Look. I cannot discuss this movie without discussing the “twist,” which is not a twist so much as the premise, delivered 15 minutes in. But if you don’t want to know anything before you walk in, which I do generally recommend for most movies, just promise me you’ll come back to this when you’ve watched the movie. Promise?
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
This seemingly innocuous shit-stirrer of a question sets the stage for the titular drama. Charlie (Robert Pattinson, our crash-out king) and Emma (Zendaya, the people’s princess) are doing some last-minute wedding menu selections with the best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie, quietly magnetic as always) and maid of honour, Rachel (Alana Haim, absolutely venomous). They’re a few bottles of skin-contact wine in when Rachel shares the pre-marriage conversation that she and Mike had, disclosing the worst things they had ever done. Mike points out that they promised they would never discuss it again, but Rachel is unconcerned with such promises and very concerned with unearthing other people’s misdeeds. So she, Mike, and Charlie agree to share the worst thing they’ve ever done, not noticing Emma’s quiet non-consent. The revelations go like this:
Mike used his college girlfriend as a human shield against a wild dog that she had antagonized. (Man’s got a type.) He is deeply ashamed of this, and he should be!
Rachel locked a “slow” child in the closet of an abandoned RV in the woods behind their houses, and lied about knowing his whereabouts when his father came looking for him. The search party found him the next day.1 Rachel is defensive, and insists that she would have told someone if they hadn’t found him.
Charlie cyberbullied a classmate so badly that the kid’s family moved away, though Charlie then says it may have been a coincidence. “But I did make him cry!” His friends are sure there must be something worse, and that this act doesn’t count because he was 14, but quickly tire of their line of questioning to prod Emma.
Emma planned, and did not follow through on, a school shooting. The men insist that she’s joking, while Rachel immediately takes Emma’s admission personally. “You realize my cousin is in a wheelchair because of a shooting,” she spits.
My immediate reaction to Emma’s disclosure was a profound empathy pang. How lonely she must have been as a teenager, and how lonely she must feel again. Three of the closest relationships in her life were sat at that table with her, and all of them were responding in the exact way she must have feared: disgust, fear, and anger, over something she never actually did. The three of them confessed times that they had actually hurt other people, and framed these injuries as hilarious—and, most importantly, forgivable—anecdotes.
The more we learn about Emma’s adolescence, the clearer her deep sense of alienation becomes. She was a weird army brat, and moving to a new state when she was 14 left her friendless and bullied. The aesthetics of school shooters, especially their video manifestos, appealed to her as a way to feel powerful. Then another shooting happened in her community, and it spooked her out of acting. And then, the two most important things possible happened:
Some kind of mental health professional facilitated group therapy for her class, and Emma got to express some of her grief. One of her classmates hugged her, and it seems like the first non-family hug she’s gotten in years.
A classmate asked her to join an anti-gun violence activist group, and then another recommends her as their spokesperson because she seems well-informed, especially about women committing gun violence.
In other words, exactly the kinds of interventions that should and do work! And when Charlie asks her, “you didn’t feel like a fraud?” She says, quite simply, “I felt like I was finally waking up from a horrible nightmare.” Emma reformed and channeled her energy into something positive before anyone got hurt. This was a story with an unequivocally happy ending!
Until. Sharing the truth with the people she thought she could trust, and who she thought would give her the same benefit of the doubt they had been giving each other, left her feeling abandoned, scrutinized, and mistrusted. And her experience is the exact opposite of her fiancé’s.
Enter: this wrinkled fucking chump.
Nobody really caring about Charlie’s confession—again, to cyberbullying a kid so bad that the kid moved away—is a running theme with him. Charlie exhibits alarming behavior and decision-making throughout the movie, starting with the opening scene. He spies with his little eye Emma reading a book in a coffee shop, so he sneaks a photo of the book so that he can look it up, thereby striking up a conversation with her. When he finally admits on their first date that he lied about reading the book, she flirtatiously calls it “weird,” and they proceed, unbothered. He corners Rachel’s cousin, towering over her in her wheelchair, as he tries to convince her that he and Emma are good people. He interrogates his employee, Misha, about her personal life, asking “what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” (this is a question for close friends, not assistants!). When poor Misha says something he doesn’t like, he explodes and storms away; and when she tries to comfort him (!), he kisses her and rips her shirt open before collapsing in tears (?!).
In every case, people laugh off or explain away Charlie’s increasingly disturbing behavior, with poor, poor Misha even insisting to Emma that “he clearly was not himself.” Nobody wants to hold him accountable for his actions, even as they’re standing in the wreckage of the consequences. But everyone wants to hold Emma accountable for seriously considering something horrible fifteen years ago, not doing it, and changing her whole life for the better.
I’ve watched this movie twice so far, six days apart. In those six days, the world gave me a lot of gruesome context that really cemented my feelings about mercy and punishment that The Drama stirred up. We are so determined as a society to forgive men their trespasses, to ignore or explain away their red flags, and to interrogate the characters of the women they harm. CNN exposed a massive online “rape academy” network, and men are spraining their thumbs typing social media dissertations about the difference between 62 million hits and 62 million users, and how this is actually feminism’s fault. Cerina Fairfax did everything she was “supposed” to do, and people are tripping over themselves to absolve the estranged husband who murdered her, killed himself, and left their children traumatized and parentless. Self-professed liberals are still decrying the incredibly brave women who exposed former U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell’s long history of sexual assault allegations for ruining his career and hurting the Democratic Party with “purity tests.”
There is seemingly no amount of harm that will ever be men’s fault, and no amount of mercy that will ever be within women’s reach. We are taught over and over again to forgive the powerful and demonize the powerless. Our empathy is only ever supposed to flow in one direction.
1 Je téléphone à la police!!