Authors-choice: Hope & Revival

I just saw the movie, “The devil wears Prada (2006),” and thinking to myself that it is unusual for Hollywood films to have a name referring to supernatural things like the devil, so naturally, I was curious and watched it. It is the story of a Andrea (Anne Hathaway), a collage graduate who gets a job in a high fashion industry and in other to impress her overbearing boss (Meryl Streep) and keep her job, she metamorphose from a simple girl who loves wearing flat shoes to a high heeled catwalk model much to the chagrin of her boyfriend and ends up wrecking their marriage? No their living together.

Yes, you heard me right, Andrea and her boyfriend aren’t husband and wife. They are just living together, enjoying all the entitlement of married life without actually being married. Her boyfriend wants her to be there for him, to work less, and come home on time for “family” time, yet they aren’t actually a family. The film ends in a high note when Andrea quits her job, walking out on her overbearing boss because she realizes that she really doesn’t want to be like her boss who has had series of divorces and was just beginning another one with her latest husband. So she quits her hugely successful career, but for what? So that she could be a perfect girlfriend to her neglected boyfriend?

 I think there is something wrong with Hollywood wanting us to believe that live in relationships are equivalent to marriage when they aren’t and until Andrea and her boyfriend decides to get married they are basically living a lie since the marital bond is what create the family, any other thing is just a shame, and they may wake up one day and walk out and that is the end of it. Even a temporal thing like getting a job needs some form of formal agreement, a contract and employment letter and terms of agreements that enable both parties understand the relationship between themselves and the different obligations that each owes to the other. Similarly, a football player is received into a new team and signs a new contract in which the terms of understanding between the club and the players are clearly spelt out. Thus, a relationship between Andrea and her boyfriend, though they pretend to be husband and wife yet because they  have no formal  marriage contract can at best be likened to a player playing  all the major games but without a signed contracts or a employee that works hard daily in a nice company but has no employment contract. In both case the situation is indefensible. This is but a weak analogy because marriage is much more than a contract; it is actually a covenant in which two persons exchange vows of giving themselves whole an entire to the other. As Professor Scott Hahn puts it, “In a contract, there is an exchange of goods, in marriage; there is the exchange of persons.” The sacrament or vow of marriage is what makes a family, any other thing would be a pretence and untruthful.

Still in the same line, the movie portrays Andrea as having a flippant attitude about sex; she treats it as a casual pastime. As such when she was on the trip to Paris, and she meets a friend who had helped in the past, and has been desiring her since, so they go out and have some drinks and the next thing they are kissing and Voila! She ends up in bed with him. But the next morning, it was as if nothing happened, she casually picks up her things and walks out. I beg to disagree. There is nothing casual about sex. It is actually very serious and should be treated like so. How so? Well for one, sex leads not just to emotional bonding but also physical bonding such that if one is afflicted with a disease let’s say for example HIV/AIDs or any of the deadly sexually transmitted diseases, the other might just catch it, so don’t let Hollywood fool you. Similarly, during sex, there is a whole exchange of bodily fluids that are sometimes unpleasant.  But even more important regardless of the deception and denial of the modern age, sex is a source of human life and really meant for people who are married

To sum, the whole point the movie is straining to make is that one must get ones priorities right, placing family over fortunes but the problem is that the movie misses the more fundamental point that there is no family without marriage and that a job contract is far more secure relationship than a live-in-boyfriend and sometimes last longer. Hollywood has to help bring back the right concept of family and stop promoting harmful practices.

by Chinwuba Iyizoba