The Moral Philosophy of The Drama (2026)

Article • 2,613 Words • Philosophy, Film, 2026 • 04/17/2026

⚠️ This post contains massive spoilers for The Drama (2026). I warned you!

Click to show main plot spoiler
Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) are drinking with their couple friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim). They go around saying the “worst thing that they have ever done”. Emma states that when she was in middle school she almost carried out a school shooting but did not go through with it.

Introduction

I believe what makes this case so interesting to me and to other people is that the screenplay touches so many big issues in moral philosophy, with some going back at least as far as Ancient Greek Philosophy.

I think that the scenario didn’t have to be about school shootings, but I think in the cultural zeitgeist it makes sense as a provocative choice. I imagine its shock value and moral intuition basis was at the maximum optimal ratio. I think Borgli’s trying to be polarizing, but I’m not sure if that’s to disseminate a moral message or just to generate buzz around the narrative.

To make it perfectly clear, I do not condone school shootings. Killing innocent people or even out of “retribution” is not something I approve of or encourage. I don’t think the film or this essay is downplaying the immense tragedy of school shootings. I am most interested in pulling apart the entanglement of moral issues presented in this narrative, especially in regards to how it may be received by audiences and why. I think the central question is: to what extent can we blame or hold Emma responsible for her moral wrong and is it possible to move past it?

The Importance of Moral Intuitions

In my Philosophy of Space and Time class in undergrad I wrote a paper called Theoretical Virtues of Major Theories of Time about how intuition preservation was a theoretical virtue on why we might prefer certain theories of time over others. I think that this easily extends to other non-falsifiable contexts because something like theories of time or morality are philosophically fraught subfields where truth becomes hard to find and/or discern.

It is important to understand and internalize that moral intuitions are not moral truths. People’s ordinary moral statements may be something akin to moral judgements (à la Quasi-realism), which means that your moral intuitions are how you interact with the moral world and moral concepts. The difference in moral intuitions amongst people will do much to explain the varying reactions to this film and its contents.

Personal Motivations and Moral Decision-Making

I think that a major theme of this movie was empathy and a lot of the film’s premise lives and dies by how much you sympathize with Emma. Having her be played by Zendaya, an attractive mixed race woman, I think helps a lot. School shootings are statistically white and male, so if it were Charlie who had planned a school shooting people would be less surprised and less sympathetic overall.

However, I think another major contributor is something that was explored in this paper, The Halo Effect Revisited: Unpacking the Influence of Attractiveness on Trustworthiness by Doniaeeziba et al. The Halo Effect of attractiveness is well-studied in plenty of other types of effects, which should really not come as a surprise to anybody since we live in a lookist society. You may or may not like Zendaya the actor and Emma the character for a variety of reasons, which makes you want to (not) trust her and believe that she is (not) a good person.

The following are different moral intuitions that I think will cause people to weigh Emma’s circumstances differently:

(Righteous) Revenge as Justification: Emma was being bullied and the film shows some examples, but they don’t seem that bad (Charlie says as much in the movie as well).

Plenty of other people get bullied and do not plan school shootings.
Even if you are bullied, the response is not proportional. While bullying is not okay, it seems clear to me that people do not deserve to die because of it. There should be some kind of correctional intervention (restorative circles or something).

The Moral Agency of Young People: As a young person, does she truly understand what it is like to take someone’s life? The ripple effects through the community of her school if she had gone through with her plan? Emma is in middle school when this is happening, and her age pays a large part in complicating the account of moral blame. She is at the age where she has developed autonomous morality (à la Piaget). At the same time, she is still young and impressionable and potentially unable to fully consider her actions and consequences from an objective viewpoint.

Systems-Thinking: No choice is made in a vacuum and Emma isn’t solely to blame for her actions.

Parents (responsible gun keeping, checking in with your child, monitoring their internet usage)
School admin (monitoring bullying, school security)
Other students who were bullying her

This isn’t to excuse her actions, she is still the person who initiated action. But it does raise larger questions about how responsible people are for actions under a system. I would recommend reading The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility by Galen Strawson (even though it is about free will) to understand how sticky of an issue this really is. This isn’t to say that we should give up the project of moral responsibility, there are plenty of responses of that paper, but I mention it to demonstrate that we can’t take our ordinary moral intuitions for granted or as fact.

Emma mentions that she had a morbid fascination with the aesthetics of school shooters. It seemed like she had a lot of unsupervised internet access, so it’s likely she could have undergone a radicalization of sorts.

“Several past studies have found that media reports of suicides and homicides appear to subsequently increase the incidence of similar events in the community, apparently due to the coverage planting the seeds of ideation in at-risk individuals to commit similar acts.” (Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings by Towers et al.)

Actions & Consequences

I believe that there are two sorts of levels of actions that are happening that are morally interesting and relevant to the narrative drive of the movie. The primary action which is the planning of the school shooting and the secondary action which is the disclosure. There are particular moral dimensions of both actions that make them philosophically interesting, and perhaps most importantly, a bit more up for debate/interpretation among people.

Primary

Planning a school shooting and committing a school shooting, at least to my mind, feel like different things. She didn’t go through with it, but should she be held just as responsible as someone who did? I actually couldn’t really find that much in the philosophical literature, so I had to turn to law for some of these questions. In The Difference of Differential Punishment by Saad Al-Obaidi, he argues that in the eyes of the law it is perhaps the case that a person who actually executes a murder is guilty of both attempted murder and murder. So at least in case of punishment, the person who has followed through is more guilty. However, Al-Obaidi concedes that attempted murderers and murderers may be equally morally blameworthy and there can sometimes be (un-)luck at play.

I think the main conditional here is whether or not she actually intended to carry out her plan (would have actually done it). If she truly meant to carry it out then I think she is just as morally blameworthy as someone who does carry it out. However, I do not think that she truly meant to carry it out. We know what the film says, and it’s that she was ready and someone else “beat her to it” but I think there’s still some uncertainty if she would have followed through or not. My personal interpretation was that the small moment of reflection upon hearing the news snapped her out of her childish fantasy and made her confront reality (and make her not go though with her plan). Of course, our own sympathies will cause us to interpret and project onto Emma our viewpoints about what she did or would have done.

In the film Emma’s actions are juxtaposed against her “friend” Rachel who locked a boy in a closet and then got scared and ran away (what exactly happened afterward we don’t really know). Rachel’s actions caused real consequences (harm), while Emma’s did not. However Emma had deliberate premeditation (with a consistent disregard for life) whereas Rachel at worst has some mean-spirited callousness.

How do we weigh Rachel’s actual actions and potential consequences with Emma’s purely potential consequences? I think that this is more of a thought experiment than anything that would produce interesting discourse, but I will leave it to you to decide. If you are interested in these kinds of things I think you might find the following concepts interesting: Moral Luck & Hedonistic Calculus.

Secondary

Some of the outrage from Charlie seemed to be less about the content, but the fact that anything was withheld (also the bad timing of course). Is there a moral obligation to disclose? Was Charlie wronged by Emma not mentioning it to him before?

I think that people in a relationship have their right to secrets, and that secrets in and of themselves aren’t lying, but I do think that there is a very fine line between secrets and lying by omission. I think the intuition about secrets and lying is important, but I think the crux is whether or not you think knowing her secret has changed Charlie’s understanding of her moral character. He has learned something new about her and information does cause some recontextualization, but maybe just in the sense of understanding personal history rather than a total character upheaval.

Much of the discussion in the philosophy of consent is centered around the idea of dealbreakers, things that if true/present, would cause the person to not give their consent. In Jennifer Matey’s paper, Sexual Consent and Lying About One’s Self, she talks about the importance of not lying about moral character beyond dealbreakers when it comes to sexual consent, something that I certainly think can be extended toward marital consent. She argues that moral character is so fundamental to identity it isn’t just like a dealbreaker, it would be like consenting with a completely different person, one where consent does not just carry over or stay valid.

A further complication of this is that if someone knows in their heart that they have changed, then do they need to say anything? How do we know that Emma has changed? Does her past have no bearing on the present? Can those things just go away? I don’t know if there is a way to know for certain, which is an important aspect of this film. I think it is through the idea of love and trust in another person that we can make a leap of faith.

On Moving Forward

Atonement

Was Emma becoming an anti-gun activist inauthentic? I don’t think so at least. She may have done it because she felt guilty at first, but she found herself a morally good outlet. She found friends and likely a community to fit into, which would have helped her from feeling less ostracized. I think she probably benefitted from confronting the darkest parts of herself and came out as a better person because of it; her character seems to be confrontational and inclined toward justice.

With all that being said, I don’t think she was completely at peace with what she had done (understandably so). She became incredibly nervous with the idea of people knowing, judging her, and talking about it behind her back. From a social ruin standpoint, I think that this makes sense, but it could also be a sense of lingering guilt that would perhaps best be solved through therapy or something similar.

Forgetting

A lot of Emma’s primary response to people knowing her secret is to try to change the subject/stop the conversation and insist that we forget about it. She repeatedly refers back to the concept of “starting over” which implies a clean slate wherein everything else is just forgotten. Some things may be best forgotten, but I don’t think you can ever just ask someone to just drop something or forget it, especially as a first line of action.

Also what does it mean to forget something on purpose? To pretend that it doesn’t exist? I think that it does imply a kind of letting go, but to me that seems like a more un-critical way of asking for forgiveness. I am of the camp that without memory there can be no accountability or sense of moral progression.

However, I am not one to impose my moral thinking onto how someone should live their life if it isn’t hurting anyone. I think that the ending suggests that Emma is willing to forgive and forget Charlie for his brief lapse in fidelity, and so in this way at least she holds herself to the same standards that she does with others. I don’t think that she’s doing it in the “two wrongs make a right” kind of way, but that love can sometimes make us more willing to overlook certain things. Whether or not you agree with this is all your own prerogative.

Acceptance

There is acceptance without forgiveness, or really a sense of being settled with the information. I think that this is something that comes up a lot with people who have escaped the alt-right pipeline. If that someone later enters a leftist space, especially one that is full of queer and/or BIPOC, some people might be understandably unsettled. You don’t have to be alright with it or even interact with them as a matter of personal preference, but I also do not think that these people are beyond forgiveness.

Everyone will react to certain information differently because of personal experience, intuitions, etc, and I don’t think that you should ever try to change how someone else feels about something or is reacting to something. I do think that the scrutability of motivations as a narrative is a large blocker; the easier it is to understand something, the easier it is to accept it.

Conclusion

As you could probably tell from this essay, I really enjoyed this film and all the delicious moral dilemmas it served up. I would be really curious to see people’s religions and political affiliations and if that has any effect on their reactions to the messaging of the movie. For instance:

Some leftists run amok with accountability as a kind of moral smugness, while others practice a kind of radical acceptance that may come from a spiritual practice or understanding of systems.
Non-hellfire Christians would also likely feel an inclination toward forgiveness because she lost her path but was able to find it again.
Conservatives are more cut and dry about moral thinking usually so I feel like they would feel quite strongly about punishment as well. Only 17% of Republicans said that they oppose capital punishment for example.
- Political Affiliation and the Death Penalty | Death Penalty Information Center

However, at the end of the day, this is all my opinion! I tried to rely on philosophical literature as much as possible, but I also added my own spin on a lot of these things. I don’t pretend to have all of these things figured out, and none of philosophy or artistic interpretation is cut and dry.