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Kristoffer Borgli’s ‘The Drama’ is less about cinematic clout and more an intelligent rumination on the systematic factors that situate us in the wrong place at the wrong time. On top of this, it offers an exercise in morality to determine, ultimately, how your morals lie with who you lie with.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD FOR ‘THE DRAMA’
‘But of course you’d forgive Zendaya. It’s Zendaya!’ my friend quips as we exit the cinema.
The trailers for Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama hinged largely on the suspense of what Zendaya’s character Emma reveals the week of her wedding to her fiancee, Charlie, played by Robert Pattinson. If you haven’t watched The Drama yet, then be warned, here’s a major spoiler: Emma says she had planned a school shooting when she was fifteen, with a written manifesto and a stolen weapon at the ready, before backing out at the last second.
This revelation serves as a hypothetical thought experiment designed and directed to spark conversation.
In the film, Emma is largely influenced by online communities and media, unregulated and unchecked by adults. ‘The Drama’ presents this plot point as a reflection of reality, particularly in the US, where gun violence is roughly 26 times higher than in other high-income countries. School shootings remain prevalent and consistent in the US, driven by niche online networks and digital radicalisation.
This phenomenon extends not just to mass violence, but also to the manosphere, incel culture, and almost every other internet-infused prejudice you can imagine. Much like Netflix’s recent drama, Adolescence, the film pushes us to approach its subject matter intellectually, rather than solely as a piece of popcorn entertainment.
In the wrong place at the wrong time
It felt at times like I was watching a dramatisation of an educational resource. The rationale behind the film’s narrative decisions – such as the exposure of Emma’s secret all in one scene around a table – was so predictable it was a little clunky. Given that Borgli plays with The Drama’s chronology through anamnesis elsewhere, this central plot point could have been delivered with a little more tact.
That being said, Zendaya’s uncomfortable reading of her confession is an effective microcosm of the film’s wider themes. Her performance amplifies the discomfort of the already morally dubious scene; Emma has already had the time to come to terms with what she was about to do over a decade earlier and shows no signs of falling back into this dangerous ideology.
In this sense, perhaps we ought to view her as an advert not for arms, as Charlie does, but as an example of someone for whom, through the opportunity to reform, a second chance was granted.
This too feels like an important point to make. While the film, primarily through Charlie’s sexualised imagination, ruminates on the ‘what if?’ of Emma’s secret, it feels significant that she didn’t do it. Stopped by a similar event that is both a coincidence in timing and a direct product of socially cultivated violence born out of a national government’s refusal to criminalise weapons, we’re forced to contemplate the constant, systematic events which facilitate and prevent our actions.
How many people simply find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, and how much more likely are you to find yourself in that place based on your skin colour, gender, or social class? When we take this into account, Charlie’s hedonistic visualisation of a mentally troubled Black woman with a gun feels less accidental and more like a deliberate comment on the dual sexualisation of, and discrimination against, Black girls in America.
One of the best things about The Drama is that all of the main characters have done deplorable things, apart from Mike, played by Mamoudou Athie, whose morality can’t be too tarnished so as to comply with the racialised stereotype of the happy-go-lucky Black best friend. As far as moral thought experiments go, this does create some interesting caveats for our assessment of Emma’s past.
Once Charlie has found out what Emma did (or rather, didn’t do), his response and subsequent behaviour cast him in an increasingly worse light with every new decision he makes.
By the end, if we’re not already thinking it at the beginning, we’re under the impression that perhaps it’s Charlie who would be lucky if Emma forgave him. Yet, by chainlinking his capacity to sexualise his fiancée in relation to violence with his ability to cheat on her when under stress, the syntactical placement of these events carried out in relatively quick succession conflates systemic, internalised misogyny with, at best, poor interpersonal ethics.
What’s more, Charlie is the one who lies first in their relationship, sneaking a photo of the book Emma is reading and pretending to have read it in order to talk to her. This decision to begin both the film and the relationship between Charlie and Emma with a lie, and thereby frame the entire relationship with this view of Charlie’s morality, arguably serves as a moral equaliser.
Charlie’s capability to not only deceive the woman he purports to love from their very first meeting, but then to make light of it in his ultimately disastrous wedding speech, casts aspersions on his character that beg either commendation or ridicule – or both – upon Zendaya’s character for putting up with it.
