I'm Not 'The Drama'
Kristoffer Borgli's 'The Drama' has plenty to say about morality politics, but little to say about the Black woman at its center.
By Olivia Charis
Five years ago, I was a Black girl who lived five minutes from the Barataria Wetlands Preserve. I hopped between schools, most of them predominantly white. I was angry. I was awkward. My father owned a gun. Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama did not use me as source material.
The Drama is a psychological romance about engaged thirty-somethings Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson), who are just a few days shy of their wedding. In a drunken game of confession, with friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), Emma admits that she fantasized about committing a school shooting when she was fifteen. Her inborn unilateral hearing loss, which Charlie once found “sexy”, was actually not something she was born with, but the result of a shooting practice gone wrong.
Despite A24’s painstaking efforts to hide Emma’s secret before the premiere, the film somehow manages to ignore her personhood? throughout its entire hour and forty-five minutes. Her character feels like a ghost haunting the plot, with Borgli centering Charlie’s struggle to acclimate to this newfangled view of his fiancée. In the opening scene, he muses about his love for Emma while crafting his wedding speech. A few minutes later, he is replaying the times she yelled at obnoxious drivers, throwing away his “Coffee or I’ll Shoot” mug, and hallucinating about her killing him in their home.
