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The Drama and the Limits of Movie Marketing

Spoiler alert for "The Drama"


TW: School shootings, gun violence


When A24 released the trailers for The Drama, audiences thought they knew what they were getting; at least I did. 

The marketing promised a tense romantic drama starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.


Social media immediately began theorizing about the central mystery: what had happened between the couple, and what secret was threatening their marriage?


Like many film fans, I was hooked.


As a film student and longtime A24 viewer, I was excited. The trailers were effective. They created intrigue without revealing too much, which is exactly what good marketing is supposed to do.


Then I got spoiled.


A TikTok video revealed the film's major twist before I had a chance to see it myself. Suddenly, the conversation around The Drama shifted from romance and relationships to something much heavier. The film's central revelation (spoiler alert) that Zendaya's character had planned a school shooting as a teenager.


This sparked immediate backlash and reopened an ongoing debate about audience responsibility, content warnings, and the role of marketing.


The criticism wasn't necessarily about the film itself. It was about the surprise. For many viewers, school shootings aren't simply a plot device. They're lived experiences.


I know this because I was on a college campus during a shooting.


In October 2022, while I was a freshman at the University of Arizona, Professor Thomas Meixner was shot and killed in a building next to where I was attending class at that same time.


Authorities would later determine that the attack was targeted and carried out by a former student. But in the hours immediately following the shooting, nobody knew that.

What I remember most is uncertainty.


I remember being on the phone with my mother asking whether I should go to my next class, stay where I was, or return to my dorm.


I remember emergency alerts appearing across campus. I remember the fear in my classmates' faces. Most vividly, I remember not knowing whether the person responsible was still somewhere nearby.


People often reserve the label "survivor" for those directly involved in a shooting, and I understand why. I wasn't in the room. I wasn't physically harmed. 


Yet trauma doesn't always follow neat definitions. I still remember exactly where I was sitting when I got the alert. I remember the clothes I was wearing. I remember texting my family that I loved them.


Four years later, I still think about it.


That's why The Drama's marketing controversy interested me, not because I was offended by the film, but because it raised a question that filmmakers increasingly have to confront: How do you market a twist built around a collective trauma? There are no easy answers.


Film marketing exists to generate curiosity. Revealing major plot points can weaken a film's impact before audiences ever buy a ticket. At the same time, subjects like school shootings occupy a unique place in American culture. They are not rare tragedies. They are recurring realities.


According to Sandy Hook Promise, more than 390,000 students in the United States have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine, and lockdown drills are now a routine experience for most American students (Sandy Hook Promise; Brady United).  For many viewers, school shootings aren't hypothetical fears; they're memories.


So where does that leave filmmakers?


Should marketing campaigns explicitly warn audiences when a film contains school-shooting or trigger worthy content? If they do, does that effectively spoil the narrative? If they don't, are viewers being denied information that could help them make informed decisions about what they're about to watch? The debate surrounding The Drama suggests there may never be a universally accepted answer.


What the controversy does reveal, however, is how normalized these conversations have become. The fact that audiences immediately questioned whether a school-shooting twist required a warning says something unsettling about contemporary America. An entire generation has grown up measuring films against experiences that previous generations never imagined would become routine.


That reality extends far beyond movie theaters.


Following the University of Arizona shooting, counseling resources became overwhelmed as students attempted to process what had happened. The incident was eventually classified as targeted, but that distinction offered little comfort in the moment.


My fear didn't wait for official reports.


Perhaps that's why the discussion around The Drama resonates with so many people. It isn't really about a single movie. It's about the challenge of telling stories about violence in a country where violence increasingly shapes real lives.


I still haven't seen The Drama… Maybe I eventually will.


But the marketing controversy surrounding it forced me to think about something larger than a plot twist. It made me reflect on how trauma travels beyond the moment it occurs; into classrooms, conversations, films, and marketing campaigns.

The stories we tell are shaped by the world we live in.


For some viewers, a plot twist is just a plot twist. For others, it's a memory.



Read more about the drama, shootings and UofA below:

When Therapy is Your Favorite Crowd Work

Why do I enjoy making my therapist laugh more than the open mic crowd?

It's more common than we think. 


My first answer to my own question was “there's more gratification in winning over a ‘tougher’ crowd”. But I was immediately proved wrong by the grating memory of the typical open mic crowd in NYC I know so well.


The 6 PM slot at the Stand or Pine Box Rock Shop sometimes feels worse than recounting events of abuse to a professional.


Once I described bombing at an open mic in Brooklyn as bad as sharing an armrest with someone at the DMV who plays TikToks at max volume, but I think I was wrong. 


It's often times worse <3.


Maybe it's my grumpy disposition towards these situations that made me favor the sympathetic chuckle during a service that I pay too much for?

What makes open mics and the DMV great in theory is that everyone is miserable together, joined by a greater shared mission of dick jokes or a name change on their ID. 


This shared camaraderie should make me feel inclined to find more joy in those moments of community with strangers, right? Wrong.


For some reason, getting a hearty giggle out of Christina during our 6 PM sessions offered a different thrill for me.

“Well”, I asked myself, “maybe it's the possibility that you're always following a tough act in therapy; everyone with a shitty set loves an even shittier opener”.  I could be the runner-up to a married couple in resentful turmoil, a traumatized teen, or a woman on the edge. 


Another plausible point was presented to me: one of the reasons I pay Christina $70 every Wednesday at 6PM, is to tell me I'm a good person. That could also be it.


Ultimately, whatever motivation I overanalyzed so successfully to discover was a failure.


Facing these thoughts eventually led to late-night scrolling, which landed me where all emotionally healthy comics rest their head: Reddit. 


It turns out I'm not alone! Comics, regular citizens, even therapists with therapists all experience this joy ride I keep getting on when a middle-aged woman with a PhD laughs at my pain. 


Different people had different reasons: masochism, the life events that landed them in therapy, suspected narcissism, boredom, and the inability to get more than 5 minutes at the mic.


Whew! 


Thank God I've found a new mode of camaraderie with a group of people who also spend too much time thinking about themselves and asking if it's normal.


That was a close one!


All of my personal pondering led to one truth I have to become comfortable with: I like to share a laugh with people I shouldn't, more often than with ones I essentially beg for. 


And for the price of $70 weekly, I'll take a laugh where I can get it.


So thanks to Reddit and my (healing) anxious attachment, I'll be here all night, folks (and for 50 minutes, Christina).

And We Can’t Even Go to Fiji


I used to think I was above reality television, or rather, I considered it to be something below me. But as an avid people-watcher, reality television has become a new guilty pleasure, and Love Island is like crack. 


My favorite activity, finding my own love, has become too expensive; going out and failed dates rack up a bill, streaming doesn't. My friends seem to be too busy hustling so we have enough money for new-age gambling, so I needed another scoop of dating discourse from somewhere.


And with a summer buzz in the air of a reality television series about love, what else was I to do besides watch?


Beyond the fact that I find it outrageous that I am quickly approaching the ages of the younger Love Island USA contestants with each new year, all I see when I watch this show, especially this year, is a petri dish taken from the dating market; I know because I'm a part of it.


Obvious reasons aside—being Gen-Z, attractive, and someone who could definitely have been a model if I ever just applied—I almost recognized this year’s contestants as kindred spirits. 


It took me embarrassingly long to realize why.  Every one of this year’s Love Island USA contestants reminded me of someone I know. 


Even if I didn’t specifically know a caricature personally (thankfully, a Sincere has not entered my life in any capacity… yet), I definitely knew of someone who was close enough.


I know of someone who can’t embrace their vulnerabilities, or someone for whom communication skills are beyond them, or someone preferring their patterns, or someone who is emotionally immature, someone stuck in toxic masculinity, or someone who people-pleases, or someone who moves blind to consequence, and so on and so on. 


This wasn’t The Kardashians about a family having money and quotable dialogue or the personal lives of rich women from Real Housewives or even, the home renovation and real-estate content of HGTV, a staple of the 2010s. These were dating stories I had heard at some point, whether from my friends or their friends, or a random stranger I struck up a conversation with at a community event.


On the surface, Love Island USA is structured like a game show, rather than just being an excuse to suck up content for clips. Contestants live in an isolated villa where they can establish themselves socially, and to survive to the end, they must continually couple and recouple.


Challenges test each couple's compatibility publicly, and winners receive rewards like dates, or access to special secluded spots. Bombshells join as outsiders trying to disrupt both couples and the existing social hierarchy.


Anyone left single after recouplings is eliminated, and each season culminates with one couple winning $100,000, courtesy of public voting.


Watching this show means watching people lie, cheat, and scam through the motions of love, intimacy, and attraction, while frantically rushing to protect themselves emotionally and strategically, all while putting on a flashy white smile for the cameras.


So much has been said online about the social patterns of the show, especially the gender dynamics and the racial biases, and how they can be extrapolated to the social politics of modern-day dating. In fact, anything that I could add here about it could practically become plagiarism. 


But what I can say, while I still feel like I have an original thought, is that Love Island USA, amidst the catty clapbacks and cathartic releases, is a snapshot of what dating looks like when it decays into itself.


Relationships have become a gig economy, and attention is the currency, valued by perceived authenticity. 


People’s value in the dating scene is constantly reassessed with new people entering “the market”, and people compete not only to win a partner, but to win the social validation that comes with “winning dating”. Swiping on dating apps, which are functionally designed to keep users on the app, has turned romantic pursuit into instantaneous decisions made about supposed romantic compatibility. 


Even if you’ve built a good foundation with someone, there is always the looming threat of someone better—hotter, smarter, funnier, more accomplished—in the form of “the other woman” or a “side piece” who can take away everything you’ve worked so hard for.


And the public voting? We don’t need that. Not when we have likes on soft and hard launches and jealous comments on couples’ content. These habits have turned relationships, both others’ and our own, into products to be consumed. 


People package themselves and their relationships, which they think of as an extension of themselves, as things that can be measured objectively, as if relationships can be understood universally.


The commercialization of romantic life with all of its emotions has become intertwined with market logic. 

And why is that? Because we are scared. So, so scared. Terrified. 


As leisurely pursuits and every form of recreation grows more and more overpriced, every potential chance for love to begin and blossom comes with a higher cost.


Expensive opportunities shrinking the scope of possibilities for love, means the possibilities we do get to have, become increasingly more valuable. And so we hold on for dear life. Until the second things might seem like they go wrong. Then we ghost, we avoid, and we run. 


Anything to keep ourselves from feeling.


That’s why Love Island USA feels so poignant. We see ourselves in the contestants. We see our pain in their struggles, our attachments in them trying to control the situation, our shame in their public humiliations. We write thinkpieces and record monologues about behaviors we have committed ourselves. When no one is watching, we are all the same scared someone.


Someone horrified that all that effort might be for nothing, that all the social alliances we built couldn’t stop unexpected change, that the performance we put on can’t save us.


Love Island USA reminds us of the someone we try to be in dating. 


Confident, attractive, intelligent, charismatic, untouchable. Perfect. But also reminds us of the realities that love doesn’t let us be those things, at least not always. You can’t be all those wonderful qualities when faced with the reality of another person.


Love is restlessly eager. Love is being gentle. Love gets jealous over others trying to get close, and love will make you do stupid things to get their attention, and you will still feel like an idiot for feeling after. Love won’t manipulate, or keep score. Love won’t laugh at your Instagram archive because it holds every record of your truth. Love is the smile when they put their head on your shoulder. 


Love has always been our desperate and messy attempt to be acknowledged and understood so we can share the best and worst parts of ourselves.


Emotion doesn’t function on the economics of attention, and the more we brace ourselves, the more alone we'll be, even in Casa Amor.

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