Gun violence is heavily politicized, and no gun violence is more scrutinized than school shootings. School shootings are a special, uniquely evil type of violence in the public consciousness, and it’s not hard to understand why: there’s no bigger universal taboo than the killing of children. Shortly into Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama, it’s revealed that Emma, played by Zendaya, planned to shoot up her high school as a teenager.
More than just planned, she brought a gun to school with the intention to use it. When portraying school shooters, both in fiction and in the news media, there’s a fear that it might come across as ‘cool’ or desirable to impressionable audiences. Cults of personality develop around certain shooters, most infamously Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who perpetrated the Columbine massacre.
There exist entire internet communities dedicated to aggrandizing school shooters. A film like The Drama might run the risk of engaging in this type of behaviour - of making school shootings seem appealing to a certain kind of mentally ill teenager - but the film actively avoids this. It does so by exposing the artifice of the shooter.
To plan a school shooting is to engage in selfmythologizing. You write your manifesto, give your reasons, show the world who you want to be remembered as. This is the sort of behaviour that develops insidious fanbases.
Emma claims that she herself developed an online following through embracing the ‘shooter aesthetic’. You buy into the mythology and create your own. But Emma doesn’t have a deeply tragic backstory.
Rather than contribute towards the desensitisation of gun violence, The Drama looks at that desensitisation, at the children who’ve been affected by it, with sympathy. Emma would never have gotten that far if her own dad didn’t have the gun.
As she stumbles over herself to explain why she did it - or nearly did it - it becomes clear that what Emma experienced was little more than typical teenage loneliness and milquetoast bullying. It’s sad, and it’s not fair, but deciding to take a gun to school is a self evidently ridiculous overreaction. Emma lives in a nice house with a pool.
Emma has loving parents. Emma tries and fails to record her video manifesto several times while being interrupted by technical issues. None of it feels cool or compelling, it feels like watching a child who has no idea what she’s doing.
Adult Emma, looking back on the moment she snapped out of it all, described it as “waking up from a bad dream”. She goes on to live a normal life, she settles into domesticity and gets engaged to the love of her life. The film makes its point explicit in one sequence, when Robert Pattinson, Charlie asks: “if there are so many school shootings in the USA, how many people thought about it, planned it, before backing off?” The Drama doesn’t portray teenage Emma with any kind of allure or mystique, and when she gives up on her plan, she’s given the opportunity to grow and live a normal life. This could make it a valuable portrayal for children going through similar experiences to Emma - that despite how taboo and unspeakable it is, they’re not permanently marked by it, and that there’s hope for them to grow past it. That it’s never too late for them to come home.