By Aksharaa Agarwal
Oh, there’s just some drama: and other times Robert Pattinson happens to stop you as you cross the street
We’re all guilty.
It’s the talked-to-death paranoia age: stalking your date online, non-commitment, fishing for secrets under small talk. The common ground of sappy romances has shifted into jagged new terrain. Surface is suspect, and everything seems so. Anaesthetised to meet-cute, marriage bound romances, we seek something that shocks to bind.
It’s no secret: even the trailer for The Drama stirred all this up. Save the date! Careful to be spare, the sense of tiptoeing around something is unavoidable, and that’s the draw.
You bite.
When Charlie meets Emma, it’s already a beloved story. The setup is exposed, the scaffolding is visible, but mandatory. Deliberately. All roads lead to Rome: the fateful night, that is, when truths are shared. You rub your hands, the wine is poured, you want a taste. What’s the goss?
I mean, would Charles still love her if Emma had once been a worm?
If you care for the answer, you reveal at least one thing- the hunger for it. The line between confession and TMI, where does it lie? What do we owe each other? Stay with this.
The iceberg’s struck. The boat is rocked. How does one deal? Kristoff Borgli’s narrative shelves the can of possibilities, open and crawling, centering instead the invariable derailing of knowing something you can’t tell you wanted to, to some comic effect. Can you really handle the truth? Can you really? What if he shows you can’t?
He capitalises on this hunger for shock and offers in turn, shocked persons. No, you wouldn’t flip a table. You wouldn’t slam the door. You can’t, not while pulling your hair, spin-wheeling, all certainties dissolved. Some games are fun, playing with upward inflections. However, sitting with the truth is hardly a simple matter. Not when everything’s booked and the invites are out and the bells ring in three days; that tends to press matters a bit.
Dressed in people talking, Borgli investigates the strings that unravel from poking bears withheld. What skeletons are under the skin? Go for it. After all, there is no truer test of commitment than instability. Me, and you, and your spanner in the works. What happens when you get what you asked for- to truly know and be known? Is it still safe? What to heed, intention, implication, or influence? Mostly though, he asks, what changes? Being a person is hard enough without it being held against you. Being two people together will make you something new. It will. You do.
The long shadow of doubt casts over belief. Romance gets a bad rap, dragged over stones on social media everyday. When surface abounds, promising the sinister underneath, what does it look like? Where does it lead? Under the sheets with Charles and Emma. Borgli suggests that the impulse for resolution may not be the only solution. Consider instead: wiping the slate clean.
Much will be said about the hydra, its many heads raised: the capacity to cut off one head of a ‘what if’ just for several cover-judging protests to take its place. That too, is fair. Can one write a story involving a sensitive topic without also becoming about it? Borgli tries. Not for the first time ever, which could earn it a chance. Whether it is well-earned will depend on the viewer. After all, there are other heads.
What he does seem to suggest is that in the end, we are just what we actually do. We’re bound to meet, we need the open ending of a second chance. We always swear that we don’t seek it and it finds us, but we love it. The thrill of wrecked nerves, fraught levity, as tensions criss-cross and compound. Delicious, delirious, but oh-so-totally serious. Then what? At times tender, mostly a trainwreck, The Drama doesn’t chastise. It just nudges us, holding our heads, half-laughing, to remember what comes with asking: knowing. One can never adequately prepare, and one must remember that. Just as one must ask anyway. Catch: Release. What’s everything worth if you never stand to lose it? If you don’t find out, you’ll never really know where you stand…and what you can stand.
Richard Siken wrote it best: Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.
Go through it: after all, there’s always some drama.
By Aksharaa Agarwal