Black and White and Red All Over

 

When the trailer first came out, my reaction was "this isn't a successor to Maleficent, this is a successor to Joker." I only had no idea how right I was. This was a great movie to be the first film I've seen in a theater since early 2020.

The movie is a heavily filmic homage to the late 70's and early 80's fashion/art scene in London and New York. It particularly loves the "Anarchy in the UK" vibe of that time. It excuses these aesthetic indulgences with the story of mad genius who becomes a superhero/supervillain alter ego with the power and morals of fashion. To this con-artist, style is substance.

And like Joker, the director realizes "wait I can get hundreds of millions of dollars from a studio to make this homage to 70's film... if I just say 'by the way the main character shares a name with some other IP', with no actual obligation to fit any pre-existing canon or imagery? Radical."

So watch it without thinking of Disney canon, and just drink in the visuals, the camerawork, and the conflict between our human self and our inhuman ideals.

Ideally, you'd watch this movie turning off the dialogue. The soundtrack is fantastic (again, homage to the 80's punk scene). And the visuals and camerawork are luxurious. The actual dialogue is a lot of bad accents, bad plot exposition (oh god the voiceover), plotholes the size Cruella could drive a Rolls Royce through, and middling witticisms. You can pick up "what is happening, how people feel, what are their motivations" entirely through the visuals. (The most you miss is a punchy running joke about saying "thank you".) I realize this won't be an option for most people, but in twenty years when this is a cult hit being watched on HD-mini-USB-chips or whatever, I think they'll go for the dialogue-less option.

Anyway, assuming you have seen it, or don't care about spoilers, let's talk about what we actually saw:

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The first thing that jumps out at you about this fashion-obsessed movie is color. Unsurprisingly, they do a lot with the black and white motif. More surprisingly, they are consistent about the meanings of those colors.

One of the complaints people seeking to understand the foundations of racism make, is how we attribute black as the negative color, and white as the positive color. Cruella - with her half black, half shock white hair - subverts that. Like her hair, she has one white ethnic friend/goon and one person of colour friend/goon, who each offer different advice.

In the movie black (as in black hair) is the color of: conscience, conformity, the middle-class, a desire to fit in and take the straight and narrow. It's how you would think the hair of a small child or twenty something would actually looking. (And it's the life path her South-Asian friend pushes her to. And every person of colour in the movie - including the new Roger and Anita - are part of a middle-class "goodness.")

Whereas white is the color of: age, aristocracy, the will to power, crime and violence. It's how the villain/mentor primarily appears. It's how her white hair stands out. (And it's the life path her Irish friend pushes her to.)

[Recall the bit in 101 where the Dalmatians try to get away by rolling in so much coal dust that they look like black dogs with white spots.]

The third color we see is of course, red. Red appears in many ways (an inappropriate red dress at the B&W ball) but most strikingly it appears as a cut that bleeds. Red is the color of messy humanity, that doesn't fit in the conformity vs ambition balance of the rest of the world.

If someone set it out to create a movie where "the color white represents evil" this is what they would have arrived at (well, after the Hunger Games.) Which is of course why vicious Dalmatians kill her mum.

Here's the thing about the Dalmatians. Cruella doesn't want revenge on them, which is most commentator's interpretation of the scene where they know her off a cliff. We see later from the glint in her eye that Cruella fears those dogs. And Cruella's first coping mechanism is to go towards the things she fears. She always runs headlong at the thing she is afraid of, because she has no room to run away. In this movie she moves towards the dogs to sit down near them, and in the future she will make a coat out of them. Because she can't afford to give fear an inch.

She learned this from the villain, the Baroness.

Of course, the movie tries to build up the Baroness as some great figure of evil, despite a boring name and no franchise history we know of, which is doomed to be disappointing. But what is interesting is how much of this character is just straight up Cruella, which the protagonist embraces whole-heartedly. In most superhero origin stories, we get some scene of the supervillain saying "you're just like me!!!" and the hero saying "neverrrrrr!" But instead for this costumed superstar, she consciously embraces the lessons of the fashion world prima donna.

Baroness: 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 a rallying cry for second wave feminism, and a rationale for why it's okay to skin puppies.

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I suppose for the people who haven't seen it - or who have but resist reading - I need to explain why this is a superhero origin story. It's because it starts with a "normal" human who wants to fix a wrong in the world and to do that creates an alter-ego who performs superhuman feats and poses as a symbol of their ideals.

In this case, not only does the protagonist take on the mask of "Cruella", but she literally has a funeral for her old, human self (Estella.) She makes clever costumes. She even fights seven goons in a show-off-y manner. And more plot and shenanigans revolve around keeping these two identities separate and secret than in eighteen MCU movies about superheroes.

If anything, Cruella is more like Superman than Batman or Iron Man - Cruella (with the bicolor hair) is who she really is, and Estella is a wig she wears on top of that. (One of the awkward bits of dialogue is that "Estella didn't get anything done, Cruella does," when as far as we can tell, Estella was a heartless and successful thief.

What's her superpower? Well when Estella gets pushed off a cliff to fake her death... she survives with a literal parachute skirt. Improbable, maybe, but it's wholly in keeping with her nature.

Not a few critics have complained that this prequel pulls its punches by not having Cruella kill a single dog - or single person, or even do anything really bad besides steal from the underserving and emotionally ignore her henchmen (who she learns to make up with.) And it is true that it's weak to revel in how EVIL your style is, while shying from anything that might get you an R rating. But they do the next best thing: Cruella frequently mentions the possibility of killing someone or a dog, and when the normie is shocked shocked at doing such a thing, she laughs it off as "obviously a joke." This is what some call the "Nelly defense," and often stands for "this person is totally willing to do such a thing but society so far won't let them."

This is not a story like Maleficent. This is not even a story like Spider-man. It would however fit in the DCEU.

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Tragically, I can't analyze the fashion like this movie deserves. Other bloggers will have to take up the mantle. The outfits do take center stage, is all I can say. Obviously this blog is going to love the asymmetry and use of garbage in her designs.

There's also a lot more to say about dogs in this movie. Cruella has a complex relationship with the famous Dalmatians (including using them in her coup d'grace, bringing them to heel with a command, and gifting them to Roger and Anita.) And once again with the duality, she has a dog she was raised with that she loves, and another (one-eyed) dog that came as part of her grifter life, coming to represent the emotional and manipulative parts of her soul, respectively. So she doesn't kill any dogs, but they are still involved in her narrative arc.

It would be impossible for class not to feature prominently in any movie about getting revenge on an aristocrat in Britain. However, despite this surface rebellion against the established order, the class reading doesn't go much deeper. Obviously rather than overthrow the hierarchy, Cruella just wants to install herself at the top of it