Max Brown
4 August, 2021
Everybody who loves Emma Stone and defying the Anti-Cruella tumblr community has seen the movie by now, and I’m sure we were all left wondering the same thing:
What’s up with the two different personalities?
Every person in the world has a multi-faceted personality in which they are able to draw upon different sides of themselves as the circumstances require, the difference comes in with the fact that these facets usually operate in an interconnected manner that makes them feel like parts of a whole rather than like compartmentalised and separate identities.
Cruella and Estella, do not seem to operate like interconnected parts of a whole. At face value, we can already see a stark difference between their accents, mannerisms, and aesthetic expressions, but it’s when we start to consider their behaviours that we really see what we’re dealing with.
Estella, for all intents and purposes, is a fairly normal person who is prone to timidity, and maybe even suffering from PTSD, and self-stigmatisation. She shows herself to be deeply disturbed by the reality of death, and even more so at the premise of being capable of causing it. She is also visibly empathetic, considerate, family-oriented, and nurturing towards both her found family and dogs in general.
Cruella, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. She’s dominant, self-assured, cold, calculating, and very okay with murder. She demonstrates a lack of regard for others, behaves impulsively, and does not embody any capacity for empathy or the consideration of others at all. Which actually makes her a prime candidate for Anti-Social Personality Disorder (yes, it does appear to be genetic).
At first glance, a psychology-free heathen might see this and jump straight to Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously Multiple Personality Disorder, no you can’t still call it that) as the answer. It’s not such a bad guess, she does have two personalities, after all. So, let’s take a deeper look at DID and see why it’s probably something a little more weird instead.
DID was first documented by Dr. Jean M. Charcot, in Paris, at the end of the 19th century, as a form of hysteria and epilepsy. Suffice it to say that psychiatry was a young discipline back then.
Today, it’s regarded as a dissociative disorder, which in simple terms is a category of mental illnesses in which the individual engages in an unconscious mental escapism as a means of coping with stress and trauma, etc. Most people know of, and have experienced, “dissociation” in terms of what you call “zoning out”, but we call depersonalisation or derealisation in which either you don’t feel real, or reality doesn’t feel real around you. This is also a common symptom of many other disorders such as PTSD, or boredom.
In practice, DID is a very complicated disorder which is hard to quantify into short, concrete terms. It’s usually characterised by a marked fracturing of the core personality into two or more alter identities that function as separate parts of an internal system. In the majority of cases, this personality split is prompted by a severe trauma at a young age of which the individual is ill-equipped to process or reconcile in a healthy way, and so they “hide” that trauma within a fragment of their personality as a way of coping, and, also, as a way of allowing the other parts of their personality to continue to live and grow as if they had never experienced it. This causes a wide spread destabilisation of the core personality and usually results in more alters emerging (or reintegrating) at later times throughout the individual’s life. It’s not always easy for one alter (or even for an outside observer) to tell the difference between where they end and another alter begins. Many alters can perform a very specific role in the system by embodying an idiosyncratic set of characteristics, behaviours, and motivations which allow them to grow separately from the life paths of the other alters, as well as to form their own separate memories and experiences. In this way each identity dissociates from the others, and they’re able to feel like completely separate people living in the same body. As such, a person with DID can have different alters, of different ages and genders, who front at different times according to the demands of the situation, eg: one who takes over during social encounters, one who protects the others from harm, one who embodies the trauma itself, etc. This often results in memory problems, losing time, and significant distress, due to the fact that all alters within a system can have their own individual memories, interests, and behaviours separate from those of each other, but not all alters will be aware of, or able to communicate with each other.
Now, keeping that explanation in mind, let’s examine the character herself. As the story starts she’s a small kiddo named Estella who is pathologically defiant and dead set on fashion, and we see her mother try tooth and nail to guide her with kindness and patience in order to help her be a good person, but maybe also to make her a little bit more inclined to fit into society. It’s here that the Cruella identity is named. Her mother, while seeing Estella’s potential for goodness, and even greatness in fashion, also sees a deeply rooted potential for cruelty and rebellion, and names that side of her thusly. And it also suggests that Cruella (as opposed to Estella) was operating as the primary identity all through this time. By marking the difference between Estella and Cruella, her mother creates a dissonance between those contradictory parts of her and lays the foundation for those identities to dissociate from each other, and later recognise themselves as two separate personalities. This split finally happens when her mother dies and she takes the blame for killing her- because, as we know, trauma works wonderfully as a trigger for mental illness.
The presence of two tangible personalities is not nearly enough to justify a DID diagnosis, however. The way the personalities interact with each other also needs to be considered, and, unfortunately, the dynamic between these alters is quite different from that which is commonly observed in DID. Instead of burying the trauma of her mother’s death itself, Estella uses her guilt and shame to build a wall between herself and Cruella, thus burying the parts of herself that she sees as bad and wrong, and holding on to the trauma in order to deliberately prevent ever having to go through that kind of pain again. It could be that the trauma either gave Estella the resolve necessary to take control for herself, and guide them on a less destructive path, or it caused Cruella such pain as to actively choose to step back. Either way, this suggests that each personality has a concrete and self-aware separation from each other rather than the fluid and overlapping dissociation between alters present in DID. They also show a seamless synchronicity between themselves in terms of when and how they front in the way that each alter seems to need to choose to give up their consciousness for the other to take control. This differs from DID whereby switching between alters appears to be far less organised, and can take anywhere up to several days to happen, but most particular is that the motivation for switching usually appears to be more in line with the conscious alter no longer wanting to participate, or experiencing an acute stressor that causes them to depersonalise from reality and, thus, necessitating a different alter to become conscious by obligation. While it’s known that alters can choose to front at times when they are invited into an interaction this can be very difficult especially if the main alter is not aware of them, or if the alter in question is not particularly interested in interacting with the outside world. For this reason, switching is more likely to be a spontaneous, and fleeting, phenomenon during times of stress or emotional strain in DID, and not the deliberate and controlled trade off exhibited by Estella and Cruella. Furthermore, Cruella shows clinically sociopathic tendencies (antisocial personality disorder) this is significant specifically because Estella does not. In DID, because all alters break off from a single primary personality, all alters will inevitably share the same mental illnesses or at least show inclinations towards them, in the same way that they can share other foundational characteristics to which they were predisposed and/ or already in possession of at the time of the split. In fact, Estella and Cruella function more like sisters, one who is good and the other who is bad, but who are still entirely separate people. Lastly, she doesn’t experience any of the other symptoms necessary to make a DID diagnosis like the loss of time, a disconnection from key life events and foundational memories, or the feeling like she isn’t sure who she is. In fact, neither Estella or Cruella show any evidence of anxiety or general dissociation in any capacity at all.
So DID she do that? I’m gonna say no.
But! none of this explains why she does still have two very distinct and separate personalities, and that’s because we’ve all forgotten one crucial point: her hair is black and white.
Yes, I know it’s just English teacher for “there’s light and dark inside her”. But I also think it gives us the real answer to the mystery: she’s a chimera.
Chimerism is an anomaly whereby a living organism has two sets of DNA. The most commonly known examples are those butterflies and lobsters that are two colours because they’re half male and half female (bilateral gynandromorphs), but chimeras can be human too, and they can have a mix of DNA of any gender. Chimerism occurs in a variety of ways, for example, the recipient of a bone marrow transplant is a man-made chimera given that the new bone marrow introduces a second genetic code into the host body, but the kind of Chimerism we’re interested in today is when a foetus absorbs it’s twin in the womb. With this type of chimerism, the child can be born with different parts of their body looking completely different from each other because some parts belong to the twin and vice versa. And I’m sure we can all agree that Cruella De Vil seems like exactly the kind of person who would eat her twin in utero.
Now in real life, chimerism doesn’t usually affect a person’s personality in any way, and only one of the “twins” will have an actual consciousness. But given that Cruella’s hair is split down the middle, it could suggest that her brain is split down the middle too, and so, with a little bit of poetic license, it could also explain why she is literally two people at once.
References
Boklage, C. E. (2006). Embryogenesis of chimeras, twins and anterior midline asymmetries.Human Reproduction. 21 (3). 579–591. https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/dei370.
Du Plessis, L. & Visser, C. (2014). Dissociative and somatic symptom related disorders. (In T. Austin, C. Bezidenhout, K. Botha, E. Du Plessis, L. Du Plessis, E. Jordaan, M. Lake, M. Moletshane, J. Nel, B. Pillay, G. Ure, C. Visser, B. Von Krosigk, & A. Vorster, Abnormal Psychology: A South African perspective). Cape Town: Oxford University Press Southern Africa. Gillespie, C. (Director). (2021). Cruella [film]. Walt Disney Pictures.
Lieber, A. (2018). Multiple Personality Disorder (Dissociative Identity Disorder). Psycom. Retrieved 1 August, 2021 from: https://www.psycom.net/mchugh.html.
Rettner, R. (2016). 3 Human Chimeras That Already Exist: Some people—such as fetuses that absorb a dead twin—have two sets of DNA. Scientific American. Retrieved 3 August, 2021 from: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-human-chimeras-that-already-exist/.
Robson, D. (2015). These animals are male on the one side and female on the other. BBC Earth. Retrieved 3 August, 2021 from: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150916-these-animals-are-male-on-one-side-and-female-on-the-other.
Sue, D., Sue, D. W., Sue, D. & Sue, S. (2016). Understanding Abnormal Behavior (11th Ed.). Canada: Cengage Learning.
Wang, P. (2018). What Are Dissociative Disorders? American Psychiatric Association. Retrieved 1 August, 2021 from: https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/dissociative-disorders/what-are-dissociative-disorders.