just has no rebuttal at all for what is a really facile observation.
“She” means who? And what was the facile observation?
The silly thing is that Miranda isn’t designing any clothing. She’s not designing a belt. Those two belts have already been designed and made by someone else, She’s just picking one of them. So she is also one of the people who have to chose from what other people have decided for them. lol.
It would have been a power move if she said “neither of those belts work! Get me a pencil and paper”
“She” meaning Anne Hathaway’s character. She had no rebuttal to the whole ridiculous spiel about how important Meryl Streep’s character was, when in fact it is easily rebutted, or at least easily substantially responded to.
What irritates me about the scene is that the way the movie plays it, it seems like the moviemakers are taking a side, because they show her failing to respond, implying that there is no response. Now, maybe the intent was supposed to be “this guy is making a ridiculous and overbroad point, and Anne Hathaway is too meek to respond, but we filmmaker and the audience are certainly aware of the response.” But instead, I remember it coming off to me as “Anne Hathaway said something silly and naive and wrong, and then was shown the error of her ways.”
It’s a pretty different speech in a pretty different movie, but it certainly reminds me of the preacher character in Contact trying to gotcha Jodie Foster by asking how she knew that her father loved her… wasn’t she taking that “on faith” just like he was taking on faith the existence of God? And… she had no response, leaving his specious and trivial question as the apparent point of view of the movie.
Another one off the dome. The Fugitive (1993) with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones.
Deputy Marshal Samuel Gerard: “Newman, what are you doing?”
Newman: “I’m thinking”
Deputy Marshal Samuel Gerard: “Well, think me up a cup of coffee and a chocolate doughnut with some of those little sprinkles on top, while you’re thinking”
…[much later]…
Deputy Marshal Samuel Gerard: “Newman, we’re gonna send you a bunch of cops, make sure they turn that place inside out”
Newman: “You got it Sam”
Deputy Marshal Samuel Gerard: “And don’t let them give you any shit about your pony tail”
Newman: “I won’t”
Last line should have been…
Newman: “If they do, I’ll just put little grains of dog shit on their doughnuts and coffee, like always sir!”
Good point. You might not “know” that someone loves you, but you do know that you love them because they were always in your corner, took the time to teach you about the world, looked after you when you were sick, gave you everything you needed in life, and treated you as a priority.
It’s just not important whether I believe someone loves me. I try not to want to believe what is unknowable.
Easily rebutted? Not if you listened to what Miranda said: It was our choice that made that color sweater available.
If Andria had chosen a different shade, it still would be Miranda’s (or another person in the fashion industry) choice of what was available. Andrea could only choose a color that Miranda chose for her.
This actually happened at a screening at MIT of the Sam Peckinpaugh movie Straw Dogs. Dustin Hoffman is an astrophysicist working a country house in England. He had a blackboard set up in the living room, covered with his equations. His character has a fight with his wife (-played by Susan George). As she walks by the blackboard, in a fit of pique, she erases a “+” (plus) sign in the middle of a long equation and replaces it with a “minus” sign.
Somebody in the audience stood up, and with great depth of feeling yelled “I’D KILL HER!”
Loud applause.
It doesn’t really matter in the movie. Shortly afterwards Hoffman walks by the blackboard, notices it out of the corner of his eye, and swiftly corrects the “minus” sign to a “plus” sign with a casual stroke of the chalk. He knew the equation so well that the problem was immediately obvious.
OK, I just went and actually rewatched the scene on YouTube. Turns out that I had been seriously misremembering one thing, which is that I was sure it was AH having the argument with some underling who is talking about how important Miranda is, but in fact it is Miranda herself. But the point still stands, imho. Miranda ends by saying something like “you think you chose that yourself, but in fact people in this room chose that for you”.
So the entire discussion goes something like this:
(1) Someone on Miranda’s team comments about how very different two similar-appearing belts are
(2) Andy (that’s what IMDB says AH’s character is named) snickers under her breath
(3) She gets called out
(4) She fairly gracefully admits that they look the same to her but she’s still new to it all
(5) Miranda then makes one logical leap from “you don’t recognize the difference between two similar-seeming belts” to “you think you chose your own clothes” (which has NOTHING to do with what Andy said), then goes on a long rant about how that shade of blue isn’t blue, it’s Cerulean, its recent history in high fashion, and how, a-ha!, therefore it was people like the people in this room who spent millions of dollars to give you the illusion that you could pick out your own clothes when in fact we picked them out for you
So there are in fact TWO obvious rebuttals:
(1) That has nothing to do with whether or not two belts look similar, and whether it was over-the-top to describe them as being SO different; which is all Andy said, she never said anything about “those two belts look different, and also I think I’m better than you and somehow believe that I have agency over my own store-brought clothes” and in fact she basically admitted she still had a lot to learn
(2) But, the point I’ve been trying to get at… if that whole Cerulean thing had NOT happened, and instead the color of that season had been more of an Azure, and oh my god we’re in a huge what if of parallel history and butterfly effects and What Ifs and we’d ended up in a crazy-ass wacky alternative timeline where Andy had been wearing an AZURE sweater instead of Cerulean, well, then… her life would not be the slightest bit materially different in any way at all. All of that effort that goes into being fashion leaders and trendsetters and what not clearly has influence, but that’s not the same as it being genuinely important.
(All of that said, it makes sense in the movie that she not talk back, given that it would be talking back to her very very scary boss, not just a coworker. But it does bug me that the movie leaves us with the impression that Miranda’s viewpoint is correct, given that it is never rebutted.)
Was this correct? I always remember Ann Lander’s quote on the subject. “The left ear is the right ear, the right ear is the wrong ear. Both ears - it’s a girl”
That is close to the point I’ve been making except that you’re extrapolating beyond what is being shown. Miranda’s “tangent” is based on her perception of Andrea’s reactions, where it’s clear she finds the discussion trivial. Miranda shows how it isn’t, that the decisions she makes affects what’s available to consumers.
Note the implication is clear if you consider the question “What if the choice is unpopular?”
