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  • Essay / Analysis of rhetoric in the film adaptation The Devil Wears Prada

    The film The Devil Wears Prada is the adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's novel of the same title. The story is about intelligent, recent Ivy League journalism graduate Adrea Sachs, who is looking for a writing opportunity in her New York days, but finds herself landing a job second assistant to Miranda Priestly, editor-in-chief of a major fashion magazine. Runway magazine and is considered a legend in the industry and is famous for her ruthless attitude towards her employees. The film and novel are a beautiful interplay of visual and verbal rhetoric. The storyline is about the advantages and survival in the fashion industry which requires a certain body shape and expectations which can affect the personal lives of people working in this industry. Leitch's argument on adaptation theory: "novels allow readers to read verbal texts 'paced and inflected as they please' and films provide 'prescribed and unalterable visual and verbal performances'" helps the The case study examines the rhetorical gestures and norms of the fashion industry presented in the film through the analysis of the hybrid framework in visual and verbal performances. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original EssayPerhaps the most effective distinction between novel-to-film adaptation is: "The written text of the film (the script of the screenplay) is performed verbally in teams to translate it into a 'performance text' which requires a verbal interpretation on the part of the actors and the audience whereas "a literary text requires a (verbal) interpretation only on the part of its readers", confirming the approach of this film in which the actors draw their lines from a written script and play these lines in their own way. This helps bring the story together because with the character's body language, facial expressions, gestures, and appearances, even if the film omitted the visual rhetoric, the audience would still be able to infer what is happening, what he thinks and what they are trying to express. The scene where Miranda tells designers through her facial expression (a nod, a press of lips, a nod) what they can release in Runway is a verbal breakdown of visual notes. This set of visual notes transformed into verbal notes confirms Leitch's interesting theory: "the gaps in the characters allow the reader to fill in the void, which makes the work successful." This film uses verbal cues within the visual framework and interprets the novel's visual imagination and attempts to give as many "revealing details" as it is presented in his novel but with its own visual perception of the fashion industry validating Leitch's remarks: "no intertextual model is adequate for the study of adaptation if it limits each intertext to a single precursor". All emotions, attitudes and messages are transmitted through facial expressions, gestures bodily and unspoken behaviors that fill the screen with a story of unspoken emotions Andrea's first interaction with Miranda or anyone else in Runway's office is a power play of verbal rhetoric in a visual setting then. that the camera pans Andrea from head to toe every time she meets a new person and clearly gives the impression that she's not impressed by their appearance and to them, she doesn't belong here. This interplay of visual and verbal rhetoric is one of the significant aspects of this film that is "understandable even to 9”