Cruella Is Not That Serious

In fact, the “everyone sucks here” ethos of Cruella makes the film view very much like another film about power dynamics between women willing to throw their closest competition off a cliff to move one rung higher on an ultimately pointless ladder, The Favourite. This theme makes sense, as one of the film’s credited writers is Tony McNamara, who wrote both The Favourite and Hulu’s The Great, two very funny works about rich people’s frivolous cruelty, among other things.

“You can’t care about anyone else,” The Baroness tells Estella in one scene, incredibly reminiscent of McNamara’s other works. “Everyone else is an obstacle. You care what an obstacle wants or feels, you’re dead. If I had cared about anyone or thing, I might have died like so many brilliant women with a drawer full of unseen genius and a heart full of sad bitterness.”

It’s an odd message for a film ostensibly intended for children. The sentiment simultaneously invokes Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and while the film’s titular Cruella both takes this message to heart then ultimately (very feebly) rejects it, the audience clearly isn’t supposed to. However, Cruella refuses to give the greater Take Factory at large what it wants—a straightforward, easy to parse message about feminism being good and capitalism being bad even if beautiful, expensive outfits are very fun to look at, perhaps a smart move on giant corporation Disney’s part, considering all the free press that refusal has earned. But nothing the film does is any more egregious than any other film with a point of view muddled by the interference of a billion-dollar company attempting to make a multi-million-dollar film mild enough to earn its money back by appealing to anyone who might be watching. In fact, Cruella might just be a little more subversive than most by refusing to make a hero of any of the bad women in a superficial industry propped up by old, bloody money. But whether that’s the case or not, there would almost certainly be no case to be made if the film didn’t star two women.

In the end, Cruella defeats the bad lady and takes her place within the aristocratic fashion elite, where she will one day become the woman who wants to skin a bunch of puppies to make a coat. One bad white lady replaces another bad white lady to become rich and mean, a final message that is messy, perhaps unfeminist, likely more true to life than we would perhaps like our children’s movies to be, and ultimately, not that fucking serious, considering the messenger.