[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Drama.]
If two recent buzzy films where white men mishandle their Black women characters can count as the start of a trend, then Hollywood is currently stumbling into an especially strange one. This year’s Best Picture winner, One Battle After Another, reimagined the actions of a real-life white leftist militant group called the Weather Underground as a fictionalized version led predominantly by gun-toting Black women like Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills. Now, in its kept-secret premise, hyped by its marketing as a twist, The Drama reimagines Zendaya as a potential school shooter.
That’s what Zendaya’s character Emma reveals during a drunken pre-wedding game of “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” While her friends and fiancé admit to specific acts of bullying and cowardice, Emma confesses that at 15 she was so depressed and isolated, she fantasized about committing a mass shooting and went so far as to bring her dad’s rifle to school as part of her plan to do it. Though she didn’t ultimately go through with the act, The Drama—like One Battle After Another—deploys only a dropped line or two to acknowledge that Emma doesn’t fit the usual profile for that kind of thing, before swiftly moving on to explore how her past choices impact everyone around her in the lead-up to her wedding.
Tonally and aesthetically, Paul Thomas Anderson’s satirical thriller and Kristoffer Borgli’s cringe dramedy couldn’t be more different. Yet, somehow, they land on the exact same structure: Take violent actions predominantly committed by white men in the real-world and give them to Black women characters instead. Then, instead of centering the story around those women, shift the lens to how their doofy, neurotic white male romantic partners react to the violent volatility of the women they love. One Battle After Another is, at its heart, a Leonardo DiCaprio movie while The Drama is, at its heart, a Robert Pattinson one. So why this framing?
In both cases, the answer seems to be similar. Anderson and Borgli want to embrace diversity in a provocative way—upending stereotypes of model minorities or passive victimhood to give their Black female characters “agency” in a boundary-pushing way. Yet their (potentially unconscious) bias toward returning their narratives to a white male perspective means they have little interest in actually exploring the unlikely provocateurs they’ve created. Anderson and Borgli assume they can downplay the racial and gendered context of their female firebrands and simply dive into issues of gun violence, political revolution, and relationships in the abstract. But you can’t strip away the realities of race and gender from Black female characters because that’s not the way Black women live.
It’s a choice that makes both films ring untrue. While there are Black resistance groups that deploy violence as a tactic, One Battle‘s French 75 are clearly modeled on an explosive, impulsive, reckless ethos more common to white Marxist militants (not to mention the film taking its title from a statement put out by the Weather Underground). The way Perfidia rats out her friends and gets them all killed makes her Assata Shakur in aesthetics but not ideology. As Brooke Obie points out, the Black Panther Party specifically condemned the Weather Underground’s reckless violence as being “anarchistic, opportunistic, individualistic, [and] chauvinistic.” As Obie puts it, “It’s insidious for Anderson to use a movement of men and white leftists that was heavily criticized in its time by other Black revolutionaries and make a Black woman the face of it for the plot alone.”
Similarly, in a world where men are responsible for 98% of mass shootings, it’s hard to believe that Emma’s friends would react so strongly to her confession of what never feels like a credible threat. It would actually have been far “edgier” to build a movie around a woman learning that her white American fiancé once thought about committing a school shooting. But that idea is so charged that it reveals just how safe The Drama actually plays it.
What’s most telling about the limitations of Borgli and Anderson’s imaginations is that even after creating these female characters who exist as rare statistical anomalies, they’re profoundly uninterested in them. You could build an entire character study around the question of what would drive a middle-class Black teenage girl from a military family to almost becoming the first Black female school shooter in American history. (There’s only ever been one mass shooting committed by a Black woman in the United States at all, according to The Violence Prevention Project.)
Instead, The Drama treats it as a given that Emma’s backstory has the same mix of generic bullying and online radicalization we’d expect from a white male character, and then largely drops her perspective in favor of zeroing in on how her fiancé Charlie (Pattinson) spirals. Tidbits like the fact that she didn’t have her first crush until 28 are thrown out and then never addressed again. And though Emma is a woman in an interracial relationship who confesses her secret to another interracial couple, her race is, at best, a fringe subtextual element of the film’s storytelling.
Perfidia, meanwhile, literally walks out of One Battle After Another after its first act so that the film can become the saga of two white men fighting over her daughter Willa (a luminous Chase Infiniti, who gets less screentime than either DiCaprio or Sean Penn). There was a lot of debate at the time of the film’s release about whether the backlash to Perfidia stemmed from a gut instinct that Black women should only be depicted positively, rather than as flawed human beings. But the bigger issue isn’t that she’s flawed (Taylor beautifully plays Perfidia’s fraught relationship to motherhood), it’s that so many of her flaws are the psychosexual power hang-ups of white male leftists grafted onto a Black character.
Had Anderson taken the time to really explore all that, he could have perhaps gotten somewhere truly three-dimensional with Perfidia’s psyche. We get an intriguing tease that Perfidia comes from “a whole line of revolutionaries,” yet her mom shares all her screentime with DiCaprio’s Pat, rather than her own daughter, so that idea is barely explored. The Drama, too, throws in Emma’s dad to give a warm wedding toast without any details about how her parents shaped her life or handled her troubled teen years or responded when she blew out her eardrum by firing his rifle too close to her ear. Any sort of specificity about Black family dynamics barely exists in these movies.
Ironically, Borgli and Anderson both prove they understand the importance of identity elsewhere in their films. Charlie’s Britishness is given far more attention than Emma’s Blackness when it comes to the forces that shape their differing perspectives on gun violence; Borgli clearly isn’t just trying to make a relationship satire devoid of real-world sociopolitical context when he has Charlie so directly discuss his European perspective on a uniquely American problem. And One Battle is specifically about how middle-aged white male identity can manifest into either active white supremacy or hilarious Gen X apathy. The male leads of One Battle and The Drama work because of how precisely Anderson and Borgli capture the comedic foibles and flaws of the white male experience. They just struggle to do the same for the Black women at the center of their premises.
They aren’t alone in that imbalance. As with Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon, our 21st-century white male auteurs have entered a weird phase where they know it’s important to tell stories about women of color, but since they’re anxious about whether or not they’re the “right” person to do that, they wind up taking half-measures that leave those women of color refracted—all while still putting white men front-and-center. The upside is that more women of color are getting hired in prestige roles. The downside is that those roles don’t feel fully considered.
It’s an evolution of what Kristen J. Warner dubbed “plastic representation” back in 2017—a colorblind approach that “renders diversity as an artificial additive and not a substantive contribution.” As Warner writes, meaningful representation needs to “resonate and connect with the histories and experiences of the culture that the character’s body inhabits.” The Drama and One Battle After Another want to be edgy with how they deploy their Black female characters. Yet the lack of real-world context leaves them hollow. Anderson and Borgli may think they’re pushing representation forward, but they’re really just dressing old patterns in new military jackets.
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