**This article contains spoilers for The Drama**
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Cheated? Cyberbullied? Used your ex-partner as a human shield? Locked a kid with mental disabilities in a closet and lied about it?
Let’s be real; I’m sure we’ve all done some pretty messed-up things we regret. In the case of Emma Harwood, her “worst thing” might cost her everything.
The Drama follows Emma Harwood (Zendaya) and Charlie Thompson (Robert Pattinson) the week before their wedding. During a drunken dinner with the best man and maid of honor, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), the couple suggests recounting the worst thing they’ve ever done, as they did before their own wedding. We listen, and we don’t judge… right?
The Confession
Mike and Rachel tell their stories and pass the conversation to Charlie. After struggling to even come up with something, Charlie says he cyberbullied a classmate as a teen.
All eyes lock on Emma, eager to hear her “worst thing.” She chugs her glass of wine and hesitantly admits that when she was 15, she planned a mass school shooting, but never ended up going through with it.
The rest of the film primarily follows Charlie as he grapples with this newfound information and questions his trust in Emma. At the same time, Rachel completely turns on her, disappearing and later threatening not to attend the wedding.
This film skillfully tackles sensitive issues and probes a million questions. The glorification of violence, the desire for power, whether someone can really change, and the difference between a thought and an action.
The Reaction
Emma’s confession is received horribly. Charlie clearly struggles with seeing her differently, and Rachel’s perception of her friend is completely ruined, without giving Emma a chance to explain.
Rachel’s character as a whole left me with conflicting emotions. Alana Haim’s abysmal acting compared to the stunning leading duo took me out of the film a few times, but the role that race plays in her relationship with Emma isn’t something that can go undiscussed.
Rachel brushes off her “worst thing” (locking her mentally disabled neighbor in a closet and leaving him overnight. Yeah, I didn’t just make that up) and solely focuses on the violence of Emma’s “actions.”
The situation represents an interesting dynamic: a white woman taking the moral high ground and writing off her mistakes without consequence, while a black woman is intensely criticized for a violent thought.
On the opposite end, Charlie tries to understand, even if he struggles to do so. When asked, his “worst thing” is surface-level at best. He’s never grappled with the guilt of doing something truly horrible.
It’s not until he cheats on Emma that he can really begin to see the harsh underbelly of humanity and finally consider himself and his fiancée to be on equal moral ground.
At one point, he receives a photo book entitled Brainrot in the mail. The book bears a heavy resemblance to Lindsey McCrum’s photo book, Chicks with Guns (2011). McCrum’s work comprises a wide demographic of women posed with guns in “beautiful and compelling” ways, showing the evolution of typical gun owners in the United States.
The book isn’t inherently political in nature, but The Drama’s version sparks conversation about sexualizing guns and the copycat culture surrounding violence.
Brainrot features women in lingerie, holding and posing with guns as props, leading Charlie to envision Emma as a model from the book. This moment in the present bridges the gap between Emma as a teen, using her dad’s rifle to feel powerful and even attractive, and Charlie investigating that side of Emma’s thought process.
The Aesthetic
Despite Emma’s desire to leave it in the past, Charlie pushes for conversation, invoking Freud’s philosophy that repression doesn’t rid one of painful emotions or memories, but simply shoves them down for it all to explode later. With each conversation, we see more tidbits of Emma’s past.
Many flashbacks take place in her childhood home, where she carries around her dad’s rifle as if it were a stuffed toy, being used for comfort. She takes photos with it by the pool, records videos of herself holding it with dark, “edgy” makeup, and takes it out into the woods to practice. Upon reflection, she tells Charlie, “I think I just liked the aesthetic of it.”
This particular line carried a lot of weight for me. The question I found myself asking was “Could you have stayed with her?” and I think the answer lies in this one line.
We quickly learn that the reason why Emma never carried it out was that, on the same day she had brought the gun to school, another shooting had taken place at the local mall. The shooting killed three people, one being a student at their high school. She saw the loss, effect, and grief of the situation firsthand and was pulled back into reality.
Through a gun reform group at her school, we see her get sucked into the other side. She makes friends, advocates for gun control, and throws her dad’s gun into a lake. I interpreted this as Emma seeing the actual effect of what her actions would’ve caused. The gun wasn’t “sexy” or “powerful,” it was life-threatening and most of all, real.
Emma’s detachment from reality and the romanticization of violence are themes that bleed into the present. When Emma’s father makes a toast at her wedding, he recounts how she grew up playing “characters,” signaling to me that this was her way of coping.
What we know about Emma feels limited — which I do believe was a minor flaw of the film — but what we do see is either her being bullied at school, or completely alone at home. No parents, no friends, no support system. While this could be representative of the unreliable narration of her past, I wish we had gotten more of who she became.
The Drama, at its core, is a bold film. It makes ambitious choices, doesn’t cater to the comfort of audiences, and pushes boundaries, examining disturbing aspects of our country’s culture and the dark side of love.
It asks viewers to question their own morals, where the line of forgiveness and unconditionality lies, and the society we’ve shaped. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but that’s precisely why The Drama should be on everyone’s watch list.
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