Column: What the audience has learned since the first 'Devil Wears Prada'

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Each of us has a shortlist of movies we find ourselves rewatching, movies we will finish even if they’re half-over when we tune in.Even if it’s being streamed with commercials.

Even if it’s playing on a 19-inch black-and-white television with no sound in a crowded dive bar.For the past 20 years, “The Devil Wears Prada” has been one of those films for me and other Americans who entered the workforce just in time to say goodbye to pensions and hello to increases in student loan debt.Generation X had the highest homeownership rate relative to their age, so when the housing bubble popped in 2008, it hit Gen X the hardest.

And yet this same group of workers is also shouldering the care of aging parents and adult children.According to Pew Research, more than half of 40-year-olds (“elder millennials”) and more than a third of 50-year-olds fall into this category, doing so with shrinking financial margins because wages have lagged behind the cost of living our entire adult lives.While the current No.

1 movie at the box office — the biopic chronicling Michael Jackson’s rise from Gary, Ind., in 1966 to headlining stadiums in 1988 — may evoke a sense of nostalgia for Gen X, the sequel to “Devil” (which opens in theaters Friday) feels more like a peer review.Twenty years ago, when we last saw our protagonist, Andrea Sachs, she had decided to leave her big corporate job because success in that environment required her to be someone she didn’t like or respect.As young professionals, seeing a fictional character like Sachs leave a toxic work environment felt like a satisfying conclusion in 2006.

However, over the decades, you learn work/life balance is an oxymoron and characteristics such as integrity and loyalty are often valued but rarely useful on a spreadsheet.Don’t get me wrong — I love the campy humor, the fashion and soundtrack of the first “Devil.” H...