The Devil wears Theory

This wonderful scene displays the fantasy of absolute power that French theory once represented.  It also provides a telling account of how the trickle down theory works in economics, as well as in Hollywood’s star system.  Back when Roland Barthes was a structuralist, he maintained that fluctuations in fashion were determined by a handful of editors—meeting in Paris, of course, not New York City, as the film shows.  These editors’ decisions, just as this scene shows, eventually determine what ordinary women in humble circumstances decide to wrap around their bodies.  Throw in a few key designers and advertisers (the scene gives us a string of product placements) and you have a consumerist version of Lacan’s dictum that the unconscious is structured by the Other.  In the movie's terms, this means that the impulses that drive your intimate consumer decisions are really guided, if not determined, by forces completely outside your control.  Individual identity, the possibility of free will, serves as an illusion that drives the fashion system, or all of society, for that matter, forward.

            French theory back in the day loved this sort of thinking, for it aligned intellectuals who explain the system’s trickle-down operation, with the masters at the social peak.  Lacan and Barthes probably did not want to be overtly connected with the fashion industry, but they surely found the status alluring.

            In other words, the system is as much a construct of intellectual theory building as anything else.  This scene’s dressing down about dressing up asserts totally mastery and control—a reality only if you are committed to the fashion system itself.  You have to believe in the hierarchy for it to work, which means that critical descriptions of the trickle down system have the perhaps unintended effect of reinforcing its operation because they insist—“This is how the world really works.” The argument claims that the theory applies even to people who don't realize that their decisions have been made for them, but by making the argument, by showing how determined ordinary people are, the theory strengthens that control.

            Meryl Streep’s speech gives us a nice summary of how trickle-down economics works, as well.  The elite make the key decisions and the lower classes pick up the remainders.  This alignment of feudal hierarchy and luxury consumption has been theorized for the last three hundred years—Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees is one of the most famous, first versions, but the idea has surely been around much, much longer. 

            Add to this system, the famous actors displaying their prowess as thespians.  At the center, stands the queen of Hollywood quality, attended by a bunch a speechless pretty women and her knowing, New York side-kick.  The young rising star is given a lesson not only in the operation of the fashion/class/star system, but also in how to perform: Streep performs how to perform, Hathaway takes notes.