In His Girl Friday (1940), newspaper man Walter Burns (played with impeccable charm by Cary Grant) refuses to part with his star reporter Hildy Johnson (played by Rosalind Russell) who also happens to be his ex wife, putting all sorts of obstacles in her way as she tries to get on the train to Albany to marry her brand new boyfriend, an insurance salesman. It is hilarious, full of punchlines, and near imprisonments. It also has, at various times, Burns pulling nutty stunts, including getting Hildy's future mother in law abducted and getting an aeroplane to write: "Hildy, don't be hasty. Remember my dimple. Walter," which delayed their divorce by 20 minutes while the judge went out and watched it. It was based on the play The Front Page and was released 86 years ago.
Cut to 2026 and the boss from hell is getting her comeuppance in the most undignified way possible. What seemed funny in 2006 would be considered toxic now, from her flinging her coat and handbag at her assistant to telling her to pick up her drycleaning. There's a scene in The Devil Wears Prada 2 where her former assistant Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) sees Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) hang up her coat herself in her room and can't believe it. Miranda's cutting remarks too are deemed far too rude for the new working environment, with her new assistant Amari (Simone Ashley) forever trying to correct her when she goes off on rants about models looking like "starving goats at a methadone clinic in New York", or about using plus size models on fashion runways.
There is a point when Miranda tells a would-be editor that she is a vendor not a visionary but the truth is visionaries have quirks which the new media environment simply has no room for. What was a fond prestige pet for the father is just a money wasting paper machine for the inheritor who is more interested in budget cuts than burnishing the beacon of beauty. So we have the unseemly sight of Miranda flying coach and getting a police no when her assistant asks for champagne to be served.
There is also a dictat replacing private cars with Ubers. And we certainly don't see her new assistant scurrying around with either her coffee or with a steak she doesn't end up eating (I suppose Uber Eats is meant to do that?) There was a time when Miranda's whimsy was celebrated and enjoyed. In our new politically correct time, she would be sued for mental harassment and be the subject of numerous social media blinds. And the way Emily (Emily Blunt) treated Andy would be escalated to HR very soon for mean girl behaviour. Much as Walter Burns would be sued for sexual harassment.
Miranda would be the boss from hell. The new awareness is a result of a new generation that has seen the pleasures of work from home and their parents being chained to the machine, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. That explains the outrage over NR Narayana Murthy's declaration that young Indians need to work 70-hour weeks, which was upped by 10 hours a week by L&T Chairman and MD SN Subrahmanyam. As a society progresses, its tolerance for bad behaviour decreases. Bosses once described as characters are no longer tolerated. As Miranda would say: "That's all."
