sparking blog

this saturday, i put on my makeup for myself, held my hand and took myself to the cinema to finally see devil wears prada 2. the last time I did this for myself was when Barbie came out and I think there is magic in women taking themselves to certain places only for their own pleasure.

i was moved by Andy’s urge to riot about how we suck the soul out of everything one by one. a true change we should be having our eyes and ears on when thinking about 2006 and 2026. in writing, in words, in art, in design, in vision, there are fingerprints of our souls. not person by person, not the way liberalism taught you. but, think about it, why does Andy approach every single person with kindness and thought and care in devil wears prada 2? no matter how evil they approach her, no matter how irritated, upset, or insulted she feels. because the purpose of the concept of a soul is not to divide or individualize, it is to remind us that we are all connected. and we are not connected because we are the same. we are connected because we get inspired by each other’s differences. we are all the same soul, not divided, but scattered in different forms, experiencing life in different tones, to the level of understanding of our own.

why are there so many different forms of paintings, so many different feelings we get from reading different authors. countless ways to imagine something, undeniably various shades of love that can be experienced and how many people experiencing love in their own ways. so many uniquely interpreted designs. all of these show how differently we look at things, how variously we perceive things. how one designer’s interpretation of a bag can be totally different from another designer. architecture. poetry. clothes, movie direction, life direction. in everything that we created in our time as humans, in everything we love, we have fingerprints of our souls. so, Andy is right, we can’t suck the soul out of everything. that was what Miranda Priestly was silently crying about as she was walking out of Milan, life is all about change but the way we live can’t be an affront to everything we care about.

the inclusion of the concept of AI taking over, not hysterically as it was shown in movies before the decade, but in an undeniably real way. we are losing our ability to perceive in our own way, to put and take meaning in our unique ways, to interpret differently, and eventually removing every fingerprint of a soul from everything that we do, in a disgracing attempt to get everything done fast, produce and consume everything hastily.

the soul is not to individualize, but to keep us connected. we are in different forms, experiencing everything from the point of our unique shades of glasses, and everything is our interpretation. certain differences irritate, upset, or even humiliate. but as Andy knocks the door of Peter and realizes, we can be not perfect together. Tom Robbins says, “We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.” and that’s sort of the whole point. not only in love interests, but in all forms of relationships and human touch. the message is not a basic and cult nobody is perfect, but we can be not perfect together. in our edgy differences, we are inspired by each other. and we put our souls into everything we create.

so, no, we can’t suck the soul out of everything.

watching devil wears prada as a kid and watching devil wears prada 2 as a grown woman was an experience, an experience that does not need shiny adjectives. it was revealing in so many ways boys wouldn’t get. boys wouldn’t get half of the depth of being a teenage girl, ever. to comprehend the unimaginable horrors beyond our imagination, at 13, we had to enlarge our imagination. and, oh, have we stopped ever since. those frozen stares of a 13 year-old girl on the swing were something beyond maths class. the black hoodie you pull over your head meant something else for the girls. it wasn’t as endearing or as rewarding as it was for the boys. but it allowed us to become more aware of our surroundings and pushed us to think and create.

so, no, we can’t suck the soul out of everything.