Notes on The Drama

When I think of girls with guns, I think of James Franco being forced to fellate one by Ashley Benson and Vanessa Hudgens in Spring Breakers, high school classmates posing with their man’s on Snapchat and a still from a film I can’t remember depicting a close up shot of an Indian woman captioned “A girl is a gun.” - imagery quintessential to forming my aesthetic sense as a teenager.

In The Drama, at a wedding tasting dinner, two of the film’s couples go around the table and share what the worst thing they’ve ever done is. The secrets offered up by each person display a gradation of compromised morality - Mamoudou Athie’s character let his then girlfriend be attacked by a dog on her birthday while on vacation, Alana Haim’s locked a mentally disabled child in an RV closet deep in the forest and Robert Pattinson cyberbullied someone, potentially to the point of having to move.

Zendaya’s character Emma, drunkenly admits that she planned and nearly committed a school shooting as a teenager.

Charlie and Emma think they catch their wedding DJ doing heroin on a street corner, which prompts the conversation in which the central revelation happens. This, like the other secrets revealed at the table, does not merely function as a punchline, but presents a hypothetical introduced specifically to reveal something about its subjects. The interlocking dramas of this film are chosen for what they expose about the class, racial and romantic anxieties of these characters.

All of these incidents happened during the character’s youth; a popular refrain when a public figure is outed as having trafficked in racist, homophobic or otherwise discriminatory behaviour. These unearthings always lead to polarized reactions which vary from complete acceptance of this as a fact of teenage life to outright denial of it as a phenomenon. Subjugation of an other, as a means of self-fashioning and an attempt at rebellion exists; when radicalization has become more mainstreamed and a commonplace part of social media use, how should film language evolve to keep up?

The film stages scenes from Emma’s teenage years - attempting to record her manifesto on a webcam, practicing shooting with her father’s borrowed rifle and refuting a classmate’s claims that only men commit mass shootings - these images are also coupled with ones of present day Emma holding a gun and Charlie’s imaginings of himself alongside a younger version of her.¹

These are the foundations of its speculative visual motifs and engagement with school shooter aesthetics. The suburbs of Emma’s youth are a backdrop for exploring how alienation and racial stratification can lead to more extreme attempts at disidentification in pursuit of a sense of personal identity. The strategizing of public perception of the act for mass shooters is arguably the second most central part of their crime; crafting a manifesto, donning specific attire, selecting the venue - their intent is decisive. The Drama asks viewers to imagine the role of these images in enticing a young subject. The film is not concerned with the omnipresence of school shootings in American life, but that allure. This idea results in the most successful and compelling invocation of Zendaya’s star image to date. A woman with a gun is seductive or repulsive, dependent upon who’s looking - it is intentionally a film of surfaces.

The film’s privileging of these images, its selective opacity and refusal to pathologize Emma’s character is a refutation of a viewer’s impulse to create stabilized meaning. It disengages from the idea of why someone is compelled to commit a mass shooting, choosing to prioritize biographical details to better render the collapse of Charlie’s perception of Emma and the erosion of trust. This is best exemplified by Emma’s deaf ear. Reminiscent of femme fatales with a disability whose dependence is eroticized - what was the feature of a sweet story between the two becomes more charged when it’s revealed Emma lost hearing in her ear while practicing to shoot her classmates. Charlie’s job as a museum director also engages with this idea, through the many instances in the film where he’s presented with imagined or real images of a woman with a gun.

Dream Scenario squandered an intriguing, initially well-executed premise by devolving into a story about the spectre of cancel culture. Its strange decision to end in sanctification of the family structure struck an aberrant note against the film’s sardonic impulses. Its concern with public reaction to contentious figures and how marriages weather crises are greatly improved upon here. The secrets offered by The Drama’s characters could easily double as lightning rod viral moments. The crisis of Robert Pattinson’s character is emblematic of cycles of rationalization and armchair psychologizing which make up the thrust of any given discourse cycle. This is most aptly represented by Charlie’s defense of Emma where he spins a distant neighbour’s passing into a key traumatizing event in her life. By relocating them within the context of a splintering engagement - it examines the psychic drive that dominates online conversations.

The film takes up an erratic editing style, which mimics the accelerated pace and invasive quality of its protagonist’s thoughts but knows to slow down in the moments when they’re in the room together, trying to renegotiate how to be with one another in the wake of this revelation. The film also shows us the private rituals Emma uses to diffuse Charlie’s self-described drama, like playing a particular song or playfully pantsing him. Some of the film’s best moments come from attempting to perform these gestures as a salve once Emma’s secret has been revealed. Borgli understands the potency of exploring what’s encoded in the character’s shifting body language with one another.

The Drama’s use of romantic comedy² conventions is an incredibly successful container for its bold assertion that both romantic relationships and school shootings exist on a continuum of image making. It’s best understood as an extreme comedy of manners - in an on the nose but effective summation of the film’s thesis, the first dance choreographer says, “A wedding is inherently performative.” One of the sole scenes from Dream Scenario which I was drawn in by, that remained with me long after watching, is when the protagonist attempts to reenact the role he had in a sexual dream with the person who had it. The initial instance of Emma and Charlie’s characters failed and restaged meet cute, and the times throughout the film where they attempt to mount a mock first meeting bring it to mind. In the film’s early scenes - Emma and Charlie recount the beginning stages of their relationship to their friends as they muse about what they want to say during their wedding speeches; The Drama is a film about the ongoing negotiation of the selves we present in a relationship, and how that mediation can preserve or upset its foundations.

The film employs a surprising amount of restraint - the shooting is merely a catalyst for exploring larger questions around the dimensions of a person’s life as transfigured by ethical rupture. I have insulated myself from the discourse and have no interest in it but think I can predictably guess it focuses around morality. The film’s glib reduction of the central “drama” to a talking point is its most audacious gesture and why I firmly disagree with claims it “didn’t go far enough.” Aestheticizing a prospective school shooting and evoking it as a rhetorical device is an authentically provocative gesture, in a mainstream cinematic landscape of faux shock and awe.

1. Images that take on new meaning in light of a resurfaced essay where Kristoff Borgli admits to dating a 16 year old girl at 27.

2. I did find the film really funny - I loved its dry humour and depiction of the straining of social mores under the upset of its revelation.