In 1999, I was a sophomore in high school. I had just arrived home from another ho-hum day at Lovejoy High. I prepared some post-school snack, probably something that was microwavable, and was stressfully preparing for my five lines in whatever Spring production I was in at the time. Rebel Without A Cause, Shakespeare, something like that. I remember playing with the dials of my stereo, either queuing up one of the many CDs I had started to collect in my nascent rock collection or scrolling over to one of the two stations I regularly listened to. I recall my tiny bedroom television being on for some reason, maybe I was just channel surfing to kill some time as I’m wont to do. However it happened, that was the moment I saw the breaking news about two gunmen walking into Columbine High School in Colorado and the chaos that it unleashed.
Watching that live footage of students my age running out of the school was a formative moment. There’s a real “your life before/your life after” aspect. I’m trying not to sound too precious or treacly about this, because of course, my direct impact was zero. I lived more than half a country away from it and knew not a single person involved, but there was still this unbelievable sense of our own fabric of safety being shaken, which would only ratchet up a little over two years later. But if nothing else, to me, that demarcates the clear end of the era of Generation X, and how American culture moved into a darker, sadder period that formed the backbone of millennial adolescence.
I hate to say it, but I think if I were to sum up my reaction, it would be to say I was stunned, and then I moved on. How was I to know that would become the status quo of our broader societal take on these things as they multiplied like so many rabbits? As the journalist Dan Hodges famously said, “…once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.” And here we are, our national shame is now just another political polemic. And while only a shred of that plays into Kristoffer Borgli‘s new film, The Drama, it’s impossible to go into it without all of that baggage weighing on a viewer’s mind. All of what’s unsaid is what’s screaming at you.
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” is a great question to hang a story on, especially among a group of friends. Peter Straub famously opens up his best-known novel Ghost Story with that very conversation. His perfect dodge: “Well, I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me.” By contrast, The Drama dives right in like a drunk college student on Spring Break.
Borgli uses what could be tremendously awkward and takes it to perhaps the most awful place imaginable. Robert Pattinson and Zendaya play Charlie and Emma, a couple on the eve of getting married. As they sit at dinner with their Best Man and Maid of Honor, Mike and Rachel (Mamadou Athie and Alana Haim), this point of conversation organically comes up. Everyone has a truly awful story to tell, from locking a special needs child in a closet to cyberbullying a kid so bad his family has to move, but when Emma lets loose her admission: that she once planned a school shooting, the wheels completely come off the party. Charlie tries to rationalize it (“she didn’t do anything though!”), Rachel starts using her cousin who was a shooting victim as a source of indignation, Mike is just trying to find peace between them all, while Emma vomits up mushroom ravioli all over the table.
That core tension is what drives The Drama from that point forward. The wedding is on the books, and the question becomes once you’ve learned something so disturbing about your spouse, can you still move forward with them in the knowledge (or at least hope) that they are a changed person? Borgli, as a storyteller, reminds me most of his fellow Scandanavian, Ruben Östlund. There’s a similar dry wit and satirical edginess that colors everything they touch. The latter’s examination of a marriage facing sudden realization, Force Majeure, shares much of the same DNA as The Drama but with Borgli taking things to a further exteme.
Much of the POV of the film is derived from Charlie, which makes sense. The film’s aim to keep Emma at a distance, and to leave the viewer with an uncomfortable sense of ambiguity about her mental state, even now. Why doesn’t she have any friends? Why was Charlie her first crush at the age of thirty? And most importantly, why didn’t she end up going through with it? Charlie battles with these questions as he learns more about Emma’s teenage years, her loneliness, and how that sense of attention and celebrity drew her up into adulation for the imagery of these school shooters that have become some commonplace now. Borgli’s script makes for a fascinating document, in that we’ve had movies that examine these issues from the parents’ perspective (Mass, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Beautiful Boy), but this is the first example I can recall of a film that instead explores the urge to participate in such a horrific act. That notion of driving someone to even have that thought is what Charlie is trying to wrap his head around, and it wrecks havoc on him in a ever-building way and leeching into every aspect of his personal and professional life.
That Charlie is also a British immigrant (for once Pattinson doesn’t get to do a funny voice), outlays its own kind of unspoken subtext. I remember once, while at Christmas in England, a younger someone told me they were terrified of the idea of ever coming to the States because they felt like anyone could be shot at any time and she didn’t understand how we lived like that. At the time, I just thought well, you learn to live with it. But taken from her vantage point, I could see how America seems like a nightmare land, and that was over a decade ago. It doesn’t get anywhere near the play it probably should, but the weight of being a stranger in a strange land and having inarguably its worst modern-day trappings landing right at your feet is staggering. And again, she didn’t actually do it. And she’s really sweet, funny and pretty. What the fuck do you do?
All of that to say, it’s also just very funny. Again, that similarity to Östlund rings forth. If you saw Borgli’s previous film, Dream Scenario, you’ll have the sense of what you’re getting into tonally. Much like that film, you’re also left wondering if there’s a grander statement being made or if the filmmaker is just taking the piss. Regardless, it’s a movie with balls, with a capital B. To see that provocateur Ari Aster was a producer did not surprise me in the least. Walking out of the theater, the feeling that many viewers (or people who will only spin a cliff notes version for social media takes and clout) will come away angry at how it presents this material. But if you want to see something genuinely daring that still sits firmly within an accessible framework, this is a story worth sitting with and pondering its greater complexities.
And again, just like Dream Scenario, I really wish I had thought of it first. Then again, David Bowie got there before any of us.