Friends with benefits
“Zola” opens with the strains of a wistful piano as we watch two young women apply their makeup in a room that seems full of mirrors. The pair, Zola and Stefani, are intent on their work. As Zola tends to her hair, she begins to speak to the audience – “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me and this bitch here fell out?”
And we’re off.
In October 2015, Aziah ‘Zola’ King went viral on Twitter with a 148-tweet thread that began with that now (internet-) famous opening hook. If you were relentlessly online in 2015, you knew exactly where you were when you first heard of the Zola-escapade – a wild story about a waitress, sometimes stripper, whose road trip to Tampa turned into a frenzied weekend of chaos, debauchery and violence. Now, six years later, “Zola” is set to be released after a festival premiere in January 2020. The opening hook is a good one, and its presuppositions have been fascinating for the past six years.
The opening sequence, somewhere in a kind of dreamscape media-res, gives way to their first meeting. “I met this white bitch at my job,” Zola recounts in voiceover as we are introduced to Stefani in the past. Zola is the waitress at a Hooters to Stefani and a man (“an old-ass, big-ass Black dude”). Stefani is immediately enamoured with her waitress and her “apple-sized” breasts. The two commiserate about their shared experience in exotic dancing. As they observe each other, a heart emoji appears on screen, a stamp of approval for the friendship. The next day, Stefani invites Zola on a road-trip. Two days later that friendship is severed.
The friendship-at-first-sight hook is a fascinating one. Kindred spirits bonding over shared experiences and ideas is ripe for narrative exploration – and a friendship that’s on the rocks? Even better. Except Stefani’s overtures of friendship are part of a pivot to prostitution, or sextrafficking, that Zola did not sign up for.
A Rolling Stone article, published a month after the thread, gets into clearer detail about the story – smoothing out the embellishments from King’s admittedly sensationalised version of the tale. The film sticks to the structure of King’s Tweets, though, framing this as a story about two not-quite-friends in a not-quite mutually beneficial relationship that’s about to split down the middle. But while Zola asks us, “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me and this bitch here fell out?” I kept wondering, the more I thought about the story, when did they even fall in the first place? The foundations of this alliance are so fragile.
As played by an excellent Taylour Paige, Zola feels too smart for this. From our very first shot of her, eyes darting sideways in scepticism of all she encounters, she feels too knowing to fall for this hazy imitation of friendship. Or, she plays it so close to her chest that we’re left to wonder at her motives. Maybe a friendship can come with some benefits. It’s a sharp performance that grounds everything revolving around her, particularly when the freneticism of the story manifests itself in a frenzied narrative in the film’s latter half. When things take a turn for a worse and the dancing job becomes a “prostitution” one, Zola’s wiliness helps Stefani get the best out of her bad job with a pimp who seems to be underselling. (Colman Domingo, the second-best-inshow as the hard-to-read X). Paige’s face is inscrutable – prideful at her business acumen, ambivalent about her “friend”, indifferent at the randomness of life? Who can tell? She’s making the most out of a bad friendship.
Janicza Bravo, who directs her script (cowritten with playwright Jeremy O. Harris), filters the women’s tale through social media. In the most kinetic sequence, a relentless parade of men file into a hotel room as if they were posts in an endless Instagram scroll. Body after body after body, chests, penises, faces, arms. It’s overwhelming, in theory. But it’s so much, and it’s delivered with such ambivalence, we soon get numb. It’s happening at us, not to us. It’s happening at Zola, and Stefani, too.
In an earlier sequence, the road trip begins with a car-ride of amped up rapping that ends with Paige’s face moving from performative excitement into a distinct sense of unease. The excess of excitement soon gives way to something resembling mistrust, or even fear, when the ephemeral thrills of newness congeal into the realisation that this is not as good as it seems. What’s in a friend, anyway? Or, “a friend”. Paige’s face is often inscrutable. At times, she seems vaguely fascinated by the ridiculousness of it all. The thrill of something new? Perhaps.
If friendship promises a portal to something newer, no matter how dangerous, then Pixar’s “Luca” announces that in an even more emphatic way. Like with “Zola”, a new friend introduces our titlecharacter to a newer world, with some bumps along the way.
Luca is a young sea monster, underwater alongside the Italian coast of Portorosso. When above-water, his body transforms into the guise of a human. A chance encounter with Alberto, a fellowmonster living above-water, transforms his life. Alberto lives above land, in an abandoned hideout. Their friendship is cemented immediately. When Luca’s parents discover his earthly encounter, they threaten to send him to his uncle and Alberto and Luca escape to the centre of the city – where sea-monsters are less than welcome. And we’re off on an adventure.
Like Stefani with Zola, Alberto withholds key information from Luca. And like Zola, Luca is in way over his head. But this is a Pixar film – and it all ends well for friendship and love. In a way. “Luca”, in many ways feels indebted to that other amination studio – Studio Ghibli. The story has distinct similarities to Miyazaki’s “Ponyo on the Cliff”, and the ‘Portorosso’ setting feels like an almost certain reference to Miyazaki’s “Porco Rosso”. Miyazaki’s films are less plot-heavy than Pixar’s entries, and are very much about luxuriating in mood and sensations of place and people. “Luca” tries this to varying effects.
“Luca” runs a mere 95 minutes, a few minutes longer than “Zola” and it’s an unusually short length for a Pixar film (the shortest feature-length entry in more than two decades) which feels natural for a
story where little happens. There’s a summery-laidback atmosphere to the plot, where the stakes are small, or seem small, even when they might not be. Luca and Alberto decide to stick together, yearning for a Vespa to travel the word together. They’ll do this by entering a town-race, with their newfound friend Giulia. Things don’t work out. And then they work out despite that.
“Zola” stretches a few days across ninety-minutes, while “Luca” flattens a few weeks (or more) into the same running time. The script, by Jesse Andrews and Mike Jones, is clearly trying to rush the set-up so that we can enjoy a diffident sojourn in the town, except in moments the first third feels too fast and the second two-thirds feel too languid. If “Luca” is about the friendship between the two boys, then it feels like it’s short-changing their relationship. But as a character-study, Luca’s identity of the wide-eyed awshucks dreamer feels too familiar to make an imprint on us beyond the surface-level. It’s pleasant watching Luca and Alfonso traipse through the town, but it’s so gentle and resistant to excavating anything in real depth, I kept wondering what really it was trying to tell us about friendship or identity.
That “Luca” has caused a very mild storm-in-teacup about homosocial friendships and queer allegory is a bit expected. The film’s allegorical possibilities, two out-of-place boys struggling to keep their true identities secret, revealing themselves to others in moments dependent on saving the other, is perhaps not a stretch if you’re using metaphor to illuminate identity. By mere coincidence, readings of allegorical queerness on to textually heterosexual characters have been a topic this month online. This June, Anthony Mackie, star of Disney+’s “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” went on a mildly confusing tirade when asked to comment on fans of the show “shipping” (as in relationship-ping) Sam and Bucky, the two (straight) male title-characters. A few days later, PascalEmmanuel Gobry (a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center) tweeted about readers “retconning queerness” on to historical male friendships. To read his thread would be to think that same-sex friendships were being targeted by queer readings. But what was it with readings of homosocial desire onto same-sex friendships? Was it retconning, or was there valid ground for exploration? I thought
about the thread while watching “Luca”, but also while watching “Zola”.
When Zola and Stefani first meet, we’re not sure if Stefani is friendly or avaricious. Stefani’s companion has his own ideas. He responds in turn – “So, you just gonna pull that dyke shit in front of me and not include me?” The women ignore him, but the camera zooms in on their face as if observing a romantic meetcute. Textually, the sapphic desire abates as the film begins to shift into high-gear, but I kept thinking about that first encounter. What to make of this initial meeting of the two? The fact that the real Stefani (real-name Jessica, who refutes King’s version of the events) is bisexual feels peripheral to the story, yet Riley Keough’s ardent “I love yous” as Stefani later in the film to Zola made me think that, considering latent homosocial desire – even if just as lead-up to competitiveness in heterosexual friendships – feels logical, especially in a media landscape where queerness is still often invisible.
What do “Luca” or “Zola” have to say about friendships, though? Homosocial or otherwise? That I’m reading the theme of friendship as the fulcrum of their varying digressions on their respective protagonists finding their identity might be overselling it. But, there’s a hedging kind of ambivalence at work in both films that’s kind of fascinating for its indifference. Both movies end in movement. Zola and Stephanie in a vehicle after an almost fatal encounter, Luca on his way to a (hopefully) better life. What comes next? Who knows? We might intuit something from both these endings as to where the friendships stand in the future. And then again, we might not. Maybe we are not even meant to be thinking about the friendships in the long term. Just Zola and Luca, as individuals. But, even then, filtering individual growth through friendships feels significant, particularly when so much contemporary media engages in the more familiar themes of the individual against the world.
It makes sense that both films centre on trips to new places. What is friendship, if not a journey to a new land? Except, you can’t quite stay there. Luca and Zola might think about how changed they are by these encounters, but I’m also not sure that the frenetic adventures of both films might linger in my brain for long after seeing them. They are entertaining enough as
I’m watching the films, but to what end? I wonder if the fleeting nature might be a manifestation of the relationships themselves. Schematic queer allegories? Social parables? Coming-of-age?
What’s in a friendship anyway? In “Zola” and “Luca” they’re really just steps to the title characters coming to a semblance of recognising who they are. For better, and for worse.
Maybe a better opening, for both, might be, “Y’all wanna hear a story about how I realised that I could survive the craziest of misadventures?”