Wait, Is Charlie the Real Villain of ‘The Drama’?

[There are major spoilers ahead for The Drama. If you haven’t seen the movie, come back to this post another time.]

The Drama has been out for less than a week, and it feels like the internet discourse around it has already been through multiple phases. First, the “No one spoil this movie for me!” phase. The “Oh my god, Zendaya’s character did what?” phase. The “Wait, this movie is…good? Maybe really good?” phase. But we’ve officially moved into a new one, which is asking ourselves who is the real villain of this story? The premise would imply that it’s Zendaya’s character Emma. But I have thoughts.

Many people, after seeing the movie, have decided the Rachel character (Alana Haim) is the real villain of the story. And they have good reason to think so. Rachel did an absolutely terrible thing in her youth—and you could make the argument that her truth, which she actually did, is worse than Emma’s truth, which she never acted on. She also stirs the pot in a diabolical way, asking people to share their deepest shame and then abandoning them once they do. And not for nothing, she gives the worst maid of honor speech of all time. (At that point, just say you’re sick and skip the wedding!) But I would argue Rachel can’t possibly be the villain of this story because she’s not the one who abandons his fiancée as soon as she reveals something honest about herself. That honor goes to Charlie (Robert Pattinson).

Charlie’s crime is that he seems to be in love with a mirage instead of a real person. When working through his wedding toast, he lists all of Emma’s qualities, like her laugh, which he loves despite how ugly it is. He recounts the story of their first meeting, where he pretended to have read the book she was reading in order to get her to talk to him, a ruse he continued through their first date. He mentions he loves their sex life, and this is juxtaposed with a flashback of them in bed. His friend, smartly, encourages him not to mention their sex life in his wedding toast. I got the sense that Charlie “loved” Emma but in that specific way that doesn’t leave any room for her humanity, which isn’t really love at all.

Because as soon as she reveals the deepest, darkest parts of herself, he can’t hang. Once his perception of his perfect life and perfect future wife has a crack, he loses it, and goes so far as to cheat on her as, what, an attempt to work through his feelings? Revenge? What’s the excuse there? At one point Emma asks Charlie, “Why are you acting like you’ve never done anything bad?” And you know what, she’s right! At the same table where Emma confessed to planning a school shooting, Charlie confessed to cyberbullying someone so intensely that their family had to move away. Not exactly a saint.

A24

To be clear, this isn’t a defense of what Emma planned to do. Far from it. But the movie paints her as a person who has done a lot of work to become a different person than the sad high school girl who was bullied and imagined doing something horrific in response. And I’d ask whether the movie does enough to fully convince us Emma would have acted on something that horrific. Imagining something is not the same thing as doing it, even though imagining it is still deeply disturbing. Maybe that’s a flaw of the movie. I just don’t buy that Emma would have acted on those impulses.

The whole idea of marriage is that you accept someone else for who they really are, not who you imagine them to be. Maybe it’s a good thing that their wedding day practically went up in flames, because Charlie doesn’t seem to really grasp the “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health” bit. It’s pretty wild that I came out of this movie feeling sympathy for someone who once planned something horrific, but again, maybe that’s the point. At least she was honest.