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Zola
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The Story
Zola (Taylour Paige) is a proud young woman who likes
to strip and dance for a paying public – any opportunity to do so relieves the
grinding boredom of her day-job as a diner waitress in Detroit. Her chance
meeting with the vivacious-cum-hysterical Stefani (Riley Keough) sends her off
on a sudden work trip to Florida – with the unexpected travel partners of
Stefani’s erratic boyfriend, Derrek (Nicholas Braun), and an increasingly
menacing figure at first identified only as X (Colman Domingo).
Is X Stefani’s secret lover, her dance-booking manager
… or her pimp? Zola, while steadfastly refusing to engage in prostitution,
finds herself caught up in a frantic whirlwind of dangerous events. Guns are
brandished, gang rape looms …
The tag that usually accompanies Zola is that it is “based on a Twitter thread” – 148 tweets, to be
precise, posted in a narrative sequence by A’Ziah ‘Zola’ King in 2015 (they can
be read here). That’s certainly where the telling of the story (it
even became known as #TheStory) began, and the film sticks to it fairly
faithfully – while tossing off the clever on-screen disclaimer that “most of
what follows is true”.
As it happens, the social media mania around this tale
didn’t ignite immediately – King admits she had to post it several times before
it gained major celebrity endorsements (including singer Missy Elliot and
filmmaker Ava DuVernay).
The next major telling of the tale occurred near the
end of 2015, when David Kushner picked it up for Rolling Stone magazine. This piece presents itself as an investigation into
the “real story” – duly noting the discrepancies and contradictions between
accounts from the various participants (or, at least, those who would agree to
be interviewed). In it, King admits she may have juiced up some details for the
purpose of greater entertainment value, and that, once it got rolling online,
she was “riffing on the reactions of her followers who responded in real time”.
Typical auto-fiction creative license! But the essential veracity of the story is
upheld.
More significant than the journalistic establishing of
truth-value, however, is the moral and political load that Kushner freighted
onto Zola’s narrative. For him – and for the society at large, as he solemnly
implies – Zola’s experience is a cautionary glimpse into the prevalence of sex
trafficking, and how women are lured, tricked and trapped into its hellish
cycle.
I think it is fair to say that King’s original tweets
reflect very little general awareness of this aspect, beyond what was
immediately occurring to her; this “reading” arrived after the fact, and King
was thereafter happy to amplify it. The tone of her tweets is resolutely: this
is fun, this is crazy, to live through it was a bit scary, but (as her cap-off
states) “If u stuck wit that whole story you are hilarious lol”.
Janicza Bravo’s film version (it is her second
feature), co-written with playwright Jeremy O. Harris, inherits these diverse
viewpoints, and tries to juggle them – not always successfully. Equally, it
tries to forge a path through the different ways in which Zola’s story could be
told cinematically: as a straightforward thriller-action plot, with or without
a social conscience; in a mimicry of unfolding social media activity (the sound
of Twitter notifications and animated love-hearts are constantly superimposed
on events); as a Sundance-style humanist testimony to one woman’s strength and
resilience in a tough situation; as a celebration of (to use Zola’s own proud
self-description) “hoeism”; and, finally, as a flipped-out, amoral piece of
contemporary surrealism in the recent tradition inaugurated by Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012).
If that stew doesn’t seem to you like a good recipe
for dramatic coherence – indeed, for coherence of any kind – you would be
absolutely correct. Zola is the type
of movie that viewers float through, occasionally grabbing for this or that
island of meaning, characterisation or topicality.
Some reviewers have yoked it to a relatively recent
sub-genre of movies about life in contemporary Florida (such as Moonlight [2016] and Waves [2019]) – under the terrible label
of Tampa-core, thus connecting it to the American independent movement of
Mumblecore. But the real precedent in this palm-tree-lined field is Abel
Ferrara’s little-seen, extraordinary The Blackout (1997), in
which the anti-hero’s consciousness swiftly disintegrates under the bombardment
of every kind of hyper-stimulation.
As we watch Zola,
we may wonder less about how real it is than about how seriously we are meant
to be taking it. Sometimes the atmosphere of threat that Zola faces seems
genuine, and at other moments it’s as light as a feather – even the original
Twitter thread includes jokes about the importance of spending a bit of quality
time in the sun, no matter what life-and-death situation is going down.
The recourse to madcap comedy hi-jinx does not always
serve the film well: to get out of a bad clinch, just run fast! Even more
vexingly, the central character’s psychology indomitably remains something of
an enigma: Zola ping-pongs, in a split second, from righteous declarations of
the need for female self-respect, to shoulder-shrugging acquiescence as
appointed manager/minder of Stefani’s prostitution appointments. Hoeism, it
seems, is a slippery moral slope.
Or is it? It can be argued that Zola tackles a modern world in which amorality (doing what whatever
you have to do in order to survive) and/or alienation (not being sure what it
is you really think or feel about anything) are rife. That puts it in a
continuum with films set beyond Florida, including Sofia Coppola’s true-life,
rich-kid crime tale The Bling Ring (2013) and, further back, Tim Hunter’s great River’s Edge (1986). Both of these prevalent states of contemporary life – the amoral and
the alienated – blend into (and are partly triggered by) a technological, pop
culture environment that has only become more intense in the age of mobile
phones and the Internet.
For screen storytellers, however, these themes can be
difficult to handle, and even more difficult to represent. Portraying
affectless people poses the problem of whether a film should mimic that lack of
emotion, or else try to generate feeling (and insight) in another way, from
another perspective. This is exactly what the Rolling Stone article did when it appealed to sex trafficking as
the key context of Zola’s story. But was that ever Zola’s own understanding
while these heady events were happening to her? As a filmmaker, Bravo finds
herself stuck awkwardly between a story related in a breathless present tense,
yet desperately needing some wisdom of mature hindsight.
In this light, the main contribution that Bravo and
Harris bring to the material is the biting irony of a racially and culturally
black perspective. (Bravo replaced James Franco in the director’s seat after
sexual misconduct allegations were made against him in 2018.) Many are the
scenes in which Zola freezes or rolls her eyes in the midst of the wholesale,
surface appropriation of black speech and manners by her white travel
companions – especially the often grotesque Stefani. (X is a more ambiguous
case, since he is revealed to be Abegunde Olawale, a Nigerian.)
Again, I think it’s correct to say that the original
tweets made virtually nothing of this cultural gap between black and white.
It’s another layer of interpretation, of significance, that has been added on –
and hence floats unsteadily, like every other ingredient in this mix.
As to the social media ambience of Zola, that is a decidedly mixed
blessing. We permanently feel the unresolved tension between, on the one hand,
imparting a linear, reasonably conventional story and, on the other hand,
bearing witness to the image-crazy, discombobulated world of our time. I
personally could not bear Spring Breakers – which seemed to me like a ten-minute block of stylistic affectations looped nine
times – but at least it had the courage of its loony, post-postmodern
convictions.
Bravo attempts a compromise manoeuver: whenever she
exaggerates the artifice of image and sound treatments (Mica Levi’s inventive
music score plays a big part here), it is usually in order to give us access to
Zola’s presumed inner life, her thoughts and emotions. But this, in turn,
contradicts the idea that all the
characters are, by definition, swimming in the same agitated bubble of social
media stimuli.
In this regard, the amateur music video staged in the
car (to the tune of “Hannah Montana” by Migos) is the film’s painful lowlight, while
Bravo’s spirited staging of a “response” to Zola’s narrative posted by Stefani
on Reddit – reversing every one of its premises, and posing Stefani herself as
the victim – is the undoubted highlight. And just remember: if u stuck wit that whole film you are
hilarious lol.
© Adrian Martin September 2021 |
