The Harmful Way Mental Health is Framed in Disney’s ‘Cruella’
Image; the disinsider
Many elements in Disney’s Cruella (2021) shouldn’t work. It had to not only establish an empathetic backstory for the classic Disney villain and turn her into a likable anti-hero but create an entertaining enough plot for viewers to watch. It also had to center this villain while not offending the Mickey Mouse Corporations' conservative sensibilities. And on top of all of these constraints, the movie had to create the space for a potential sequel.
It’s a surprise, frankly, that we got a movie as fun and workable as we did. Some of Cruella’s elements really are fun and exciting: the costumes and set pieces are simply to die for, darling; Emma Stone, though using a somewhat questionable accent, is having the time of her life playing Cruella, and we are here for it; there are also many memeable moments that I am sure will fill text threads and messaging groups for years to come.
Unfortunately, what doesn't quite work is how mental health is framed in this film. The film tries to humanize the dog-skinning protagonist by defining her as someone just a bit different. She is an eccentric who can’t help but stir trouble, leaving us with a portrayal that is far more harmful than edifying when it comes to mental health. It uses her “craziness” as a prop to cause drama rather than to reflect on what having mental health issues means to someone existing in a time period as regressive as the 1970s.
For those unaware, Cruella is a reimagining of the 101 Dalmatians’ villain. It’s about a young petty criminal named Estella Miller (Emma Stone) trying to break into the fashion industry in 1970s London. Her initial job as a designer and personal assistant for Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson) blossoms into a secret rivalry, as Estella dons the persona Cruella to go head-to-head with the Baroness.
The film is of two minds when it comes to discussing mental health. On the one hand, it wants the viewer to think that there is something off-kilter with Estella. We see her referring to herself as “as a little bit mad,” and we know that there is a long history of her acting this way. There is a scene midway through the film where Cruella is trying to recruit an old friend, Anita Darling (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), into reporting on her antics. The way she presents herself to Anita causes the friend to recognize old patterns. “You know that glint in your eye,” Anita says cooly, “…I'm starting to remember that you have a bit of an extreme side.”
Cruella clearly has some unaddressed condition; however, the text doesn’t bother to dive into the specifics of what that illness or disorder is. There is no direct reference to a particular set of symptoms. The closest we come to is several mentions of her having two split selves (i.e., the nice, people-pleasing Estella and the dominant, vindictive Cruella), going all the way back to early childhood when her mother asked her to suppress all aspects of Cruella. This could be a reference to Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder), which requires that someone have multiple distinct personalities, but there is no way for us to know for sure because there are gaps in the characterization that make a diagnosis impossible.
Some might argue that this gap in knowledge can partially be explained by the time period. The 1970s existed well before our current understanding of mental health. Multiple Personality Disorder only became a widespread term in 1980 with the publication of the DSM III, years after Cruella was set. Although there were diagnoses for similar disorders going back centuries (see possessions, hysteria, Hystero-Epilepsy, etc.), it’s not surprising that Estella/Cruella and her companions might lack the vocabulary to describe her mental health issues.
Yet this mainly reads as an excuse. The point of frustration here is not the lack of knowledge the characters have but how those characterizations are presented to the viewer. The film didn’t need modern-day labels to depict symptoms of DID accurately. It could have simply depicted them in a way that was accurate, regardless of whether or not the characters understood them. For example, the film could have shown clear signs of ongoing amnesia, as is common for DID. If the film intended Estella/Cruella to have some other disorder such as Borderline Personality Disorder, it could have shown us chronic feelings of emptiness, dissociation, or one of the other symptoms (see the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend for an example that does this right).
Despite clearly referencing some mental health problems in Cruella’s past, the film is not interested in diving into this issue in a way that’s fleshed out. It’s played out more as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation, as Cruella slowly takes over the once-dominant Estella personality. It’s a dramatized conception of two imagined selves (symbolized by her natural hair color of black and white split down the middle) battling it out for control, rather than anything resembling our current conceptions of mental disorders.
This feels all very ableist. These references I have made to DID are subtextual. Unless you are trained to see them, it's doubtful that the typical viewer will walk away thinking the character Estella/Cruella is anything more than “a little bit mad” — a harmful generalization when mental disorders are already understood so poorly by the typical viewer.
Say what you want about Todd Phillips’ Joker (a film Cruella has been compared to extensively), but that at least put a lot of effort into making it clear that the Joker had some disorder (although it is also poorly explained). The film conveyed to the viewer how hard life was for the main character in a society (i.e., 1970s New York City) that didn’t give a flying f@ck about people with mental health issues. He faced stigma that made it difficult for him to interact with people and hold down a job.
Estella/Cruella does have problems, but these appear to be largely situational. She is on the run because she was framed for her adopted mother Catherine's murder, not because her disorder made it difficult to make friends or hold down a job. Her raw talent leads to an unsolicited job offer, and she obtains a found family within days of losing her adopted one.
In fact, the movie often conflates Estella/Cruella’s potential mental health problems with her genius. It frames her challenges to authority not as systemic abuses but rather because these authority figures cannot appreciate her exceptionalism. “And might I say,” remarks Estella’s mother (Emily Beecham) in response to her child getting expelled, “your school seems to turn out horrible children with no creativity or compassion.” “…or genius,” Estella adds mirthfully. “Being a genius is one thing,” Emma Stone narrates several scenes later, “Raising a genius does come with its challenges.”
A more self-aware movie may have made these comments a component of her delusion — a bubble waiting to be popped in the narrative — but the text never challenges these assumptions because Estella/Cruella is by all accounts a genius. She is able to start her own underground fashion label in the span of what seems like five minutes. We have no reason to believe that she’s anything less than exceptional, and it's that alleged genius that brings her more strife than her poorly defined mental disorder.
The writing very clearly wanted to have the aesthetic of someone “mad” without putting in the work to make that characterization well-rounded. This isn't the only area of the movie that relies on appropriating aesthetics without diving into their proper context either. The punk scene of the 70s is referenced to ad nauseum in this film, with Cruella even putting on a punk-inspired runway at one point. And yet, despite a musical soundtrack of over 30 songs, very little punk music is in the actual movie, and there is likewise little connection to punk's political roots. As NPR music contributor Cyrena Touros says in a review segment of the movie:
“…yes, these are songs from the ’70s. But these aren’t punk songs. There was one punk song, which — I don’t know if it’s a spoiler to say — is used in a big high-fashion show moment. And it’s a Stooges song. I think you can guess what it is…And it’s, like, way overproduced. I was like, you took the one punk song in this film, and you did the opposite of what punk is. And you overproduced it.”
The movie also appropriates the facade of queerness with the character Artie (John McCrea), who was lauded as the first openly gay character in a live-action Disney film. However, he is never textually revealed to be queer. He is coded as such in lines like “I like to say that ‘normal’ is the cruelest insult of them all,” his androgynous wardrobe, as well as his David Bowie-inspired eyeliner, but these, are again, merely aesthetics divorced from representation. This queerbaiting is a problem that has shown up in over half a dozen films at this point (see also The Rise of Skywalker, Beauty and the Beast, The Jungle Cruise, etc.), and, unsurprisingly, it has shown up again in Cruella.
Given Disney’s tendency to appropriate other aesthetics, both historically and in this very movie, it would not be fair to give them the benefit of the doubt here with Estella/Cruella’s portrayal of mental health. We have no evidence to suggest that they tried to tell a three-dimensional story about someone who has a mental disorder. Instead, they appear to be using the veneer of “craziness” to tell an “edgy” story about how exceptional women don’t have to be nice.
Worse, when diving a little deeper, we see that the portrayal of mental disorders in this film is actually pretty harmful.
Cruella's inaccurate depiction of mental health not only comes off as ill-informed, but because this is a major film, it means that that misinformation is going to impact how people see mental health, especially for something as misunderstood as Dissociative Identity Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder.
A major component of DID is that people develop two or more distinct personalities (referred to as “dissociated parts” or “alters”), which we see in the movie in the way of Estella and Cruella, respectively. A person may experience passive influence where a part exerts indirect authority (i.e., alien thoughts, emotions, feelings, preferences, etc.) or a full dissociated intrusion, where one part takes control of the body at the expense of another part. There is no cure for DID, and treatments and diagnoses remain controversial to this day. Generally, psychotherapy is used to integrate various parts, so dissociation is unnecessary or, conversely, to achieve a harmony between the various identities where they come to a cooperative arrangement.
Cruella, however, takes the opposite approach. The Cruella part kills the Estella part, and this is portrayed as a positive thing. “[Estella] was with her mother now,” Cruella says after killing off the Estella part. “But Cruella was alive…And I call that a happy ending.” This representation is a somewhat terrifying stance because it goes against the established consensus of how this disorder should be treated. As Therapist Alyssa Cotten says in her own review of the movie:
“What ends up happening at the very end of the movie is very disturbing because, in the DID [community] we do not endorse this at all…we do not encourage, we do not support the death or killing of your parts, your alters, because all of them hold different memories and experiences and its important that we love all the parts that are present.”
The death of Estella at the end of Cruella not only flies in the face of established mental health consensus, but if someone with DID, who did not currently have a stable support network, took the advice in this movie, it could lead to some unsettling outcomes. It’s not a “happy ending” for anyone to kill off a part of themselves, and the fact the Cruella has the viewer walk away with this message is an unsettling take.
Another harmful element in this work is how it weirdly essentializes Cruella’s “craziness” as an inherent component of her nature. “I'm Cruella, born brilliant, born bad, and a little bit mad,” she tells the viewer after learning that her mother is the evil Baroness, a narcissistic woman (more on this later) seen berating and torturing her staff the entire movie. The film recontextualizes Cruella’s badness in this scene, something we have seen her have since early childhood, as a component of that legacy. She’s born bad, it's heavily implied, as a result of her genetic heritage.
Yet, while there may be a genetic component to disorders such as DID, it is not as readily inheritable in the same way the disorders schizophrenia or major depression are. It’s also not clear that someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder can genetically pass on the completely separate Dissociative Identity Disorder. It is not only an ableist assumption that this “crazy” is interchangeable with all others, but it is also weirdly sexist for a movie trying so hard to be a white, feminist power ballad to assume that the “craziness” of the mother could be passed on at all.
These disorders are complex, and our understanding of them is constantly evolving, but what we do know is that environment is a huge factor in how they develop. Childhood trauma, in fact, is overwhelmingly cited as a cause of DID, which means that if you are going to “blame” anyone, Estella’s mother would be the far better candidate because the Baroness never interacted with Estella/Cruella until adulthood. The film briefly addresses this possibility when Cruella monologues to her dead mother about how she always tried to control her, saying: “I guess you were always scared, weren’t you? That I’d be a psycho like my real mum?”
There is an argument to be made here that her adopted mother Catherine did instill real trauma onto Estella to avoid her adopted daughter developing the Baroness’ perceived evilness. She actively tried to suppress Cruella (something we know shouldn't be done with parts), but the movie ultimately doesn’t blame her as the source of that “badness” because this is the same monologue where Cruella tells the viewer that she was “born bad.” The film Cruella erases the complicated reality of how people get dissociative disorders like DID — most likely because telling a story about child abuse would probably be too dark for an edgy Disney movie — and instead tries to essentialize these mental disorders as a part of Cruella and the Baroness's badness.
We see this essentialization, not only with the titular character, but also with the Baroness, who is portrayed as a truly despicable figure in the movie. She takes pleasure in hurting others, has no qualms about killing off her competition, and is literally called evil in the film’s closing monologue. The explanation for why she is like this is because of her alleged disorder, one of her henchmen, saying: “The Baroness, on the other hand, she’s a true narcissist.” Narcissistic Personality Disorder, however, is defined by someone having at least five of nine characteristics listed in the DSM ( e.g., a grandiose sense of self-importance; preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success; belief that they are “special” and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people, etc.) and has nothing to do with people taking pleasure in hurting others or being inherently evil.
This characterization in Cruella is quite ableist as it ties into a long history of people equating narcissists to flat-out monsters. We need to only look at cinemas' classic antagonists to know this to be true. Most Disney villains, from Gaston (Richard White) in Beauty and The Beast to Scar (Jeremy Irons) in The Lion King to Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon) in Enchanted, portray narcists as evil. The protagonist in American Psycho, the homicidal Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), is so narcissistic that, at one point, he admires his own reflection while having sex. The serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) in Se7en has an overinflated sense of self. The MCU is likewise littered with narcists from Thanos (Josh Brolin) to Loki (Tom Hiddleston) to Ego (Kurt Russell) in Guardians of the Galaxy.
It’s possible to list pages upon pages of narcissistic villains in pop culture, but the same cannot be said for heroes, especially outside the realm of comedy where narcists are comedic punchlines (see Emperor Kuzco (David Spade) in The Emperor’s New Groove, Lucille Bluth (Jessica Walter) in Arrested Development, etc.). In fact, narcissistic characters given the hero moniker usually have their “badness” massaged to make them likable. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) in Iron Man may have a high ego at the start of the film, but he ends the movie caring so much about humanity that he stops his company from producing weapons. Loki starts the MCU as a “megalomaniac,” but by the time he gets his own series, his ego is deflated so much that he realizes his personal failing on his own. Their narcissism is effectively dropped for them to become protagonists.
We see a similar trend with DID. There are some empathetic, albeit sensationalized portrayals in pop culture (see Tara Gregson (Toni Collette) in The United States of Tara, Charlotte Wells (Sophie Okonedo) in Ratched. etc.), but a lot of people with DID are often depicted as vessels for evil. The character Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) in Split and later in Glass has a literal monster part called The Beast. The character Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) in The Dark Knight is left disfigured from an accident — his psyche split in two, so torn that he often leaves violence up to the flip of a coin. The movie Fight Club ends with the reveal that violent mastermind Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is a part of the narrator character (Edward Norton). A similar plot can be seen in the hacker thriller Mr. Robot.
Just as in Cruella, depictions of DID often fall into the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde trope with a “good” side and a “bad” side fighting for control. The movie Black Swan is about the protagonist Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), splitting back and forth between the orderly white swan and the chaotic black one. The cruel Skeksis and peace-loving urRu in The Dark Crystal are the good and evil parts of the urSkeks race. Split personalities are also frequently a Horror movie trope. The twist of many is that the homicidal part perpetuating the murders is being concealed by a more banal part (see Dr. Elliott in Dressed to Kill, Axel Palmer in My Bloody Valentine, Dr. David Callaway in Hide and Seek, etc.)
However, people who have these disorders are not any more predisposed to “evil” than neurotypical people. One well-regarded study found that when you consider other factors such as substance abuse and poverty, people with mental disorders do not seem to be any more violent than others. As one of the authors remarks: “a great deal of what is responsible for violence among people with mental illness may be the same factors that are responsible for violence among people without mental illness.” In fact, someone with DID is far more likely to commit suicide than they are to engage in Machiavellian plots and serial killer sprees.
This trend of sensationalizing these mental disorders, often quite inaccurately, as this film shows, creates a stigma that prevents people with mental disorders from getting the help they need — for who would willfully admit that they are a “monster.” Millions of Americans go both undiagnosed and untreated, and dangerous framings like this do not help this matter.
Ultimately Cruella doesn’t separate itself from this dangerous throughline in cinema but adds to it. The film creates a story where someone is evil because of their disorder. We don’t walk away thinking mental illness is something that makes life more difficult for Cruella, but at best, it is padding for her eccentricities, and at worst, something that makes that badness predetermined.
Disney’s Cruella relies on some pretty terrible cliches to ground its anti-hero and villain in. It creates this paradigm where mental illness is used to justify why someone behaves immorally, and as we have briefly covered, that ties into a long, problematic history.
There were plenty of ways to make Cruella a lovable protagonist, even one as vindictive as a puppy murder, that would not have played into these problematic tropes. They could have made her motivation about trying to win the estate from the Baroness from the beginning. They could have had the Baroness’ “evil” rooted in a personal philosophy rather than her mental health. Hell, they could have even had narcism and DID play a central role. The goal here is not to preclude villains from ever having a mental disorder or for these disorders always to be a main part of the text, but rather to depict these disorders respectfully. To do that, though, this film would have had to involve far more research and care than shown presently.
Telling a lukewarm conversation about mental health was a landmine they chose to step into. No one asked for them to do this, and, sadly, this has not garnered more attention in the conversation surrounding the film, though there is no doubt it will be perceived less favorably as the years roll on ahead.
All of this being said, I still had fun watching this movie. I loved the costumes and one-liners, and unlike other films I have reviewed, analyzing it was not a chore. There is a tendency for people to criticize critics for ruining their fun or being moralists, but criticizing the things we enjoy doesn’t mean we have to cast them aside. It's just a matter of recognizing the problematic elements in them to make space for future works to do better.
As a society, we have been stuck with these harmful tropes with mental health for a while, and there's nothing fashionable or cool about that.