The file ‘The Drama’ Gets Commentary from Gun Control Advocates and Shooting ‘Experts’

There’s a movie called The Drama. I care absolutely nothing about seeing it because, based on the summation of the plot on Wikipedia, it’s more of the nihilism we tend to get from Hollywood. Plus, it’s going to be really hard to get me to watch a movie with Zendaya that isn’t either part of the Spiderman or Dune franchises.

And I tolerate her in those, at best.

Still, I’ve been forced to talk about this movie already, because anti-gunners have a bee in their bonnet over it. It seems Zendaya’s character, during a night when everyone is telling the worst thing they’ve ever done, admits that she planned a school shooting.

She never carried it out, was appalled by a school shooting that took place shortly after her plan, and then became a gun control advocate, but the problem is that the anti-gunners don’t think enough attention was put on this, even though she completely lost her friends and fiancé over it, but whatever.

Now, we’re getting commentary from so-called experts about the damn movie.

The Drama has received mostly favorable reviews, but its detractors have singled out the school shooting storyline for criticism. Representatives of gun control advocacy groups like March for Our Lives took issue with the film’s marketing, calling it “deeply misaligned” and stating that it “[expects] better” from studio A24.

For a deeper perspective on the film and its controversial twist, Entertainment Weekly spoke with Mia Tretta, who became a fierce gun control advocate and Students Demand Action advisor after surviving two school shootings, and Dr. Jillian Peterson, who wrote the acclaimed The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic, and is executive director of the Violence Prevention Project. They both shared concerns about the nature of The Drama‘s engagement with gun violence, and the reciprocal effect that media like it can have on culture.

“I think the film’s ideas around forgiveness and empathy, and how much people change, that’s real, and that’s a nice theme,” Peterson says. “I even think there’s a way to make a movie about that issue,” that is, the issue of school shootings. “But this was not the way to do it.”

…

They both raise a number of issues with the film, from its marketing campaign, which concealed the school shooting storyline as a twist, to the absence of the voices of victims and survivors, to an interpretation that planning a mass casualty event and cheating on your spouse are comparable red flags (though the film itself does not directly suggest this).

But the aspect of The Drama they both pointed to first was the film’s comedic tone. “It was a comedy about school shootings, and made essentially a mockery of people’s real lives,” Tretta says. “It felt very much like Rachel, the maid-of-honor character, was made out to be crazy for overreacting. Even Robert Pattinson’s character [was] made out to be overreacting, crazy. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, because I felt as though most people were actually under-reacting.”

Well, maybe they were made out to be overreacting because, of the four people sharing stories of how awful they’d been, she was the only one who didn’t actually harm someone? The rest actually hurt people in some way. Zendaya’s character planned something awful, never did anything at all, though, and everyone apparently acts like she’s the worst of them all for it.

Look, it would be different if she’d carried it out in the film, somehow got away with it–or even just assisted the shooter in some way–and then confessed. I’d get the outrage here, but as troubling as it is for someone to plan out such a shooting, which is a crime, it’s not quite the same as carrying one out.

See, the problem with people like this is that their pet cause is everything. They look at us like we’re the jerks if we don’t sit back and try to enjoy a film about gun control, for example, or even get pissed when it shows up out of the blue as part of the plot, but not necessarily the entire thing. When I write about a film that does that, I get comments from these people telling me to get over it, it’s just a movie anyway.

But then, we get this, where a non-event is the worst thing in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, all of these characters appear to be awful people, and the nihilism that seems clear, being masked behind dark comedy, is probably a bit jarring for anyone, but these people really need to get over it. It’s not a celebration of mass shootings, violence, or anything else. It’s more of the artsy grimness that seems all too common in today’s films and nothing else.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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