C. Cruella

A defense.

When I was young I had four goldfish that I called the DeVille family: Willie, Mink, Cece and Cruella. They came to a bad end – dumped in a pond in Golden Gate Park under cover of darkness – but perhaps it was the memory of them that made me go to the movies - the real movies I mean – to see the new flick “Cruella.” The film is getting a lot of hate on twitter right now by people who think the plot is outrageous. Their threads are hilarious: when I saw one gif with the opening shot of Cruella’s mom being killed by vicious CGI Dalmatians I laughed my head off and thought, now there’s a movie I’ll never go to. So of course, two days later there I was, in the theater.

Dragging films like ‘Cruella” is what twitter was made for, but honestly? I kind of liked it. Only kind of, mind you, because I hate all Disney movies. But the thing is, everything really stupid about this film  is true of EVERY Disney movie. Everyone knows that the company likes to kill mothers as a plot motivation, but in this one, there are two mom-deaths (sort of), plus a new twist: Matricide! Anyway, twitter is mad about it, but I don’t know: maybe it’s the pandemic that has caused people to suddenly become critical of this product of the dominant culture, when they used to totally swear by it. Probably it was the Pandemic, since I myself would not have enjoyed going to see this movie if it hadn’t been for the long lag between seeing films, which made lying in a lounge chair in a darkened room and watching a half hour of previews super fun. Now I want to see the Aretha bio and “12 Mighty Orphans” and maybe even “In The Heights,” because there is apparently a synchronized swimming routine in it.

Anyway, as previously mentioned, I hadn’t meant to go see “Cruella” at all. What changed my mind is that I found out it is set in a fashion house in mid-1970s London and is very influenced by Vivienne Westwood, and I therefore felt that, as the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Punk, I was obligated to check it out. Is it punky? Sort of. For example, Cruella’s name, it turns out, is just her punk name, like Sid Vicious, Tom Verlaine, Dave Reckoning or a host of other fun d-jay handles we used to use when I worked in college radio at KFJC. (Mine was Divine Discontent, after a minor character in the book Vile Bodies. Isabelle was Jane from Occupied Europe.)

Also, there’s a lot of punk iconography used herein, like leather, torn t-shirts, badges, safety pins, Anarchy symbols and hair dye. But the punk highlight is surely when Cruella holds an impromptu punk fashion show/rock concert outdoors in London - not on a barge on the Thames but practically - wearing a coat made of fake Dalmatian fur (the real Dalmatians, which she has dog-napped, are seen to be eating treats back at her loft, she’s just punking people about dog death, in order to seem more anarchist and punk). During this sequence, Artie sings “I Want To Be Your Dog.” Wow, and you thought it was discombobulating to hear “Lust for Life” as a Royal Caribbean Cruise Line commercial? This is weirder.  

Speaking of music: the movie is set between 1965 and 1976, i.e. very slightly pre-punk, and it mostly sticks to music from that era. A few of the songs used to illustrate the action include “She’s A Rainbow,” “Gimme Shelter,” “These Boots Were Made For Walking,” as well as time appropriate tracks by The Animals, the Zombies, the Bee Gees, the Doors, Deep Purple, Supertramp, the Ohio Players, and Ike & Tina’s version of “Come Together.”  (The two punk songs, “One Way or Another,” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” are actually outside the time period by a couple of years. That happened in “I Tonya,” this director’s previous film as well. Probably only a rock nerd would notice though.)

The thing is, if you think of “Cruella” as a regular movie, it’s fine – it’s only as a prequel to “101 Dalmatians,” that it doesn’t work. In fact, the presence of 3 Dalmatians at all in this film is utterly de trop; there’s a chihuahua that has a larger role. (What is it about Disney and chihuahuas?). What it’s really about, at least ostensibly, is a strong woman character and the ties of friendship - that is, within a larger framework of the joys of capitalism, ruthlessness, and the powerful and therefore insane-woman trope. In a pretty harsh take down, Vulture says, “If you look closely, Cruella is indicative of the very culture it pretends to critique: Its central character is a white woman whose concerns and politics begin and end with herself. She’s a girl boss pretending to fight against the powers that be. She doesn’t want to overthrow the Establishment so much as become it. Cruella takes one of the richest narrative archetypes — the madwoman — and whittles her down into a glossy, hollow, capitalism-approved monster fueled by girl-boss politics. It has nothing to say about how women move through the world.” And I buy that. In one way, punk gets used as shorthand character development for anger, and also accounts for her having funny hair. But I would also argue that Disney has never attempted to say anything other than the above about all of its heroines, ever, and at least its use of punk is pretty.

To wit: herein, Cruella is an up and coming fashion designer who has a David Bowie-ish friend named Artie (Get it? He’s ARTY!) with a vintage clothes shop on King’s Road, and she makes dresses out of garbage bags and uses punk iconography and fonts to make manifestos and declarations about the death of old icons. You could argue that this is a very lightweight take on an artistic movement that I personally think was more important than that, but on the other hand, what greater measure of success is there, in the world of art and commerce, than co-option of punk by Walt Disney?  

(This is Cruella’s arty friend Artie. Who may or may not be Disney’s first gay character, depending on if you think that an interest in fashion automatically makes men gay.)

There is also an argument to be made — well, by me — that “Cruella” is a great example of the postmodernist literary method called pastiche – that is, the technique invented and used by writes like Borges, Pynchon, Eco and many others, which pastes together the genre-forms of different eras and styles in order to make a comment on what one critic has called “the chaotic, pluralistic or information-drenched” nature of our times.

Or not. Either way, Cruella’s creations are frankly beautiful and the situationist installations she arranges to have happen are great too. There’s one done with a bunch of moth chrysalis that is highly reminiscent of a Damian Hirst’s work with flies and butterflies. So good.

One thing that any review of “Cruella” should say: I think the film is too scary for little kids. When she was littler, my daughter would have been terrorized by the scene where Cruella is tied to a chair and nearly burned to death. She wouldn’t have liked the mom’s death by vicious dogs scene at all either, since she like many children was already scared of dogs. Fair warning.

That said, it’s worth saying that this film features 5 doggie characters that are never harmed or put in any danger at all. In fact, the whole idea of making a coat out of dog fur – which is the entire stakes of the source material and is pretty scary – is considered ridiculous here, which is just one of the many ways this film doesn’t work as an origin story. We all know that Cruella is going to go on to do that in a subsequent film, but that’s not what this Cruella would do, which is just one more instance of the way that Disney takes huge liberties with its source material.  But I mean, when has Disney ever improved on source material? If you think of this movie as separate from that work, it becomes a much better movie – more or less.