The Drama is a wonderful movie about just that: drama. Directed by Kristoffer Borgli, the movie centers around our two main characters, Emma (Zendaya ) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) who are due to be married in a week but encounter a brash moral dilemma. One night, Rachel (Alana Haim), a friend of Charlie’s, informs Charlie and Emma that before she and her husband Mike (Mamoudou Athie) got married they shared with each other the worst thing they had ever done. Without consulting Mike first, Rachel urges him to share his story. It is revealed that Mike used a college girlfriend as a human shield when faced with an angry stray dog on spring break in college. Rachel admits she locked a mentally disabled kid in an old RV supposedly overnight. Charlie admits that he cyberbullied someone so badly they ended up moving, and Emma admits that, at 15, she almost did a school-shooting, it’s why she is deaf in one ear.
Rachel extends empathy to Charlie, the only other white person in the group, refraining from extending that same grace to Mike or Emma, concluding in a seemingly racialized response. In rebuttal to Emma’s dark secret, Rachel gives her harsh judgment, yelling at her in disbelief and mentioning that her cousin is paralyzed from a shooting to shame Emma. Rachel belligerently yells and overwhelms a drunk Emma to a point in which she vomits everywhere.
Rachel’s response to Emma, a person she treats rather poorly, only heightens in intensity when Rachel alludes to Emma being ugly for “crying”, doesn’t respond to Emma’s emails once she gets Rachel a job, and seems to constantly view Emma and Mike as beneath her. To hide her lack of remorse, and possible tendency to easily racially profile, she weaponizes what she thinks is morally righteous to appear above others. In her retelling of locking a mentally disabled child in a closet, she seems to show little to no remorse, while also maintaining little empathy or understanding for Emma when she admits the worst thing she’s ever done. Rachel at one point has a conversation with Charlie, Mike being present, in which she implies that her husband grew up around guns and violence and that even he feels uncomfortable with Emma’s dark secret. However, Mike had never had that experience, he had an uncle who was a cop, which was the closest he was associated with guns or violence. Rachel is willing to project danger onto the people closest to her if it protects her own image and moral high ground. The character of Rachel has been one I have been intimately curious about. I have found her character has been reflected in many of the well-off people I have met in college; people who fit in in every circumstance they are a part of and when they don’t, they feel they need to place themselves above you. It’s all a very long way in which they tell you they’re insecure.
People in everyday life use proximity to trauma to make themselves the center of victimhood, to gain social leverage or even as a means of self preservation. Rachel is one of the most realistic antagonists that I have encountered in film. She hides and manipulates in her passing appearance, as a white woman, however after analyzing her behavior, you can see that her damnation of Emma’s actions is a macabre facade to hide her own lack of empathy and need for self-leverage. It is apparent to me that this movie not only was well thought-out but it opens the floor to discussion about difficult topics. This movie brings up incredibly unique discussion points of morality and America’s fascination with violence.