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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:

Beyond Red and Blue

Can you change your mind about politics?


It sounds like a simple question. But in 2026, it almost feels like asking whether you can become a different person.


Political identity has become more than a vote every four years.


It's become shorthand for who you are, who your friends are, what news you trust, where you get your information, even who you're willing to date. Somewhere along the way, "Republican" and "Democrat" stopped feeling like political affiliations and started feeling like identities people were expected to keep for life.


Except that's not what many Americans are actually experiencing.


Across the country, people are quietly rethinking where they belong politically. Some have walked away from the political party they once identified with.


Others no longer feel represented by either major party. Many now describe themselves as independent, "politically homeless," or simply unsure where they belong politically.


For some, the shift happened after one defining event.


For others, it came slowly through college, new jobs, relationships, parenthood, changing communities, or simply years of asking questions they hadn't asked before.


Those shifts rarely happen overnight.


"People's ideology changes a lot more slowly," says Matthew Williams, organizer of Triangle Common Good, a Raleigh-based community focused on bringing people together across political and philosophical differences.


Williams says most people don't arrive looking to change parties. Instead, they arrive because something feels off. "Most people...come through because they have some type of feeling that something's missing in current society," he says. "They're looking for ways to discuss that or answer that."


That observation raises a larger question: if political identities can change, what is actually changing?


More than Left vs. Right


For years, political conversations have been framed like a battle between two fundamentally different kinds of people.

Kurt Gray, a professor of social psychology at The Ohio State University and author of Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground, argues that liberals and conservatives aren't driven by fundamentally different moral systems so much as different perceptions of harm.


According to his research, nearly everyone is trying to protect someone they believe is vulnerable. The disagreement comes from who they believe is being threatened.


"Most people think those people pick evil views because they're evil," Gray says. "No one does."


Instead, he argues, political beliefs are shaped by the information people receive, the communities they belong to, and the experiences that teach them what danger looks like.


An evangelical Christian who believes being gay endangers a person's soul, Gray explains, will likely see LGBTQ+ issues differently than someone whose primary concern is protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination. Likewise, someone whose media portrays undocumented immigrants primarily as dangerous may reach very different conclusions than someone who sees immigrants first as vulnerable.


The instinct to protect people, Gray says, is often the same. What changes is who we believe needs protecting.


That distinction helps explain why political realignment often looks less like abandoning your values and more like reinterpreting them.


"I think there's a lot less change in values," Gray says. "Issues can change. Values kind of stay the same."

Rather than replacing one moral framework with another, many people are reevaluating how those values apply to the world around them.


Identity isn't built overnight, and it rarely changes overnight


If values tend to remain relatively stable, what actually pushes someone to rethink their politics?

According to Gray, it's usually not a viral debate or a single election cycle. It's life.


Starting college. Moving to a new city. Changing careers. Becoming a parent. Losing a job. Meeting people with different lived experiences. Even simply stepping outside the social circles that shaped your worldview can begin to shift how you understand political issues. Those moments don't erase someone's identity. They gradually reshape it.


"Our political orientation stays the same because there's the desire for consistency with our past self," Gray explains. Family, friends, and the media that people consume all reinforce existing beliefs, making genuine political change much slower than it often appears from the outside.


That gradual evolution mirrors what Williams has observed through Triangle Common Good. Rather than watching people suddenly abandon one ideology for another, he sees individuals arrive with questions they haven't fully answered yet.


The politics of belonging


Political identity isn't only about policy; it's also about belonging.


One Reddit user, who asked not to be identified, described himself as "politically homeless" after spending more than a decade identifying as a Democrat. He said he no longer felt represented by the party, but also couldn't support President Donald Trump, leaving him feeling politically adrift rather than politically converted.


His experience reflects a broader reality: for many Americans, leaving a political identity doesn't necessarily mean finding a new one.


Gray argues that communities play a much larger role in political identity than many people realize.


"No one is really born conservative or liberal," he says. "For the most part, you get all this stuff from your family."


Breaking away from those beliefs often requires more than changing an opinion. It can mean navigating new friendships, new communities and, sometimes, difficult conversations with the people closest to you.


At the same time, those conversations have become harder to have.


Research has shown Americans are increasingly likely to sort themselves into like-minded social circles, neighborhoods and even relationships. Social media only accelerates that process, rewarding certainty, outrage and quick reactions over curiosity.


"Trying to win makes it worse," Gray says.


Instead, he believes productive conversations begin with something much simpler: genuine questions.

"We're not very good at asking questions," he says. "As soon as someone starts talking, we're like, 'Yeah, but...'"


Looking beyond the labels


It's easy to think of political realignment as a dramatic moment: a voter switching parties, changing a registration card, or casting a ballot differently than before.


More often, it looks quieter than that.


It looks like questioning assumptions you've held since childhood. It looks like realizing a label no longer captures your beliefs. It looks like listening before responding, or becoming comfortable saying, "I don't know where I fit anymore."


While this quiet shift doesn’t mean America’s political divisions are disappearing overnight, it shows that political identities, like people, aren’t as fixed as they sometimes appear. And maybe that's the point: changing your mind doesn't always mean becoming someone else.


Sometimes, it simply means becoming more honest about who you've become.

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).

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