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A couple's mutually constructed stories serve as an anchor through periods of conflict.

A trauma can threaten the intactness of a couple's story and at first seem impossible to integrate.

Healthy couples are able to focus not on the content of the story but on how the content is interpreted.

Boiled down, Kristoffer Borgli’s latest film, "The Drama," is about what happens when the stories we tell about ourselves and others get derailed and lose their meaning. Take the opening scene of the couple’s meet-cute: A handsome but bumbling man—Charlie, played by Robert Pattinson—walks into a coffee shop and eyes Emma—played by Zendaya—reading a book. In the brief moment she leaves her table, he takes a photo of her book and Googles the plot summary to craft a better pickup line. Creepy or romantic? It depends on how the story is told and by whom.

Also consider their first kiss. Late at night, Charlie attempts to sneak Emma into the museum where he works, but gets locked between two glass doors. As he wrenches the handles to escape, the alarm goes off, and he goes in for the kiss. In one telling, Charlie kisses her only after trapping her. In another, Charlie finds genuine romance in the absurdity of the moment.

From Events to Meaning: Constructing a “Story of Us”

These stories are nested within larger scenes where Emma and Charlie, alongside friends, consider what to include in their wedding speeches. We don’t so much learn about the actual history of their relationship as we learn about the process of deciding what that history is, what it means—and to whom. As if participating in an oral history interview—the process John Gottman uses to predict which couples are likely to separate or stay together with surprising accuracy—we learn about their mutually constructed "story of us."

Gottman’s work has found that such founding stories are essential to healthy relationships. By communicating values, assertions of identity, and moral lessons, couples maintain in their shared stories a kind of guiding light to navigate periods of conflict. (Robust research exists within family structures as well, correlating adolescents’ knowledge of their family history with better psychological outcomes.) Importantly, it is not only the content of the story but the act of storytelling itself that is associated with positive outcomes. After all, the same content can be interpreted in completely opposite directions, with generosity or suspicion—what Gottman refers to as negative or positive sentiment override.

As evidenced by Charlie eventually admitting to never having read the book he claimed—what would be a shocking revelation to some—Charlie and Emma have been good at ironing out ambiguities to settle on a shared meaning. It is when they take their stories to their friends that they begin to falter and question each other. And that is why the plot’s inciting incident is so effective: it threatens their "story of us."

Early into cognitive processing therapy, a manualized treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the clinician introduces the patient to the just-world belief: Good things happen to good people. According to Melvin Lerner, such a belief is necessary for goal-directed behavior but comes with obvious drawbacks—namely, the idea that people get what they deserve. If, after a trauma, I am to still believe in a just world, then the logic must go: If I’m a good person and something bad happens to me, it must mean I myself am bad (what is known as assimilative processing) or that the world is bad (accommodative processing).

Charlie knows an inevitably incomplete version of Emma. It is, after all, impossible to truly know every intimate detail and experience of another person. And so, Charlie, using his present understanding of Emma, assumes stories about her past to create a more coherent understanding. But then Emma introduces a kind of trauma into this understanding. Over dinner, and effectively soused, she divulges that she planned but did not commit a school shooting. The difference between the Emma that Charlie loves and an inmate in a federal penitentiary is razor-thin. She had a weapon and a plan—but then another shooter beat her to the act at a nearby mall. Through observing the emotional fallout of this other shooting and being invited to partake in activism against gun violence, she comes to find a new identity and community.

Why Relationships Matter

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This information presents an extreme cognitive dissonance for Charlie. He cannot integrate the Emma he loves with Emma the adolescent goth with a shooter manifesto. In a hilarious quick cut, we see a modern-day Charlie quietly panicking as he poses with the younger, much gothier version of Emma, played by Jordyn Curet. He instead relies on others to tell his stories for him.

Outsourcing the Story

Tragically, Charlie seeks to let others “story” Emma’s character rather than authoring her for himself. In one scene, he again edits his wedding speech, rewriting a sentence about how kind Emma is. At least, he tries to rewrite it… He struggles to find a more nuanced description of her that integrates this previous identity. He ends up deleting the entire wedding speech. Together with his friends, he begins to recast Emma into a story more palatable to the public. In a gross exaggeration of the truth, he explains that she almost shot up her school, not because she was bullied, but because she was traumatized by witnessing up close the death of her childhood friend. The whole telling is incredibly invalidating and reveals Charlie’s prim sensibilities that lead him to so easily disregard Emma’s nuanced history with class, race, and gender. He sees not his story of her but the story his friends, culture, and society tell of her.

Over time, cognitive processing therapy seeks to loosen the rigidity of the just-world belief, allowing for a more nuanced version of it that integrates the trauma: something like, Often good things do happen to good people, but sometimes the world is not fair. At the start of the film, Charlie is unable to accept that the world is bad, or even that he himself can be bad (Charlie seems to neglect that he did not almost cyberbully a high school classmate so badly that the kid and his family moved away; he actually caused that boy tangible harm, unlike Emma). He instead paints Emma as bad, sparing himself and the world. Although far too little, too late, he does eventually come to question this.

A Relationship Is a Story You Co-Author

After their wedding, a beaten and bloodied Charlie returns alone to their apartment. He sulks, attends to his injuries, and plays Jesse Rae’s “Inside Out,” a song that Emma previously put on to frustrate Charlie, and that Charlie now plays to admit his fault. He then goes to their favorite diner down the street and orders food. Emma walks in wearing an orange puffy jacket over her white dress. She asks to sit with Charlie, feigning to not know who he is. Charlie goes along with it. “What is your name?” they ask.

The plain diner becomes a tabula rasa for a new telling of their story, a story for which the boundaries of a public vs. private life will be more intentional and forgiving. With all their baggage, the scene is a beautiful reminder that the health of a relationship depends not on what actually happens but on how the two collaboratively author what those events mean. Together, they will sort through the rubble and again build a coherent "story of us." And the shared narrative they construct will not only reflect a new reality but will also shape how their new life is lived.

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