Maybe You’ll Never Really Know Who You’re Marrying
The following contains spoilers for the film The Drama.
The Drama features the kind of unforgettable first-kiss story that would belong in the First Kiss Hall of Fame, if such a thing existed. Late one night, Charlie (played by Robert Pattinson) tries to sneak Emma (Zendaya) into the museum at which he works, but his ID clears only the first of multiple doors. The alarms go off, the two get locked in the entry hall, and as Emma panics, Charlie rushes over to kiss her, quieting her fear.
It’s swoon-worthy—or is it? The Drama follows Charlie and Emma in the days leading up to their wedding, during which the rose-colored glasses each of them wore slip off. One evening, Emma makes a dark confession that casts her in a completely different light; Charlie’s reaction, in turn, shakes her trust. Moments that had seemed cute take on a sinister bent. Maybe their first kiss wasn’t a spontaneous expression of care, but a deliberate attempt to startle Emma. Maybe it was a bad omen. Maybe, Charlie and Emma wonder, they shouldn’t get married.
Pop culture has been preoccupied with commitment angst lately. The hit Ryan Murphy–produced limited series Love Story, which just concluded, dramatized the real-life courtship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette in the 1990s, exploring whether Bessette was ever truly ready to join the Kennedy family. The steamy romance Heated Rivalry saw two gay men spend nearly a decade trying to define their relationship; although being closeted played a major role in their hesitation, the show also mined tension from the characters’ doubts about having an exclusive partnership. Strangers, the writer Belle Burden’s best-selling memoir published in January, examines why her husband suddenly wanted a divorce after 20 years together. And reality TV series capitalize on how entertaining it can be to see others deal with questions of settling down. Shows such as Love Is Blind and The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On treat marriage as both a reward and a threat: Contestants who get engaged receive more screen time. Failing to partner up means going home.
Films have only recently begun to catch up with this trend, in part because of the decline in the number of romantic comedies being made. Most of the love stories that do make it to the big screen still generally follow broad, conventional strokes, capturing the bliss of coupling up or the blues of falling apart. Last year’s Materialists was the rare movie tackling whether finding The One matters in an era when people seek to optimize their dating life. The Drama, though, understands today’s particular anxiety about saying yes to someone forever: It rejects the impulse to deliver a happy ending or breakup saga. Instead, it teeters between those extremes and illustrates how getting married can be alternately romantic and terrifying, fulfilling and draining.
[Read: What we lost when we lost rom-coms]
The Drama unfolds over the course of the stressful week leading up to the central couple’s wedding. The turbulence begins with a secret Emma has been keeping for more than a decade: that as a teen, she had almost carried out a mass school shooting. She’d planned it thoroughly, even going so far as to choose her first targets and record a confession video. When a gun-related tragedy happened near her town, however, she saw the devastation and decided against completing her mission.
But Emma’s past matters less to how The Drama unfolds than to the aftermath of her confession. Emma and Charlie desperately try to move forward, but Charlie can’t stop thinking that his wife-to-be no longer resembles the person he thought he knew. Emma, meanwhile, grows anxious over how poorly Charlie communicates his fears. Love in the time of easy outrage—of shallow social-media interactions, of relentless headline-driven anxiety, of brain rot—is terribly risky, The Drama posits, and maybe even dangerous: Dating amounts to placing trust in total strangers. Falling for someone involves revealing yourself in ways your partner may never understand. And publicly vowing to be together ’til death can turn out to be nothing more than an arduous performance.
Watching The Drama made me think of the essayist Lindy West, whose memoir Adult Braces turned the internet into a fountain of opinions upon its release last month. In the book, West reveals that shortly after her wedding, her husband told her that he had a girlfriend and wanted to be in a nonmonogamous marriage. Despite West’s initial resistance, she eventually agreed to the arrangement after taking a solo cross-country road trip to think it over. Much of Adult Braces involves West justifying her decision; as a result, readers have questioned whether she stayed in her marriage out of love or out of fear—fear of being alone, yes, but also of being perceived as intolerant of modern mores, of being selfish, of being inflexible when things got tricky.
This is the kind of mental gymnastics about romance that fuels The Drama. The commitment angst plaguing Charlie and Emma over Emma’s secret seems to have a lot to do with several contemporary concerns—mixed messaging about gender roles, confusion over what constitutes a moral failing—that yield knee-jerk responses. After Emma is coaxed into sharing her secret during a misguided bonding exercise with her wedding party, her maid of honor, Rachel (Alana Haim), takes the revelation personally. Emma’s intentions are unforgivable, says Rachel, whose cousin was injured in a shooting. When Rachel threatens to drop out of the wedding, Charlie tries to appease her by piling on what he believes are palatable lies: He makes up a story about Emma going through a significant childhood trauma, as if to explain why she’d ever consider doing such a terrible thing.
Yet Charlie is much less capable of soothing his own nerves, and he fixates on whether Emma harbors violent tendencies. At one point, he receives a coffee-table book featuring scantily clad women posing with firearms; he begins imagining Emma as one of the models, suggestively holding assault rifles on their bed. Paranoid, he looks to his co-worker for validation of his choice to go through with the wedding. But when she tells him that, under the same (and, to her mind, hypothetical) circumstances, she wouldn’t stay with her partner, he snaps and responds in a reckless manner: by kissing her aggressively in his office. It’s as if doing something bad himself might help him understand Emma—or damn them both.
By the movie’s end, the charming love story has devolved into a disorienting series of mind games. Maybe Charlie doesn’t want to be seen by anyone as doing the wrong thing—whatever that even means. Yet some of his actions, like his spontaneous decision to cheat on his fiancée, come off as empty provocations. Instead, The Drama is most successful when it plays with conventional romance tropes to capture how off-putting modern courtship has become. During Charlie and Emma’s meet-cute at a coffee shop, Charlie dashes over to Emma’s seat when she steps away, snaps a quick photo of the book she’s reading, then skims a summary so he can pretend he’s read it. The scene wittily evokes app-driven dating: Here are two strangers, one of whom is wooing the other based on the shallow information he’s acquired through clumsy sleuthing. Later, the couple has to pause their discussion of Emma’s past to meet with their wedding photographer, Frances (Zoë Winters). Sensing the couple’s unease, Frances turns their meeting into a practice shoot. What should be a chance for the two to loosen up, however, results only in forced smiles and awkward silences.
Watching Emma and Charlie’s plans collapse into chaos, I was struck by how well their journey to their wedding day conjured the violence built into today’s language of love and commitment. No one is merely “going steady” anymore; now it’s about “matching each other’s freak,” as well as “ghosting” and “zombieing,” “cuffing” and “love bombing.” As tongue-in-cheek as these terms may be, they still sound somewhat alarming out of context—a dissonance The Drama captures through absurd, dreamlike flourishes. Charlie and Emma’s growing fears about their impending ceremony start to overwhelm their thoughts: Emma pictures Charlie concocting an over-the-top plan to leave her. Charlie has a nightmare in which he finds the guests at his wedding reception dead.
I’m not convinced The Drama needed sequences like these, especially not when the film skims over Charlie’s own history and speeds through its final act. But the overarching result is a movie that depicts love as an unsettling force and commitment as an eternal mystery. The climactic wedding, after all, is more distressing than celebratory: The DJ they’d hired at the last minute accidentally blares ear-splitting feedback noise. Charlie’s new dress shoes leave his toes a bloodied mess. And worse, he gives a postnuptial speech that exposes his lingering uncertainty about Emma, horrifying everyone in the room. Even its closing scene toys with doubt: Charlie and Emma are shown reuniting after their disastrous reception, pretending to be strangers so that they can start over. Their reconciliation is sweet, but it also lays a trap. As viewers, we’ve spent too long watching them question each other to believe that playing a little pretend will fix everything between them. Yes, the couple is married, the drama is over, the credits have begun to roll. And yet.
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