What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever intended to do?
What’s the worst thing that’s happened because of something you’ve done?
The Drama, A24’s latest starring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya, forces its audience to think about these questions. In doing so, it also forces its audience to consider how much it matters that the expectation, intention, and outcome of a decision align. The film is marketed as a romantic drama, perhaps a comedy, with fun publicity campaigns involving Zendaya wearing something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue and answering questions about marriage advice. Eagle-eyed fans who spotted the Ari Aster production credit (Midsommar, Eddington) and those who are familiar with writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s previous works (Dream Sequence, Sick of Myself) knew to expect that the movie wasn’t going to be as straightforward as its marketing. But casual movie fans who just love Zendaya have been blindsided.
If you have somehow missed coverage of The Drama and do not want to know anything else before you see it, now’s the time to stop reading. But I would argue that you should know what you’re getting into, and the marketers should have given you that choice from the beginning. The “drama” in the movie is not a plot twist, it’s a plot device that anchors the entire story. There is no movie without it. And playing it for shocks is dangerous and irresponsible.
The movie follows Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson) in the week leading up to their wedding. It opens on a flashback to Emma and Charlie in a coffee shop, Emma at a counter reading a book, and Charlie immediately being drawn in by her. Charlie snaps a picture of the book when Emma runs to the restroom, Googles it, and attempts to strike up a conversation with her about it under the false pretense of having something in common. The opening scenes take us through their early relationship as told by Charlie to Mike (Mamoudou Athie), his best man, as he attempts to write his wedding speech, and by Emma to Rachel (Alana Haim), her maid of honor and Mike’s wife, coupled with more flashbacks. The relationship-building is charming, full of chemistry and just the right amount of awkwardness that you would expect from two of the most charming yet awkward movie stars in the world.
At a last-minute meal tasting, Rachel and Mike ask everyone at the table about the worst thing they’ve ever done, prompted by Emma and Charlie revealing that they may have witnessed their DJ doing heroin on a street corner. As everyone goes around the table, it comes out that Mike once used his girlfriend as a human shield during a dog attack, Charlie alludes to bullying someone when he was younger, and Rachel locked her neighbor (whom she disparages and describes as “slow”) in the closet of a piss-covered, booze-filled trailer overnight. It’s then revealed, after a quick chug of wine, that Emma planned to commit a school shooting. At this moment, the movie devolves into what you would expect from Borgli and producer Ari Aster. Things are dark, but funny. Emma’s friends and fiance are horrified and full of questions—Why did she do it? (Bullying) How close did she get? (She filmed a manifesto and practiced with her father’s rifle, causing her deafness) Why didn’t she do it? (Someone else committed a mass shooting and it stole her thunder) Didn’t she know that Rachel’s cousin was paralyzed by a mass shooter? (No) The rest of the movie follows Charlie as he attempts to cope with this new information, having dreams and recalling memories that put the woman he thought he knew into the context of this revelation, including him rewriting his wedding speech to remove references to Emma’s “empathy.”
On paper and in practice, the movie is a success. It is thought-provoking, subversive, dark, and deeply funny. But in attempting to hold a mirror up to the American public’s indifference to and tolerance for gun violence, the movie perpetuates that indifference and tolerance. How much does the writer-director’s intention matter when the outcome is deeply irresponsible and potentially harmful? Artists can’t be beholden to audience reactions and interpretations of their work—that would be devastating both for audiences and the artform. However, art does not exist in a vacuum, but in a society in the context in which it was made, and in the context of the artist themself.
The Drama’s point-of-view is Charlie, who is clearly an avatar for Borgli, a Norwegian man who grew up far from the impacts of American gun violence. Borgli uses Charlie, a bumbling British buffoon who is enamored by Emma’s beauty from the jump, as a tool for the audience processing Emma’s revelation in real time. Charlie is bombarded by images of guns, including some very clever reworking of the movie poster, a coffee mug saying “Coffee or I’ll Shoot,” a book full of beautiful women holding assault weapons, and visions of Emma in bed holding a rifle. He seeks counsel from his best friend Mike and from the beautiful woman he works with (played brilliantly by Hailey Gates), who is maybe the only rational person in the whole cast. And at the end of the day, Charlie, whose intentions and rationale aren’t fully communicated, decides that he’s willing to overlook Emma’s past and make this work. As he mentions in his wedding speech, he would be willing to marry her even if she killed someone!
As Charlie bumbles around trying to figure out whether he’s going to marry Emma, it’s impossible to separate his character from Borgli. A 2012 essay written by Borgli has resurfaced, in which he described his deeply inappropriate age-gap relationship with a teenager, saying that he sought out media to help him “recalibrate his moral compass.” Like Charlie found ways to lessen his guilt around forgiving Emma in spite of his closest friends telling him that her actions were wrong, Borgli familiarized himself with age-gap media after his friends responded that his actions were not “within bounds.” Borgli chose to listen to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, in which Woody Allen’s 42-year-old character has a public relationship with a 17-year-old girl, over his friends. Accordingly, it’s completely inappropriate to divorce Borgli’s potential intentions from the potential harms of his work. He should know better than anyone that someone may turn to movies to recalibrate their own moral compass and decide that maybe gun violence is actually forgivable.
As The Drama shows us, we all have to live with our choices and their consequences. Emma has to live with a permanent, physical reminder of a choice she almost made. Charlie will have to live with his decision to forgive Emma. Similarly, artists have to decide what they’re willing to live with. In a 2024 interview for Chain Reactions, a documentary on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Stephen King once again discussed Rage, his controversial book about a high school student who takes his classroom hostage after killing his teacher. King chose to pull the book because of its connection to school shootings in the 1980s and 90s, saying he couldn’t live with the potential impacts. In fact, King’s trajectory closely follows Emma’s. King has been vocal for years about his high school experience, his own thoughts of isolation and violence, and his sympathy for violent youths. But instead of creating more art that perpetuates violent narratives and those sympathies, King has frequently spoken about how we all have a duty to alleviate the perpetuation. After students were found with Rage in their lockers, King was forced to consider whether Rage provoked violence, and whether art in general has that potential. King has stated “The answer is troubling, but it needs to be faced: in some cases, yes. Probably it does. Often? No, I don’t believe so. How often is too often? That’s not for me or any other single person to say. It’s a question each part of our society must answer for itself.” But ultimately, King decided he didn’t “want to be part of it.” And that was his decision to make. I suppose it’s up to Borgli whether he’s able to live with the potential worst possible outcomes of his decisions, despite his intentions.
That is not to say that art should avoid violence, or the realities of American life. It just must do so with care and consideration for the potential consequences. What happens upon that consideration and care is up to the artist.
Ultimately, this movie fails to interrogate the consequences of its own actions. Guns are the leading cause of death of children in the United States. There are hundreds of mass shootings every year in the United States. Historically, mass shooters have openly discussed that their actions were driven by the notoriety that comes with perpetuating something so terrible. And just like we can’t hold Emma’s character accountable for something that she never did, we can’t hold Borgli entirely accountable for the potential impacts of his art. But we certainly can hold him accountable for his lack of care and hold the marketing executives responsible for misleading audiences so wildly and irresponsibly.
