‘The Drama’ and ‘Just Mercy’

by Timothy Kirchoff

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The recently-released film The Drama poses difficult questions: What is the worst thing you have ever done, and would other people be justified in rejecting you if they knew about it? (I will discuss the film’s plot in detail, so there will be spoilers.)

The film explores these questions through a soon-to-be-married couple, Charlie (played by Robert Pattinson) and Emma (played by Zendaya). Early in the film, Emma and Charlie are with their Best Man and Maid of Honor at a menu tasting for their reception. Having each had a few glasses of wine between sampling entrees and appetizers, they are not at their most discreet or articulate, and they begin asking each other about the worst thing they’ve ever done. Emma, having been urged and cajoled by everyone else, finally discloses that she had planned — but not gone through with — a school shooting. 

The rest of the film focuses on Charlie’s attempts to process this information about his beloved. He is unable to see her the same way, unsure if he would rather have never found out, wondering whether the would-be mass murderer, this unspeakable, incomprehensible, violent, psychopathic monstrosity, is still somewhere inside Emma.

For her part, Emma had never discussed that part of her past with anyone, and therefore struggles to understand for herself, much less explain to anyone else, this deeply shameful moment in her youth. She offers Charlie the chance to act through starting over – introducing herself as if for the first time – but Charlie can’t take it seriously.

The Maid of Honor, meanwhile — the very person who had first raised the question about the worst thing they had ever done — comes down hard on Emma, and openly questions whether she wants anything to do with the wedding. Charlie tries to help her understand and empathize with Emma even while he himself struggles to do so. 

There are moments in the film that ask how much we can empathize with who Emma had been as an isolated and lonely teenager; whether a girl who poses with guns and fantasizes about using them on her classmates can truly be worthy of love; and how much a person can actually change. There is no explanation, however, that fully exonerates her — the psychology of mass shooters remains beyond the film’s grasp.

In watching the film, and particularly when thinking about the scenes in which the Maid of Honor expressed her disdain for Emma or when a character suggested calling the police on Emma, my mind was pulled back to the concluding chapter of Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy. 

“We’ve become so fearful and vengeful,” Stevenson writes, “that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak – not because they are a threat to us, but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken” (p. 290).

For the Maid of Honor, deciding whether to reject Emma is a function of her own desire to hang on to moral superiority; in judging Emma for the horrible thing she contemplated and planned — but did not actually do — the Maid of Honor gives herself assurance that she is not a monster. Judging Emma is her way of seeming tough, of defending herself from judgment for her own failings.

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done,” Stevenson continues. “In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy” (p. 290). 

At the end of the film, after a wedding reception with some very dramatic moments, Charlie finds himself alone, physically and emotionally wounded, and looking desperately for Emma. He goes at last to a greasy spoon diner that he and Emma had discussed half-jokingly early in the film, as a place to go after their reception in the way actors do after awards presentations. 

It is only when Charlie has confronted his own shame and brokenness that he is truly prepared to love his wife, not as a beautiful mystery or pitiful monster, but as a fellow broken human being. The drama at the reception had stripped Charlie of the pretense of respectability, and all he wants in this moment of brokenness is Emma.

From the very start of their relationship, Emma was capable of loving Charlie in all of his flaws (among them obvious and compulsive lying) precisely because she knows her own brokenness, even if she struggles to understand or explain how it manifested in the way that it did. When she re-introduces herself at the film’s conclusion, it is not an attempt to hide from the past or from uncomfortable truths they wish they didn’t know about each other. It is an invitation to a genuine renewal of their relationship with each other as they each continue to grow and change: to begin again, and again, and again — broken together.