The devil wears cleats

My boys and I love going to the movies together. It is one of the great blessings of fatherhood: sitting in the dark next to your children, eating overpriced popcorn, watching the glow of a screen reflect back onto faces that are growing up faster than seems medically advisable.

Over the years, we have done the usual father-son cinematic pilgrimage. Marvel movies. Superheroes. Multiverses. Explosions. Men in armor. Men with hammers. Men with shields. Men with complicated trauma that somehow still allows them to maintain extraordinary abdominal definition. This is familiar territory for adolescent boys. Give them a portal in the sky, a city under attack, and a man with a cape trying to resolve his father-issues, and they are at home.

But this past weekend, through my own scheduling creation — a kind of domestic Barbenheimer — we saw “The Devil Wears Prada 2” on Saturday night and “Mortal Kombat” on Sunday night.

On paper, this made sense. Saturday night was fashion, ambition, betrayal, couture, and Meryl Streep delivering emotional annihilation through a whisper. Sunday night was skull-cracking, spine-ripping, blood-splattering video-game mythology. One movie asked: What does success cost a woman in a world built to devour her? The other asked: What if someone got punched so hard their skeleton briefly became public?

And yet, here is the part I cannot stop thinking about: after both movies, the boys could not stop talking about The Devil Wears Prada. Not Mortal Kombat. Not the fatalities. Not the fights. Not whatever ancient tournament of testosterone had been resurrected for our entertainment. The chick flick.

I say “chick flick” knowingly, because that is the kind of lazy cultural label adolescent boys are supposed to hide behind. These are boys who spend much of their free time avoiding anything that appears too closely associated with women, feelings, or emotional complexity. Football practice is followed by the weight room. A single note of Taylor Swift can produce theatrical groans normally reserved for dental surgery. Their vocabulary includes “bruh,” “shut up,” and a range of sounds suggesting someone is either dying in a first-person shooter game or communicating with an injured walrus.

The soundtrack of my house includes video-game gunfire, competitive insults, sudden wrestling, farts, body odor, and references to genitalia delivered with the confidence of young men who believe they have invented both comedy and biology.

And yet, there they were: fully invested in Meryl Streep in couture.

My eldest, who is now deeply into cologne and has made it clear that I am an uncultured fool for not knowing the difference between seasonal scents, explained that he likes the movies because they are “classy.” This is a word I do not often hear from him unless he is critiquing my shoes, my car, or my apparent failure to understand modern grooming. But I understood what he meant. He was drawn to the style, the elegance, the authority of a world where people know how to enter a room.

My youngest, who is 12, was mostly following along for “the Devil.” This, too, made sense. Adolescence has a natural fascination with power. Miranda Priestly is not a superhero, but she might as well be. She does not need a cape. She has silence. She has a stare. She has the ability to destroy a person’s confidence with a sentence so soft it barely qualifies as speech. For a 12-year-old boy, this may be more impressive than Thor’s hammer. But what struck me most was not simply that they liked the movie. It was that they paid attention.

For two hours, my boys followed dialogue, betrayal, ambition, compromise, disappointment, loyalty, status, and emotional subtext. They tracked the story. They noticed callbacks. They understood tension. They were not bored by people talking in rooms. They were not waiting for something to explode. Their iPhone-trained attention spans, which sometimes appear unable to survive a sentence longer than a TikTok caption, managed to handle a long-form, large-screen drama about fashion, work, identity, and power. This alone felt like a miracle on the order of the splitting of the sea.

Afterward, we spent a good 20 minutes discussing what the plot of The Devil Wears Prada 3 should be. Twenty minutes. With adolescent boys. About fictional magazine executives, old rivalries, shifting power, and who should betray whom next. They were not humoring me. They had theories and opinions. 

Mortal Kombat, by contrast, was fine. It was exactly what they expected it to be. It delivered the familiar pleasures of adolescent masculinity: fighting, spectacle, revenge, noise, bodies used as weapons, and a moral universe where most problems can be resolved by kicking someone through a wall. The Devil Wears Prada gave them something they had not seen before. Even if there was an emotional kick through a wall every now and then.

That is the real lesson. Boys are often more emotionally curious than they let on. They may not always have the language for what they are seeing, but they are watching. They are absorbing power dynamics. They are studying confidence. They are trying to understand what makes a person respected, feared, admired, desired, or dismissed.

We flatten adolescent boys too easily. We assume they only want violence, competition, sex jokes, sports, protein, and whatever cologne has been recommended by a 19-year-old influencer with a Lamborghini he definitely does not own. And, to be fair, they do want many of those things. A lot. Loudly.

But they also want beauty. They want drama. They want stories about transformation. They want to understand why someone would betray a friend, chase success, lose themselves, find themselves, or walk away from the approval of someone powerful.

Those are not women’s questions. They are human questions. They are also deeply masculine questions, though most boys are rarely invited to ask them outside the language of winning, strength, or dominance.

So maybe my sons’ love for these movies is not strange at all. Maybe it reveals something I need to remember as their father: the same boys who grunt “bruh” across the kitchen are capable of following emotional nuance. The same boys who mock Taylor Swift may still be captivated by Meryl Streep. The same boys who smell like football pads and questionable hygiene may still recognize class when they see it.

Young men contain multitudes. Sometimes those multitudes just need popcorn, a dark theater, and Miranda Priestly to remind us.