Scalding Hot Takes: Zola

To the detriment of my mental health and overall happiness I spend way too much time on Twitter trying to distract myself from life’s inexorable horror and my own infinite failings as a writer and human being. 

Yet I at least have the decency to feel a deep sense of shame and embarrassment over my terrible addiction to social media. So you would think that I definitely would have read the notorious tweet storm that inspired the movie Zola. 

But I did not. I’m not sure why that is. I didn’t read it before buying tickets to see Zola and I’m not particularly tempted to read it now despite very much digging the film. 

My ambivalence towards social media is intense. I am hopelessly dependent upon it to provide a much needed lifeline to the outside world but I also see what it’s doing to me individually and to society as a whole and overall the effect is not unlike my ex-wife’s Meatloaf Surprise: not good! 

Zola makes a lot of smart choices, chief among them a refreshing and unexpected unwillingness to moralize about social media, to cast Old Testament judgment on newfangled technology for warping our minds and obliterating our attention spans, even though, objectively speaking, social media is evil and should be destroyed.

The filmmakers very easily could have made Zola a movie about  social media. Instead it handles Twitter matter-of-factly, as a core element of its characters’ everyday lives rather than as a cultural cancer or force for darkness in the universe. 

There are so many ways that Zola could have gone hopelessly awry and devolved into a seedy, sordid, racially problematic  exploitation movie with terrible gender politics that it is a goddamn minor miracle that the movie turned out the way it did. 

I’m glad that I went into Zola blind because one of its great strengths is its sense of immediacy. I felt like I was there with unforgettable protagonist Aziah "Zola" King (Taylour Paige) as she uses her guile, street smarts and brains to survive an increasingly perilous situation. 

It helped that I did not recognize any of the actors in the movie or know them from other projects and other characters so there was nothing keeping me from seeing them as the desperate lost souls they were playing rather than the professional pretenders playing them. 

In Zola, waitress and sometimes stripper Zola gets a decidedly sketchy offer from customer Stefani (Riley Keough, who has managed to somehow carve out a successful career in show-business despite the considerable obstacle of being Elvis Presley’s beautiful, talented, wildly charismatic granddaughter) to travel down to Florida to strip alongside her for what she promises is an enormous amount of money. 

Zola is tempted by the prospect of a big old pile of cold hard cash, of course, but she’s also clearly sexually attracted to Stefani. Though she has a steady boyfriend, Zola’s sexuality is fluid and her partner’s staid predictability makes Stefani’s wildness even more exciting by comparison. 

Stefani is brazenly sexual and filthy and uninhibited in a way that Zola initially finds attractive. She may be unethical and unreliable and not all there but unlike Zola’s boyfriend, she sure as shit isn’t boring, so against her better judgment Zola agrees to go on the trip with Stefani, Derrek (Nicholas Braun), Stefani’s almost impressively gullible dope of a boyfriend, and X (Colman Domingo), Stefani’s mysterious, enigmatic “roommate.” 

Paige has such an expressive face that a single facial expression, generally one of muted horror and disgust, can convey more than reams of exposition and lengthy monologues ever could. 

It’s consequently possible to pin-point, down to the millisecond, that Zola’s physical and emotional attraction to the wild woman who has lured her down to Florida dissipates completely and is replaced by a tricky combination of pity, anger and sisterly concern. It happens early in the trip on the ride down to Florida when she realizes that Stefani is legitimately unhinged and not just uninhibited.

Even before Zola makes a fraction of the fortune she was promised at a rundown strip club where a seriously misguided patron attempts unsuccessfully to flatter her by telling her she looks like Whoopi Goldberg Zola realizes that she has been deceived. 

The motel where they’re staying would need to be upgraded considerably just to qualify as a dump and it turns out X isn’t just Stefani’s roommate: he’s also her pimp. 

X wants to perform the same service for Zola but she makes it clear that she will not have sex for money. That is a line that she steadfastly refuses to cross. It’s not that Zola has a problem with sex work in the least. 

Zola would one hundred support Stefani choosing to be a sex worker if it meant financial security and benefits and real legal protection. Stefani doesn’t have any of those things. 

Stefani’s problems, and by extension Zola’s problems, are caused largely by the illegal, unregulated nature of sex work and the way it makes vulnerable young women like Stefani completely completely dependent on men like X, who are vicious and controlling and sociopathic. 

X is a sadistic and cruel but like everyone in Zola he’s also infinitely, fascinatingly human and complex, particularly in his relationship with Zola. He’s angry at Zola because he cannot control her or sell her to lonely men for money but he also respects her strength and her brains, particularly after she shows Stefani how she can make way more money just by charging more. 

Zola isn’t just a better human being and hustler than X. She’s intuitively a better pimp as well. Zola’s salesmanship work spectacularly well and at the end of a long, long, long, long night of having sex with men for money she has more money than she could have possibly imagined. 

Zola is a very physical movie that drives home how physically and emotionally exhausting it is to have sex for money with an endless series of seemingly interchangeable customers.

This relentlessly engaging dark comedy of amorality does not judge Stefani for how she makes money but it does not romanticize or glamorize it either. 

As sordid and sad and sleazy as the characters in Zola might be they’re never caricatures or broad stereotypes, but rather deeply flawed human beings trying to make the best of a singularly fucked-up situation. 

This includes Derrek, who is pathetic and deluded in a way that’s unmistakably comic, or rather tragicomic. We laugh at Derrek but we feel for him as well. Braun lends his character a real pathos and puppy-like vulnerability.

People have speculated as to how real Zola is. The consensus seems to be that, in the tradition of social media, the title character exaggerated certain incidents for dramatic and comic effect but the core of the story is true. 

In a way it does not matter. What matters is that no matter how crazy and outrageous and sleazy things get, everything feels real, and to me that’s infinitely preferable to a movie that sticks closely to the facts and honors the historical record but feels fake and inauthentic. 

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