The Cowardice of <em>Cruella</em>
This article contains mild spoilers for Cruella.
“It’s time to make some trouble. You in?” reads one of the posts promoting Cruella, Disney’s prequel-meets-reconsideration of the classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians villain. The line is in keeping with the film: It’s slick and witty and teasingly imprecise about what “trouble,” in this context, might entail. Previous incarnations of Cruella de Vil—including the 1961 animated film that gave us a song dedicated to her vileness—have paid fealty to the character’s outlandish fiendishness: This is someone who will attempt to murder puppies in order to make outerwear. The new version, which tells of Cruella’s life as a young fashion designer, both complicates and flattens the existing stories. Played with off-kilter aplomb by Emma Stone, the young Cruella is a hustler, a skilled self-promoter, and an influencer. She is not evil; she is merely complicated. She is a creature of 2020s America who happens to reside in 1970s London.
is the latest entry in the and ); documentaries such as and ; and retellings of old tales () from the villain’s point of view. The genre is not new, but it is flourishing in an age shaped by the internet and fluent in the language of postmodernism: It tells the story about the story. It is deeply concerned with the totalizing power of authorship. It understands that villainy, as a category, is imposed—and that, in a culture that tends to prioritize reductive myths over complicated truths, the label can be its own kind of injustice.
