Cruella · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A gown unfurls at a party. Nobody swings, nobody draws a weapon; a garment opens, the photographers wheel around, and the Baroness von Hellman loses ground she will not get back. That is the whole film in one move, and it is a stranger move than it looks.

Craig Gillespie's invention here — the thing he actually does, working with editor Tatiana Riegel and cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis — is to build a revenge picture in which no revenge is ever performed. It's all worn.

Deleuze's two cinema books are, at bottom, a sorting machine. He asks what kind of work an image is doing. Most movies run on what he calls the movement-image: a character perceives a situation, acts on it, and the situation changes. Cruella is wired that way. It's a rise-and-revenge melodrama with the sensory-motor circuit at full power, an encompassing situation — the Baroness's stranglehold on British fashion — pressing down until a decisive act transforms it. Deleuze calls that skeleton the large form. Cruella keeps every bone of it. What it swaps out is the act.

In his map there's a hinge category, sitting between straightforward action and full-blown thinking, where action stops being done and becomes figured: transposed into spectacle, ceremony, display. He calls it the reflection-image, and its sharpest variety is the attraction-image, a term he lifts from Eisenstein's "montage of attractions" — staging that exhibits rather than acts. Cruella lives there almost start to finish. Each new Cruella appearance is an act of aggression against the Baroness, and each one is a show: red-carpet ambushes, guerrilla stunts that hijack her rival's events, a dress that unfurls into spectacle. The plot beat and the fashion moment are the same object. That's the film's real formal proposition, and once you see it the texture makes sense — why Karakatsanis's camera sweeps instead of observing, why Riegel cuts to the song instead of to the consequence.

Is the lens worth granting? Test it against the standard complaint. Critics felt the runtime and blamed the wall-to-wall needle drops. But the sag isn't musical. It's that display doesn't accumulate the way consequence does. Ten shows is not more story than five; it's the same story at higher volume. Deleuze's category tells you where to point.

Then the clothes. Deleuze borrows a term from Brecht — the gest — for a posture that lays bare a social relation rather than expressing a private feeling. Jenny Beavan's costumes are gests, which is why they won the Oscar and why the film's reputation rests in that department. The Baroness wears sculptural mid-century haute couture: imperious, immobile, expensive, a class position rendered in seams. Cruella's wardrobe is a punk détournement of exactly those shapes, the same grammar vandalized. It isn't mood. It's an argument about who owns taste, staged on bodies. It runs in colour too: Estella's muted disguise gives way to the stark black-white-red of the persona, a colour that stops describing a scene and starts absorbing it. Deleuze's colour-image, put to work on a person.

Now the harder question, the one the film can't quite answer.

Deleuze has a category built for appetite: the impulse-image. Its world is naturalist — a polished, respectable milieu revealed as the crust over something savage, populated by figures driven by compulsion rather than choice, and running along what he calls a line of slope, an irreversible descent toward exhaustion. Every ingredient is here. A grifter with an appetite for mischief. A couture house whose elegance is predation. The punk street beneath the salon, ready to erupt. Joker, the film's acknowledged model, rode that slope all the way down.

Cruella won't. Her arc goes up. The film assembles the entire impulse-image chassis and then withholds its one essential motion, which is the fall. That's the vexation the reception kept circling: how do you originate a woman famous for wanting to skin puppies and keep her likeable? The film's answer is to relocate villainy from cruelty into wit, ambition, and justified rage at a worse antagonist. Wit and ambition aren't drives. They're style. So you get the origin of a persona, not of a person.

There's a second road not taken. Estella is a con artist, serially somebody else, a maker of false selves — Deleuze's forger, the figure who doesn't discover truth but manufactures it. In his account the forger belongs to a regime where rival versions of a life sit side by side and stay undecidable; Welles is the great case. Cruella has the forger's biography without the forger's vertigo. We are always told which woman is underneath. Give it mirrors and a genuinely inseparable Estella and Cruella and you'd have a crystal-image, a present and its double that can't be pulled apart. The film prefers a reveal. That's a corporate decision as much as an artistic one, and naming it is more useful than pretending it wasn't made.

The lineage is unusually legible. I, Tonya is the immediate template: same director, editor and DP, the same toolkit of tabloid antihero sympathy, wall-to-wall classic rock and direct address, scaled to blockbuster. Behind it sits Goodfellas, which fused the licensed-track soundtrack to a criminal's first-person narration and made freeze-frame and whip-pan into music-driven grammar. Marie Antoinette granted the specific permission: anachronistic needle drops over a costume-heavy period world, couture as the visual grammar of a young woman inventing herself. A Clockwork Orange gave the wide-angle, saturated 1970s London of delinquent theatricality and the charming monster who plays to us over ironic cues. The Devil Wears Prada, through story-credited Aline Brosh McKenna, supplied the mentor-protégée duel. Joker supplied the commercial license.

Looking forward, honesty serves better than claims: a sequel was announced, and the settled achievement is a design achievement — Best Costume Design, with a Makeup and Hairstyling nomination beside it. What the film demonstrated, at the tail of the streaming transition, is that inside a franchise machine the surviving channel for authorship is craft. Not story; that was pre-owned. Costume, cutting, colour, song.

So watch it again with a stopwatch on the garments rather than the scenes. Then ask what it would have been if the slope were real — if the appetite went somewhere. Deleuze doesn't make Cruella deeper than it is. He tells you precisely which film it decided not to be.