‘The drama’: immune to the massive cult of queen Zendaya

Before auteur cinema and the conviction that the director is the true star became fashionable, people basically went to the movies to enjoy the company of actors and actresses who had magnetism and who early on or over time reached mythological dimensions.

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In most cases, that lasting appeal lasted a long time and memory still appreciates their remembrance. Promotion worked, marketing (although back then it wasn’t called that, something the film business considers fundamental), but it was clear that viewers fell in love with people who had something special, the ability to hypnotize the onlookers all the time.

You fell in love with their presence, their gestures, what they expressed, what they seemed or suggested, and what they might have hidden. The camera, so wise or capricious, loved them and that love was transmitted to the viewers. And who knows how they were off-screen. It didn’t matter. Only what they conveyed in the movies mattered. I find Cary Grant’s response to an original journalist who asked his opinion about Cary Grant brilliant: “I wish I were Cary Grant.”

And faithful to my lifelong loves in cinema, music, or literature, I try to find out, without dedicating excessive effort, where the infinite charm, supreme art, and communicative ability of people who captivate youth anywhere lies: Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift, Rosalía. I don’t get the point that turns them into angels. My problem, my narrow-mindedness, an old age that has learned nothing.

And within cinema, I’m amazed by the tons of information and cult around an actress named Zendaya. She’s beautiful, agreed. She has an exotic face and an expressiveness that can be mysterious, with ease to hint at the storms of the soul. But I don’t perceive anything legendary in her. Apparently, she is going to be the queen in the movies of the present and future. Girls identify with her to the extreme. Everyone desires her. Well, okay.

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She is the protagonist of The Drama. I saw it three days ago and I already struggle terribly to remember its plot. That said, it has plenty of pretensions and psychological sophistication. It talks about the preparations for a wedding that seems to bless the future. But there are dark areas in the lady. Coming from childhood and adolescence. Including homicidal instincts. I feel neither cold nor warm about the twisted intrigue. Filmed with efforts of twisted personality by the Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli. Since I’m bored, I don’t care about the past, present, and future of this couple. And I can’t stand Robert Pattinson either, who plays her confused and distressed boyfriend.

But trying to understand the Zendaya phenomenon, I watch with astonishment the first season of the series Euphoria, which the trendy say is amazing. And I’m stunned by this court of messed-up teenagers. They’re all hooked. On drugs, on damn phones, and on pornography on social media. Some have a lot of sex, although in very strange ways. Sadism, masochism, violence, derangement, and active or passive depression abound.

The parents, from comfortable middle class, are as dumb as their offspring. And Zendaya, who is already tainted with fentanyl, is constantly going crazy or suffering. There is a large audience for whom the treatment this series offers about these very strange people seems the height of subversion, the realistic and truthful portrait of sex, substances, and addiction to technology that many teenagers and “youngsters” are hooked on. I can’t stand them. Ignoring them. Including Zendaya.