Coping with "The Drama"
...when there is none? Raw reaction to The Drama (a conversation between two film freaks)
Today I offer you a Scribbled Loose Sealed meditation on The Drama, Kristoffer Borgli’s new quirky rom-com featuring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson WITH a special contributor!
Quick sidebar: I caught this at the theatre closest to me (Flix Brewhouse, formerly an Alamo Drafthouse) but the hunt for my tried and true movie theatre continues. Suggestions are welcome! I’ll be starting film school in NYC this fall so throw some darts in that direction why don’t ya.
Before The Drama, I revisited two of Borgli’s formative films, the most recent, starring Nicolas Cage, Dream Scenario (2023), and the other starring Kristine Kujath Thorp, Sick of Myself (2022). The latter, my favorite, channeled a perverted take on the attention economy with a woman hell bent on stealing the limelight from her pretentious artist boyfriend to achieve her own fame. What I loved about this film was its willingness to go there when it comes to bodily disfigurement via volitional illness (spoiler, she takes dark web drugs to self induce skin disease). It really commits itself to examining the perilous physiological interplay of a woman wedged between insecurity and the twisted validation.
Dream Scenario mirrored many of these untethered cognitive extremes with the tale of a college professor stuck in the liminal space of other people’s dreams, presenting as neither friend nor foe but something in between, and perhaps even more freakishly imposing. Dream Scenario thrives off an emotional landscape as pernicious as the last, with a similarly daunting visual style. As a fan of both worlds, what imprints me the most is their weaponized mundanity, laying in the folds and waiting to dubiously unmask themselves as drivers of chaos. This quality emerges with particular force during meal times. In Sick of Myself, conversations are hijacked by Signe’s developing attitude of total social disgust. She struggles to hide her look of physical pain across the table from her boyfriend and his friends. Paul (Dream Scenario) is burdened by parallel career resentments and a gaping feeling of inferiority, made the clearest at an early dinner conversation with a former colleague where he asks pointed questions about her status before accusing her of scholastic fraud. Paul, too, is sick of himself and, will soon square his twiddling reality with the dreamed up projections of strangers and kin; just like Signe squares her insatiable need to be a sobbing headline story with a world who eats it up without hesitation.
Going into The Drama I expected the same caldron of dormant explosives, bubbling up forebodingly in a darkly comedic stew. I hopped on a phone call after the screening. Here’s what my friend Bryce and I have to say about it.
<SPOILERS AHEAD>
Alexx(Me): All right, dude. What a...
Bryce: How do we even start, bro?
Alexx: I want to start with a thematic statement. And it’s that... Well, more of a question. Do you think it’s possible for couples to start over after that kind of discrepancy in whatever it may be? I guess we should keep it to this. But, like, that’s obviously the question, the main question it’s posing. It’s stated, like, three different times, beginning, middle, and end. And I... I understand that ambition of, like, tackling that question in a different way, in a very unique way. I did not expect that reveal at all. Did you expect it?
Bryce: No, man. Oh, my God.
Alexx: Their relationship started off in a performative way.
Bryce: Definitely. Definitely
Alexx: And I feel like it ended that way, too. Maybe that’s the point. He literally met her with this idea of, like, seeking the perfect image of a meet-cute, under the pretense of pretending to know what she’s reading. Like, the fucking thing started off as a fraud.
Bryce: Oh my god dude yea
Alexx: But I do think that what it had to say about the way that we are desensitized to the school shooting phenomenon in this country was way more interesting than what it had to say about, like, relationships. But I also appreciate what it the discussion it foments about whether someone can truly change.
Bryce: Yes. I agree.
Alexx: Because it... Like, the complete lack of ability for... What’s his name? Charlie? For Charlie to exercise any empathy toward Emma is insanity. It is reactionary to the fucking tea, dude.
Bryce: What I thought about that shit is, like, you could tell, like, the difference in how they were brought up. I think... Okay, a lot of the film is talking about is, like, darkness and how, like, that type of, like, childhood trauma and hardship can, like, mold you into a better, more mature person later on in life. And you can tell he’s never encountered any sort of, like, anything.
Alexx: God. That’s an amazing point. He wants a pristine life that doesn’t exist. It’s a public image.
Bryce: Bro, because, like, he literally crumbled at, like, the fucking… at the prospect of, like, oh, like, this is so shocking. And it, like, can really, like, ruin his entire world. Like, it should not have gotten to that point.
Alexx: This is his primary traumatic event.
Bryce: Which is... It says a lot.
Alexx: Yea. And it becomes about everyone else reckoning with this thing that happened to her, without really flipping the mirror back to ask how the fuck she’s dealing with it or where she’s at now. Oh! My theatre’s biggest laugh was the knife moment. And the computer recording where Emma’s like “you’re ass is gonna die first.” There were so many awesome comedy moments. And I couldn’t get over her joining an activist group against gun violence. Second swings like that, that’s what being human is about.
Bryce: snickers yea for sure
[Break]
Bryce: Rachel was so fucking annoying.
Alexx *laughs* Yeah, yeah. And let’s talk about the DJ and the heroin.
Bryce: The same way Rachel was judging Emma for her mistakes, I feel like that’s... Like, they were kind of projecting their, like, own insecurities onto the DJ who was doing heroin. Like, why does it matter she does heroin? Like, it’s had nothing to do with you and your wedding.
Alexx: Exactly. I feel like they were projecting their own insecurities onto her and, like, just being judgmental for no reason. Like, not for no reason, but just to... as a way to escape from things that they’re hiding from each other. Good character there.
Bryce: Dude, a lot of it worked. It’s just I have a problem with the fact that like, the revelation of what she did or what she didn’t, almost did, it just didn’t warrant the response that it got… It just felt kind of like, it felt kind of forced. But they still made it work?
Alexx: But like, the absurdity of that reaction, I feel like, is the engine for the whole thing. And, you know, like them freaking out about something she did when she was 15. When the other couple was talking about some shit they did a minute ago. The different ways they qualify stuff. The selective understanding. I think that was a really interesting conversation that the movie was having. But the ending...
Bryce: Yeah. It’s just that ending. But everything else pretty much worked for me. The performances were really great.
Alexx: Yea I was disappointed by it a bit. Like those tidied up rom com endings I hate. But I really enjoyed what it did visually. I enjoy that he’s still playing with surrealism. And the ways that it kind of blurs temporal lines when they’re having these arguments in the house.
Borgli definitely followed through on what I think he does best: eerie, squeaky contradiction, caught in the act through conversations with misaligned people whose primary concern is the optics of their actions. And it milks its comedic absurdity with some seriously great laughing moments, my favorite of which involve flashes of the past, child, version of Emma imposing onto her present self in ways that feel both disconcerting and uncomfortably revealing of the general collective numbness on mass shootings in America (particularly the causality of them) Despite our qualms about the ending, what resonates with me symbolically is Emma’s radical honesty and willingness to put the darkest parts of herself on display, even as it ostracizes her brutally and unceremoniously. Even as everyone around her chooses to present sanitized versions of themselves. Charlie is thus forced into a dance of discovering the empathy below the noise, what truly lies underneath his polished façade. It becomes a question of whether he is capable of change. The ending, of course, offers a potential yes… even after you’ve coped in the most eruptive, emotionally close-fisted ways possible just like the world around Charlie defaults to.
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