Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Devil Wears Prada 2
2026 · David Frankel · The Devil Wears Prada 2 on Sightlines
At the bottom of Miranda Priestly's staircase there is a blue rug. When The Devil Wears Prada 2 takes us back into her townhouse twenty years on, the rug matches the one we remember. Getting that match took real work: set decorator Stephanie Bowen went through at least twenty-five blue fabrics and rugs before one was right. The rug does nothing for the plot. It is there for you, the viewer who was in that house in 2006.
That rug is a good place to start, because it shows what kind of machine this film is. Deleuze gives us a precise name for that machine.
Deleuze divided cinema into two broad regimes. In the first, which he called the movement-image, a character takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the editing serves that chain: see, decide, do. In the second, the time-image, the chain breaks. Characters can only watch, and time comes through as itself. The Devil Wears Prada 2 belongs firmly to the first regime, and there's no shame in that, because most of the films people love do too. The more interesting question is which kind of movement-image it is. Deleuze divided that regime very finely, and this film works on several of its levels at once.
Start with the plot. Andy Sachs, now an award-winning journalist, loses her newspaper job and is hired to help save a struggling Runway. Its survival may depend on money controlled by Emily Charlton, who now runs a luxury brand. Deleuze calls this the large form of the action-image. A surrounding situation, which he names the synsign or “encompasser,” presses on the characters until a decisive act changes it. In 2006 the encompasser was the fashion world as a closed court. Here it is a media economy falling apart: cost-cutting, tech disruption, corporate owners. The setting has changed shape. The film bets that the old duel can be dropped into it and still run.
That duel is what Deleuze calls the binomial: force against force. Andy's earnestness meets Miranda's imperial standards. It is the oldest engine in the picture, and its lineage is easy to trace. Margo Channing and Addison DeWitt in All About Eve gave American film the imperious older figure and the barbed, quotable line. Nine to Five and Working Girl made the formidable boss the structural obstacle of an office comedy. Broadcast News showed how media ethics could carry a smart ensemble. Funny Face supplied the fashion editor and the photoshoot as spectacle. Miranda's guilt trips and put-downs, which Time Out called staggeringly good, are that inheritance in fluent use.
A duel alone would make this a plain contest, though. The Prada films get their texture from clothes. Costume designer Molly Rogers, who assisted Patricia Field on the first film, keeps the franchise's premise that clothing is argument, not decoration. This is where Deleuze's small form of the action-image helps. In the small form, a gesture reveals a situation that was partly hidden. His model was Lubitsch, master of the comedy of manners, where a closing door can tell you everything. In the Prada films the gesture is a garment. An outfit tells you whether someone has given in, moved up or remade themselves before anyone says so. James Harvey in Film Stories read the sequel's wardrobe as glamorous legacy media set against corporate mediocrity. The conflict is staged in fabric before it reaches the dialogue.
Florian Ballhaus's camera helps this along. He kept the film mostly between 25mm and 66mm, physically close to the actors, and he consciously avoided the glamorizing Hollywood close-up. In Deleuze's terms that choice matters. For him the close-up is the home of the affection-image: a face holding a feeling that hasn't yet turned into action. Comedy can't afford to let a feeling hover. A Miranda put-down is itself an action, and Ballhaus frames faces so that the line lands rather than lingers. His close-up lens, the Leitz Hugo 66mm, still keeps the face inside the scene.
Now back to the rug, because this is where the sequel does something the original couldn't. Deleuze's third type of movement-image, which he found perfected in Hitchcock, is the relation-image. Here meaning lives in relationships that the viewer has to hold in mind. Deleuze names two signs in it. A mark is an object that carries a habitual chain: when you see this, you expect that. A demark is the odd detail that breaks the chain and makes you stop and interpret.
A legacy sequel is built out of marks. There is the blue rug, and there is the callback to the first film's Chanel boots. Even the returning crew works this way, from Ballhaus to composer Theodore Shapiro, as institutional memory. Then there is blue itself, the color of the first film's most famous speech. Rogers points out that the speech was written simply as “blue” in the script before a specific shade was chosen. Across the franchise, blue has grown into what Deleuze calls a symbol: one object that sums up the relationship the whole film runs on. Here that relationship is the claim that taste has a lineage, and that what you wear descends from decisions made above you. The sequel lights its world knowing you'll notice.
This is also where its weakness shows. USA Today found the third act too close to the original's and Andy's arc of winning Miranda over repetitive. In Deleuze's terms, the film has plenty of marks and few demarks. Mostly it confirms the chains it inherited instead of breaking them. Whether that's a failure or simply the deal a legacy sequel makes is a fair question to bring to a second viewing.
Then comes Milan, where Jess Gonchor's design goes furthest. A dinner is staged in a refectory under a hand-painted replica of Leonardo's Last Supper. A runway is built from glossy, transparent, reflective materials under bold red light, drawn from the stage of Lady Gaga's Mayhem tour. Mirrors and glass are the classic furniture of what Deleuze calls the crystal-image, where present and memory can no longer be told apart. It's tempting to read the runway that way. Resist it, because these reflections are spectacle and the plot moves straight through them. The temptation still teaches something. A film about a twenty-year-old memory, built from callbacks and set inside a hall of reflecting surfaces, comes close to the edge of the time-image without crossing it.
So what did it do to film as an art? It didn't change film's grammar. Its real achievement is quieter: it shows that a relation-image can be built across decades. The knowing third party Hitchcock relied on is no longer someone who saw the bomb under the table a minute ago. It is someone who saw a cerulean sweater in 2006. Nearly seven hundred million dollars worldwide suggests a lot of people were holding that memory. What this film will seed is still too early to say.
When you watch it, look at what each person is wearing before they speak, and ask whether the outfit has already told you how the scene ends. Then keep track of the blues.
Concepts in play
- action-image (large form) — Runway's survival in a collapsing media economy of cost-cutting, tech disruption and corporate ownership presses until a decisive act is needed: the funding controlled by Emily's luxury brand.
- the encompasser — The transposition of the 2006 conflict onto a media economy in collapse, a milieu that has changed shape while the duel stays the same.
- binomial — Andy's earnestness against Miranda's imperial standards, carried in Miranda's guilt trips and put-downs, a line inherited from All About Eve's Margo Channing and Addison DeWitt.
- action-image (small form) — Molly Rogers's costumes as argument: dress encodes power, status, capitulation and self-invention, so a garment reveals the situation (Harvey: glamorous legacy media against corporate mediocrity).
- the mental-image — The legacy-sequel structure relies on the audience's memory of the 2006 film as the knowing third party: the continuity-matched townhouse, the returning crew as institutional memory.
- mark — Miranda's townhouse blue rug and staircase, matched after at least 25 blue fabrics and rugs were tried; the callback to the first film's Chanel boots.
- symbol — Blue, the colour of the original's cerulean monologue (written only as 'blue' in the script), carried through the sequel's colour continuity as the sign of taste's lineage.
- affection-image (by contrast) — Ballhaus resists the glamorizing Hollywood close-up and keeps to 25-66mm close to the actors, so faces discharge into comic action instead of holding feeling.