This article contains spoilers for “The Drama”
When faux engagement of Emma Harwood (Zendaya) and Charlie Thompson (Robert Pattinson) was announced last October, followed by the trailer of “The Drama,” A24 and Zendaya fanatics alike went wild guessing what the film’s premise — Emma’s confession of a seemingly unforgivable secret to Charlie before their wedding — might be. Since the release of the film, the reveal of the secret teased in the trailer has resulted in a mass discourse among audiences.
As teased in the trailer, “The Drama” begins a week before Emma and Charlie’s wedding. At a wine tasting with best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim), the friend group decides to each share the worst thing they’ve ever done. The major conflict begins when Emma reveals that she planned a school shooting as a teenager. Rachel is instantly furious, Mike is a voice of reason and Charlie is left to face a new perception of his fiancee. The rest of the film follows the couple in the week leading up to the wedding, as Charlie tries to reconcile the empathetic woman he loves with her uncharacteristically dark past. Driven by his newfound moral confusion, Charlie commits a sin of his own, leaving the two to decide whether they can forgive each other and start over.
The dividing friction of the film is that the plot of “The Drama” isn’t really about school shootings. In fact, Emma’s primary inspiration for considering the crime is the romanticized aesthetics of school shootings she saw online as a high schooler. “The Drama” focuses on the relationship between Emma and Charlie as they navigate their emotions toward one another, never making a direct statement against school shootings or gun violence at all. At times, the film does the opposite — cutting to sexualized photos of Emma in bed holding a gun — seeming to embrace the romanticization of weaponry. It leaves audiences wondering why writer and director Kristoffer Borgli would choose planning a school shooting as Emma’s greatest mistake. Why use such a sensitive, emotionally charged political problem as a plot point, just to avoid making a statement on the problem itself?
Borgli is not American and did not grow up in an age as rampant with school shootings as today. Additionally, a large majority of the film centers on Charlie’s viewpoint, a British immigrant played by a British actor. So, is the film’s negligence toward the problem of school shootings a result of a writer-director stepping out of his place as an artist? The seemingly blasé attitude attributed to the subject is a direct result of Borgli’s and other non-Americans’ observations of gun culture in the United States. As “The Drama” points out, guns have been normalized and celebrated by American culture through coffee mugs, finger guns and even photographers using the word “shoot.” By now, school shootings are simply accepted as a fact of American culture that many feel is out of their control.
Deciding not to narrow in on the horror of a teenager feeling inspired to commit a school shooting is a statement in and of itself: American politics and citizens have also been desensitized to this violence. As Charlie notes, while Rachel questions how Emma could even think of committing a school shooting, shootings happen all the time in America. He even goes so far as to suggest that there are probably thousands of people walking around the U.S. who have considered carrying out a shooting but never followed through. The event is not just normalized; it is almost a banal consideration.
So, what is the drama? As in, what is the real drama happening in front of us, and what are both audiences and American citizens choosing to care about? As argued by Borgli, the real drama is the desensitization of American citizens to gun violence, specifically against children, told through the uneven dispersal of repercussions for Charlie and Emma’s mistakes. The drama is that so many audience members have walked away upset by the film’s insensitivity toward school shootings when that is how most of us act every day. As this portrayal has forced audiences to face the absurd normalcy of gun violence in culture and media, “The Drama” has become an incredibly effective source of discussion.
Through “The Drama,” Borgli utilizes the breakdown of a young couple’s relationship to present his thoughts on the current state of desensitization to and aestheticization of gun violence in America. The real triumph of the film is its ability to stir conversation; some leave the theater laughing, others leave crying and many leave furious. Nonetheless, “The Drama” directly mirrors the current political and social climate in which it was made, and does so without its audience even realizing that this is intentional.
Daily Arts Writer Audrey Kovtun can be reached at koaudrey@umich.edu.
