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Seen from the right warped angle, “The Drama,” a new film from the Norwegian director and screenwriter Kristoffer Borgli, is less a drama than it is a comedy—a romantic comedy, which kicks off with what one character will later describe as a classic “meet-cute.” Though, since it involves a white lie, a misunderstanding, and some borderline stalkerish behavior, it’s perhaps more of a meet-sketchy. In a bustling Boston café, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) is instantly smitten with Emma (Zendaya), who’s quietly reading a novel by a window. He looks up the title on his phone and, after scanning a plot summary, approaches her from behind, gushing about how much he loves the book—only to get no response. Emma, he doesn’t realize, hasn’t heard him speak; she’s deaf in her right ear and listening to music via her left one. Some confusion and awkwardness ensues until Emma, recognizing what’s going on, lets Charlie off the hook with a forgiving smile and an interested query: “Can we start over?”

That question will become something of a steady motif for Charlie and Emma. Or, rather, it has already become one, given that this origin story turns out to be a flashback, an episode that Charlie is considering mentioning in his speech for their wedding, which is fast approaching. Over the course of their relationship, you gather, Charlie and Emma have dodged many an argument by hitting the reset button, allowing themselves an easy do-over, with the possibility of some goofily improvised role-play. But “Can we start over?” also proves grimly prophetic; by the end, the two lovers might well wish that they had never started in the first place. Their perfectly imperfect romance narrative has been derailed by a more dangerous form of storytelling, the kind that can strand even the closest relationship in uncharted territory.

If you haven’t yet seen “The Drama” and plan to, best to stop reading here, before all is revealed. One night, as Charlie and Emma are finalizing food and wine selections for the wedding, with their married friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), an ill-advised game of “What’s the Worst Thing You’ve Ever Done?” begins. Emma’s worst thing, blurted out in a moment of drunken foolishness, is a particular doozy: when she was fifteen, she says, she planned to carry out a mass shooting at her high school. Thankfully, she didn’t go through with it and would never dream of doing such a thing now, though that’s scant consolation for her fiancé and friends, who, for a while, are in utter disbelief. Rachel furiously turns on Emma, with a mix of self-righteous hypocrisy and vindictive spite that occasions Haim’s strongest, spikiest work since her star-making turn in “Licorice Pizza” (2021). Charlie, although more sympathetic, is left reeling, and Pattinson, always at his best when his matinée-idol looks surrender to warpings of fear and anxiety, conducts a virtuosic symphony of shifting moods. As the wedding-day countdown accelerates, ushering in a litany of vender appointments and other logistical niceties, Charlie can’t stop wondering what the point of it all is—and who, exactly, this woman he claims to love so unconditionally is.

Does the movie itself know who she is? I’m not so sure. Emma is a literary editor, though the specifics are awfully vague—a late subplot involving challenges on the job feels particularly superficial—and her love for literature seems to begin and end with that novel in the café. Zendaya more than fulfills the central requirement of a romantic lead—when she’s onscreen, you can’t imagine looking at anyone else—but her striking presence alone can’t provide the psychological illumination that the film needs as a portrait of repressed, and ultimately redeemed, violence. “The Drama” has a juicy, combustible premise that it struggles to justify, not because there’s anything inherently distasteful about broaching the subject of real-world gun violence in the context of a sexy, tempestuous Hollywood melodrama but, rather, because Emma’s deep, dark secret simply doesn’t ring true.

Some might contend that this seeming implausibility is very much to the film’s point, insofar as many shooters’ identities have taken their communities by surprise. (One scene acknowledges the relative rarity of shootings committed by women, mainly so that it can then conveniently bat that statistic away.) But Borgli undermines his premise—ironically, by attempting to substantiate it. He repeatedly flashes back more than a decade to the high-school-age Emma, played by Jordyn Curet, who bears little physical or emotional resemblance to her Zendaya counterpart. Is that also the film’s point—that people can, in fact, transform themselves dramatically—or is it plain bad casting? Would it have made more sense for Zendaya, although several years older than when she first starred as a teen-age drug addict on the HBO series “Euphoria,” to embody Emma’s younger self as well? In any event, Curet’s Emma is a case study and a cipher. She’s lonely, isolated, and bullied; she wears nerd-coded glasses one minute and disreputable eye makeup the next. She has ready access to her father’s military rifle, which she drags around her family’s pointedly empty house as if it were her closest companion. Emma is turned on by the aesthetics of sociopathic rage and enjoys making online videos in which she spews hatred and poses with the rifle. But she is most heavily influenced, the film suggests, by the sheer ubiquity of school shootings and gun culture, which has contaminated America at large with a free-floating psychic residue of mass violence.

Borgli, a co-editor on the film, cuts jaggedly between past and present, and sometimes between reality and hallucination. Watching the young Emma, we can never be entirely sure if we are seeing an accurate representation of a distant time, a distorted memory of Emma’s, or a paranoid imagining of Charlie’s. In a way, the filmmaker is accessing the slippery terrain of his previous work, “Dream Scenario” (2023), an ominous black comedy that starred Nicolas Cage as a kind of flop-sweaty Freddy Krueger figure—a nebbishy professor who invaded the dreams of everyone around him. It was, like “The Drama,” a story about the dangerous power of suggestion, the repeated blows to our collective psyche, and the ease of villainizing someone for things that they didn’t actually do.

“Dream Scenario” was darkly amusing for a while, before it ultimately crapped out, unable to sustain either its funny-scary genre mechanics or its moribund cancel-culture subtext. “The Drama,” for all its miscalculations, is better at holding your interest. It was richly shot, on film, by Arseni Khachaturan, who brings out a lustrous golden-afternoon warmth in the film’s Boston locations, and it has an intensely jangly horror-film score, by Daniel Pemberton, that keeps your nerves suitably off-balance. Mostly, though, it holds you for a structurally built-in reason, the kind that keeps wedding movies in business. It isn’t just Emma but Charlie and Emma’s very beautiful and expensive nuptials that are in danger of being cancelled.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Forced to play the game himself, Borgli might not supply what many would deem the obvious answer: a relationship that he had in his twenties with a teen-age girl from Oslo. She was ten years his junior and not yet of voting age (eighteen) but over the age of consent (sixteen). Borgli wrote defensively about his “May-December romance” in an essay that was published by a Norwegian magazine in 2012; an English translation recently resurfaced in The Hollywood Reporter during the publicity campaign for “The Drama,” which is being released in theatres this week by A24. In short, the toxic cloud of judgment that Borgli seeks to interrogate has settled around and polluted the reception to the movie itself, forming a kind of life-versus-art ouroboros that, in the eyes of the most cynical marketeers, might seem less a blow than an opportunity.

I mention this not because Borgli’s life choices are under review but because his artistic ones are. And although “The Drama” has mercifully little to add to the self-serving tedium of so much age-gap discourse, it does boast at least one prominent visual-design element—a spiral staircase, in Charlie and Emma’s apartment—that reminded me, each time I saw it, of a similar fixture in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” (1979). I don’t think I’m casting about idly for associations here; I saw “The Drama” and sensed the connection even before reading Borgli’s essay, in which he holds up “Manhattan,” with its “open and romantic” presentation of a fictional May-December romance, as justification for his real-life one. The characters in “The Drama” have quintessentially Allen-esque jobs in the literary and artistic establishments; Charlie works as a curator at a Cambridge art museum, and his job is only slightly less decorative, in the context of the narrative, than his fiancée’s is. At one point, driven nearly mad by Emma’s revelations, he finds a provocative book of art photographs on his desk, filled with images of women holding guns—and proceeds to torment himself with visions of Emma in the same sexy-violent poses.

“The Drama” never manages to imbue Emma with more depth than one of those images. The movie’s attempts to dramatize her history of near-violence feel perfunctory to the point of incuriosity. It treats her mental-health history not as a complicated reality but as a premise, a narrative impetus, and, worst of all, a problem that seems to weigh more heavily on those around her than it does on her. (No illumination is forthcoming from Emma’s parents, who, despite being significant variables in this scenario, are kept out of the spotlight until the big wedding-day climax.) I fear that this is at least partly, and through no fault of her own, a Zendaya issue. I was reminded, unhappily, of “Malcolm & Marie” (2021), in which the director and writer, Sam Levinson (of “Euphoria” fame), cast her as a recovering drug addict, turning her scantily attired body and her howls of resentment into a voyeuristic spectacle. “The Drama” treats her better than that, but to no more substantial effect: rather than messily exploiting her, it reduces her to a tidy blank. Either way, you have to wonder: What is it about Zendaya that compels certain filmmakers—and, there’s no way around it, certain white male filmmakers—to pelt her with gobs of unexplored trauma? Do they think suffering looks good on her? Does her air of youthful innocence provide just the touch of sugar they need to make the hard-core medicine go down?

A more honest appraisal of Emma’s character, and of her and Charlie’s chances of staying together, might have been conducted without the artificial pressurization of a wedding-countdown framework. And yet it’s in the accumulation of tension and the exacerbation of squirm that Borgli’s real strengths as a filmmaker lie. The road to Charlie and Emma’s big day is paved with tense appointments and ill-fated encounters, the most memorable of which involves Charlie’s colleague Misha, played, with a brilliant swirl of matter-of-fact cynicism and empathetic concern, by Hailey Benton Gates. The wedding itself unfolds as a series of escalating set pieces, dryly observed and thoroughly excruciating, that reminded me of the great Scandinavian tradition of gathering-from-hell movies, including Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Celebration” (1998) and Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” (2011). As in those films, Borgli sends up the emptiness and tedium of codified social rituals—what the couple’s dance instructor describes, witheringly, as their “inherently performative” nature. “The Drama” ends on a note of grace that suggests Charlie and Emma may well survive the horror of their wedding; it also suggests that they will look back on it, in the future, as the actual worst thing they’ve ever done. ♦

On an icy Friday morning in February, in Brooklyn’s Little Caribbean neighborhood, Tascha Van Auken, the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement, was knocking on strangers’ doors—something she’d done many times before. As the field director of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, she oversaw an operation that drew a hundred thousand volunteers and knocked on an estimated three million doors. It was the culmination of the nearly ten years that Van Auken had spent in leadership roles in the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, where, with a core of like-minded organizers, she had helped to transform what was once a sleepy vestige of the now old New Left into a central player in New York politics.

That morning, she was shadowing a team from the O.M.E.’s Public Engagement Unit as they canvassed apartment buildings, helping New Yorkers register for city services. Mamdani had appointed Van Auken to her post on his second day in office, declaring that the O.M.E. would “fundamentally change” the way New Yorkers related to city government. On one hand, this sounded like awfully sweeping rhetoric for a job that, oversees a handful of preëxisting city programs dealing with community groups and civic outreach. On the other, his claim signalled a desire to channel campaign energy into the work of governing—and, in so doing, to sidestep the kind of letdown that followed Barack Obama’s grassroots-powered candidacy. If the O.M.E. captured the ambitious idealism of the new administration, it also sparked the fevered imaginations of its antagonists. The New York Post predicted that, under the leadership of “Democratic Socialist comrade Tascha Van Auken,” the office would serve as a front for “radical activists”; more recently, the paper has crowed over the prospect of hiring “15 (count ’em, 15) comrades to provide agitprop” for an office one unnamed source compared to “the Soviet politburo.”

Van Auken bears little resemblance to any caricature of left-wing extremism. She is a soft-spoken woman in middle age with dark hair and an old-fashioned countenance; if some actresses are said to have faces that have seen an iPhone, Van Auken’s seems like it could have seen a phonograph. Yet few people have been as influential as she has in making the New York City D.S.A. a force that can reliably turn out thousands of volunteers and reshape races with its hard-fought endorsement process. Currently, the D.S.A. counts eight socialists in the state legislature and four in the City Council. “The foundations of not only our field program but our electoral strategy as a whole were created, in large part, by Tascha,” Grace Mausser, the co-chair of the N.Y.C. D.S.A., told me.

“I think the question is, why has D.S.A. been able to build a really durable organization over the last decade?” Sam Lewis, a friend with whom Van Auken co-chaired the Brooklyn D.S.A.’s Electoral Working Group, said. “What Tascha brought was a sensibility about how to treat people and how to relate to people that is now built into the DNA of D.S.A.”

This sort of politics—practiced on a quotidian human scale—was also the Public Engagement Unit’s aim that February morning. The team was registering citizens for IDNYC cards and Fair Fares, a city program that provides a fifty per cent discount on transit for low-income New Yorkers. Van Auken, entering a building on Linden Boulevard, peppered the team leaders with practical questions. (“What’s the best way not to overwhelm people?”) Those of us not actually knocking hung back in the stairwell; even so, some residents were hesitant to engage. “Pas ICE!” a team member fluent in Haitian Creole reassured one man who declined to open his door.

Van Auken’s role is, in a sense, a testing ground for what the new mayor can make socialism mean to his constituents. Mamdani has spoken admiringly of “sewer socialism,” in reference to a crop of left-wing leaders in early twentieth-century America who strengthened basic municipal services. (This week, in fact, the Mayor announced a hundred-and-eight-million-dollar investment in New York’s sewer system.) Reviving that legacy would mean cultivating a new trust in government—such that an official knock at the door might be expected to herald something good as opposed to a masked federal agent.

“The skill in developing trust quickly is impressive,” Van Auken said, watching the Public Engagement team at work. “You knock more doors, you talk to more people—it’s a numbers thing.” She volunteered to approach a door on the third floor, and, when she did, her knock was jaunty—tap ta-tap tap! No one answered. But that was only the first door; she’d keep going.

Van Auken grew up in Brooklyn, and her family spent a long stretch in Flatbush. Her mother, who had a staid upbringing in California, came to New York in the early sixties looking for someplace more diverse and less stifling. She raised her children (Van Auken has two brothers) to pay attention to the world around them—how the Macy’s then on Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall wasn’t maintained like the one in Herald Square, because there weren’t lots of white people shopping there. “She was very good at demystifying things,” Van Auken said. Her mother “wasn’t politically organized in any way,” but her proclivities were influential and clear. “I remember she really didn’t like Ronald Reagan.”

At Edward R. Murrow High School, in Midwood, Van Auken was a theatre kid, though not just a performer; she was also part of the stage crew. “I think I just liked collaboration,” she said. Her junior year, she and her younger brother participated in an evening of one-act plays; when they called home beforehand, their mother sounded upset but wouldn’t say why. “All day long we thought somebody had died,” Van Auken recalled. After the show, they found their parents in a school hallway, and learned that the family had been evicted. Van Auken was shocked; she’d had no real sense of their financial precarity. (Her father was an engineer, and her mother had for a time been a secretary in the same office.) “On the spectrum of folks who are evicted from their homes, we were on the luckier end,” she said. “My parents had friends with resources; we were never unhoused.”

Van Auken also felt lucky to be at Murrow—staff there were supportive and helped her to find grants and loans for college. Murrow’s founding principal, Saul Bruckner, was a legendary figure at the institution that he led for thirty years. A magnet school focussed on the arts, Murrow was a place that prized freedom over order and was premised on a fundamental respect for its students. In her speech accepting the O.M.E. job, Van Auken cited Bruckner’s profound influence; he had, she told the crowd, “taught generations of students that they mattered and that participation wasn’t reserved for someone else.”

Still, in her own life, sustained political engagement was slow to cohere. Back in Brooklyn after college at Emerson, she was appalled by the march toward war that followed 9/11. She went to protests and took the LSAT, but felt discouraged by the relative toothlessness of international human-rights law. Instead, in 2005, Van Auken took a job as a casting assistant at the Blue Man Group. It was a role that combined administrative tasks with the delicate business of assessing others’ abilities. Tim Aumiller, who worked with her there on and off for more than a decade, remembers her treating performers during auditions in a manner both genuinely respectful and “deftly diplomatic.” She got more comfortable with public speaking as she found herself obliged to address callback crowds of aspiring Blue Men. Also, she was extremely organized. “She was the first person who taught me Google Sheets,” Aumiller told me.

The 2008 recession brought layoffs to the Blue Man Group, and casting was among the first departments cut. Barack Obama, meanwhile, was running a Presidential campaign poised to channel the anger of the Bush years into a movement. Van Auken was interested in the candidate, but, even more than that, in the public energy coalescing around him. Through a friend, she got a paid job as a volunteer coördinator at a field office in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. “That campaign had a real, multiracial, working-class movement supporting it,” Van Auken said. “And it was mostly middle-aged women running everything.”

She learned about the mechanics of canvassing—how a campaign door-knocks its way toward a “win number,” the estimated count of likely voters required for a victory—and about the philosophy of Marshall Ganz, the veteran social-movements, civil-rights, and labor organizer who established the Obama campaign’s field strategy. Ganz’s approach hinged on the power of individual voters and volunteers. “Treating people like smart people who have agency, who can be there or not,” Van Auken said. “Asking people to step up and lead, so it’s not about me, it’s not about one person being a leader—this is all Marshall Ganz. He has this wonderful definition of leadership: you have to step into a moment of uncertainty and inspire other people to action toward a new possibility.” She returned to work at the Blue Man Group between campaigns, but, by then, she said, “I was hooked on organizing.”

Van Auken’s biography hits a series of beats common in histories of left-wing awakening in the twenty-first century. September 11th and the wars that followed were the occasion for disillusionment with the Democratic establishment; Obama’s first Presidential campaign offered a glimpse of an alternative, followed by further disillusionment. When Occupy Wall Street took off, Van Auken went to dozens of meetings but grew frustrated by the movement’s lack of structure. (“I mostly learned what not to do by trying to get involved with Occupy,” she told the Danish scholar Fabian Holt, in an interview for his 2025 book “Organize or Burn.”) She worked on a handful of causes in the years after 2008, but nothing pulled her in as the Obama campaign had until Bernie Sanders’s first Presidential run. The way he talked about the country’s problems energized her, and she could tell it was energizing other people, too.

In the summer of 2015, she went to a meetup of Bernie supporters at the Union Square Barnes & Noble and, at first, was disappointed. “It was sort of just a group of people being like, We should get this person to endorse him,” she recalled. On the subway trip home, though, she got to talking with another attendee about the Obama campaign, and about her interest in building a volunteer operation with the same degree of seriousness. “Could we get access to the voter files the way that campaigns do?” Van Auken remembered musing. Her new friend happened to be “really into data and building data systems.” By the end of the train ride, they were planning a Brooklyn for Bernie meeting on his apartment rooftop.

That first gathering grew into Team Bernie N.Y., an independent volunteer organization. The official campaign had focussed its resources on Iowa and New Hampshire, which left a late-primary state like New York with few channels for supporters’ enthusiasm. Van Auken’s group filled the void. When the Sanders campaign finally arrived in New York, in the weeks leading up to the election, “they very much came in and steamrolled a lot of the work that people had been doing,” she later told Holt. “But we gave them almost fifty thousand IDs that we had collected of supporters across the city.”

Van Auken had met members of the D.S.A., and, after Donald Trump’s first election, one of them suggested that she check out one of its meetings. The D.S.A. has been around since the early eighties—in 2015, it had around six thousand members nationally, but the numbers grew dramatically after the 2016 election. As of February, 2026, there are roughly a hundred thousand members nationally, and fourteen thousand in New York alone.

“I don’t know if she’d want me to,” Sam Lewis, her friend and fellow-organizer, told me. “But I’ll say that my recollection is that when she joined D.S.A. she was kind of iffy on even describing herself as a socialist.” Lewis did describe himself that way, but Van Auken gave him a new understanding of what that meant. “Like, what’s the point of being a democratic socialist if it’s just a book club? The ideology is that regular working people can take control of their political and economic circumstances—and, if we’re not doing that, what are we doing?” Lewis had recently helped form Brooklyn D.S.A.’s Electoral Working Group. “The proposal we wrote was, like, We want to build the grassroots electoral arm of a democratic-socialist organization,” he said. “But I had not built the grassroots electoral arm of anything at that time.” With Team Bernie N.Y., Van Auken had.

The new Electoral Working Group set out to create an organization that could run a campaign. Van Auken was skeptical of consultants and other paid experts. “Her attitude was, Elections are actually pretty straightforward,” Michael Kinnucan, an organizer who worked alongside her, told me. She hoped to avoid what she saw as mainstream campaign culture—one that is, as Kinnucan put it, “macho,” where “everyone is trying to pull rank on everyone else.” Van Auken insisted on respect for all participants, including respect for their time. “When people walked in the room for a meeting, they walked out with a plan,” Kinnucan said.

The reinvigorated D.S.A. lost the first two campaigns it ran (for a pair of City Council seats, in 2017). Then, in 2018, some D.S.A. members recruited an organizer named Julia Salazar to run for a State Senate seat; Van Auken managed the campaign, with Kinnucan as her deputy. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had achieved her upset victory in the months before Salazar’s primary, and though Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t risen through the democratic-socialist ranks, she had been endorsed by the group. Her star power brought heightened attention to the D.S.A. candidate. Salazar defeated her opponent—an eight-term Democratic incumbent—decisively, becoming the D.S.A.’s first socialist in the state House. A wave of five more would follow in 2020, among them Mamdani.

“There’s this term that sometimes emerges on campaigns—‘super-volunteer,’ ” Salazar told me. “Tascha hated that term.” In Van Auken’s view, talk of “super-volunteers” trivialized the contributions of others who could afford to give only a couple of hours of their time. The last weekend before Salazar’s primary, Kinnucan told me, “a big endorser who I won’t name” proposed doing an event with a d.j. “Tascha was, like, Julia will be canvassing. I hope you can do your d.j. thing without the candidate and without our team, because our team will be on the doors.”

Mamdani’s primary upset in June, 2025, marked a triumph for Van Auken’s electoral philosophy. It also arrived at a difficult moment: ten days later, her mother died, following a long illness. “She would have been very excited by all this,” Van Auken told me.

After the primary, she was put in touch with Ganz, who had been watching the campaign with interest, and who now teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “She’s for real,” he told me. “That’s no small thing.” Since then, they’ve continued to talk about the challenge of translating a movement campaign into government. “We have a lot of experience with that not working,” Ganz said. “This is an opportunity to make it work.”

The day-to-day responsibilities of public service lack the bright clarity of a campaign: there is no win number once you’re in office. When I asked Van Auken how she’d define success in her new role, her answer was direct but general. “If we’re able to launch a city-wide initiative around a mayoral priority that allows thousands of New Yorkers to participate,” she said, “and continue organizing together and working together long term, beyond the initial campaign, that is how we’re defining what we want to do.” The Office of Mass Engagement has not yet announced what campaigns it might undertake, though it has been staffing up. “Government only works when it’s accountable to those it serves,” Mamdani said in a statement. “Tascha’s work is a testament to that belief. It’s never been about one election.”

Van Auken has some experience translating her field skills to a position within government. In 2020, she managed the D.S.A. member Phara Souffrant Forrest’s campaign to represent a State Assembly district in Central Brooklyn, and, after Souffrant Forrest won, Van Auken stayed on for about a year as her chief of staff. Once Van Auken was in office, Souffrant Forrest told me, she wanted to keep knocking on doors—for example, in buildings owned by the Pinnacle Group (which Mamdani has targeted in his efforts to protect renters). “The goal is not just to win but to turn people to socialism,” Souffrant Forrest said. This meant showing voters that their problems were “organizable.”

This summer’s Democratic primaries will test New Yorkers’ response to the D.S.A.’s efforts in the Mamdani era. Notably, in the race to fill the retiring congresswoman Nydia Velázquez’s seat, both the Mayor and the group have endorsed State Assembly member Claire Valdez, who is running against Velázquez’s preferred successor, Antonio Reynoso—a contest between city power brokers old and new. Meanwhile, as Mamdani navigates the reality of actually being mayor, media observers have scrutinized his relationship with the D.S.A. for signs of a potential rupture.

The D.S.A. represents a fractious collection of fellow-travellers, including plenty who have been dubious all along about the compromises involved in any electoral campaign. Van Auken, like a number of D.S.A. members associated with Mamdani, is part of the group’s Socialist Majority Caucus, which seeks to build a socialist mass movement through democratic means. This is the wing of the organization most inclined to mainstream compromise. In 2023, Lewis wrote an essay warning that a tendency to create “litmus tests that can be used to punish elected officials” was “a dead-end approach to advancing socialist aims.” For the D.S.A. figures central to helping Mamdani succeed, his success represents an avenue to wider legitimacy; to undercut it would be self-defeating.

“I was pretty skeptical of Zohran’s decision to run, which shows what my opinion is worth,” Kinnucan told me. He was relieved when he heard Mamdani was hiring Van Auken as field director. “If Tascha is on the campaign, then win or lose, something is going to be built. People are going to get engaged in politics.” To Kinnucan, Mamdani’s choice to work with Van Auken spoke well of his judgment; her choice to work with him spoke well of his potential. “Tascha isn’t someone who idealizes candidates and, conversely, isn’t crushed when they disappoint,” Kinnucan went on. “They’re just people to her, like the next volunteer you engage in the campaign is a person.” ♦

Last year, a YouTube channel called Akhbar Enfejari (Explosive News) began posting a variety of digital content with a political and moralistic bent. A young Iranian man delivered Middle Eastern news commentary for the camera, influencer-style, ring-lit in front of a neon backdrop. Artificial intelligence-generated animations stressed the importance of decisiveness and offered tips on navigating Iran’s water crisis. The channel and a related Instagram account had a pronounced anti-Western slant—“Send this video to filthy America so it explodes 💣,” one caption read—but its clips were not particularly galvanizing. Most netted only a few hundred views each. Then, in February of this year, Explosive News hit its stride with a new style of content: A.I.-generated animated propaganda against the U.S.’s war on Iran, done in the style of Lego movies, with world leaders caricatured as yellow bobbleheads and missiles as plastic bricks.

In recent weeks, the Explosive News Lego videos have become inescapable artifacts of an international conflict that was already generating barrages of digital content. The clips have accumulated millions of views and many enthusiastic comments from Western audiences. They have been re-shared by Iranian-government accounts, promoted by Russian state media, and co-opted by No Kings protesters for their flamboyant anti-Trump imagery. The political messaging on display in the videos is as blunt and cartoonish as the blocky Lego characters. Lego Iranians celebrate missiles flying toward Tel Aviv as an A.I.-generated rap soundtrack plays. (The song is “L.O.S.E.R”; “Taste the ash of defeat,” it goes.) A Lego grave reads “R.I.P. Donald John Trump.” A missile-struck White House lights up in flames. The videos express a crude solidarity with victims of U.S. aggression, past and present; in one clip, Lego missiles bear messages in English commemorating everyone from Native Americans to Vietnamese villagers and “stolen blacks.” “ONE VENGEANCE FOR ALL,” text declares in all caps. The videos are also fluent in the language of conspiracy and online trolling. One makes reference to rumors that Benjamin Netanyahu was killed in Iranian strikes and replaced by a deepfake. Another, playing into frenzied online speculation about Trump’s health, depicts a bruise blooming on one of the Lego President’s hands. One clip shows Lego Trump perusing pictures of himself and Netanyahu in the Jeffrey Epstein files, then creating a distraction by launching the missile that struck an Iranian girl’s school last month. The flurry of imagery provokes a surreal sort of whiplash. The subject matter is deathly serious—international war, unfolding in real time, killing thousands—yet the visual vocabulary is preposterously trivializing.

Some news reports have described Explosive News as having ties to the Iranian regime. Forbes, for instance, cited the fact that the Lego videos have been reposted on Telegram by Tasnim News, an outlet affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the Jerusalem Post noted that certain clips were labelled with an “apparent watermark” for Revayat-e Fath, which is the name of an Iranian state-run media foundation. During an e-mail correspondence this week, a representative of Explosive News claimed that it is “totally independent”—“no government. No military. No state TV.” “Revayat-e Fath,” he said, “is the Persian title of the two videos we released—Victory Chronicles 1 and 2. (In persian: روایت فتح).” When pressed by a fact checker about ties to the regime, he said, coyly, “Is there any way to prove that you are not connected to Jennifer Lawrence?!” He described Explosive News as a “student-led media team with a background in social activism,” and said that the individuals behind it wished to remain anonymous out of fear that their viral success might make them targets in the war campaign. He added, “Funny twist: some of our old universities . . . got bombed. Yep. Quite a ‘gift’ from Donald Trump to Iranian science and culture!”

Explosive News posted its first Lego-style videos during the U.S. and Israel’s bombing campaign on Iranian nuclear facilities last June. When the war began, in February, the representative said, “Our team was ready, plans in place, engines revving—and, by day two, the Lego-style videos were back in action.” They started churning out new clips, writing scripts and then generating corresponding visuals using A.I. and digital editing tools. “Working full time, we can produce a two-minute video in about 24 hours,” the representative said.

American viewers who are accustomed to MAGA-style trolling might expect the Lego videos to be driven by a certain clickbait nihilism—brain rot, Tehran-style. But the Explosive News representative spoke of their efforts with a lofty earnestness. “Every scene, every frame, every hidden detail, and every idea in our work feel like our own children,” he said. He quoted a Persian proverb (“What comes from the heart will surely sit upon the heart”) and said that the team hopes that their videos can inspire viewers with “a glimpse into a different kind of spirit—something more poetic, more human, maybe a bit more gentle.” Those might not be the first words that come to mind when one watches clips of a Lego Trump whose plastic butt is often on fire. But Explosive News sees itself as fighting “a battle between truth and falsehood.” The spokesperson wrote, “Quick wisdom from the Qur’an: ‘The noblest are those who stay righteous.’ ”

However pure the team’s intentions, the Lego videos have succeeded, in part, because they meet the political discourse on the level to which it has already sunk. The Trump Administration has waged its own meme-based battles on its official social-media accounts with A.S.M.R. videos of deportations, white-nationalist in-jokes, and supercuts of bombings interwoven with video-game footage. Trump is reportedly shown a daily two-minute video montage of successful strikes on Iran to keep him up to date on the war, a kind of private military TikTok feed for a Commander-in-Chief with a toddler’s attention span. Even if Trump himself posts mainly on Truth Social, he is an image-obsessed creature of the internet; it stands to reason that Explosive News’ vengeful, mocking clips may actually reach his eyes, or at least grab public attention by speaking in the same showily combative terms as MAGA. With the help of A.I., the team can achieve a startling production value. As the representative put it, “We believe that dominant Israeli-American media narratives often present acts of force, injustice, aggression, and even violence in a polished and appealing way through the power of media.” He added, “Let’s face it—if truth isn’t flashy, it’s kinda lonely.”

Last year, a trio of media scholars published a paper titled “Slopaganda,” a new bit of twenty-first-century slang to describe the intersection of generative A.I. and propaganda. The authors argue that this burgeoning form is uniquely toxic, both because it is so quickly and cheaply produced and because it “introduces mass personalisation, creating tailored messages and narratives” in an instant. Slopaganda has quickly become our new Esperanto of international conflict. CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster, ran an A.I. animation explaining the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz using martial-arts tropes, with the Iranians as anthropomorphized cats and Trump as an eagle-headed grand master unleashing expensive golden bombs. The X account of the Iranian Embassy in the Hague posted an A.I. animation depicting Trump’s internal monologue as an “Inside Out”-esque hive of demons, and the account of the Iranian Embassy in South Africa posted a slop video that referenced a famous COVID-era TikTok, of a man longboarding to Fleetwood Mac, to celebrate Iran’s bombing of Tel Aviv. But Explosive News’ videos might be the world’s most potent example of slopaganda yet, changing hearts and minds—or at least generating lots of clicks—one exploding toy battleship at a time.

Last weekend, YouTube and Instagram abruptly took Explosive News’ accounts down. Instagram did not respond to a request for comment, but a spokesperson for YouTube said that it had removed the channel for “violating our Spam, deceptive practices and scams policies.” (The Explosive News representative blamed the ban on “ ‘false flag’ media actions” by “Zionist actors.”) But the videos remain accessible on X and other platforms, and the removals seem to have done little to slow their reach. The representative said that at first the team was surprised by their international notoriety, because they’d aimed their content squarely at Iranian viewers, but that they’ve begun to mold the videos to a wider audience as they “better understand their preferences.” Last week, their channel on Telegram began posting in English instead of in Persian, and the group broadened its name from Explosive News to Explosive Media. This Tuesday, they posted a teaser on X for a new video featuring bombs falling over burning bald eagles and a Lego Moses watching the conflagration of a pyramid etched with Trump’s face. In the current geopolitical climate, perhaps slopaganda is just another path to global-media stardom. “We’re dreaming bigger,” the representative said. “New formats, cinematic vibes, maybe even longer works. Who knows?” ♦

A month ago, when Donald Trump pitched the United States into a war against Iran, he announced the decision to the American people in a brief eight-minute video, which was sent out over social media in the dead of night on a weekend. On Wednesday evening, with the conflict he unleashed having upended the global economy and failed to dislodge the Iranian government that he initially vowed to topple, Trump finally made his case to the public in a prime-time address to the nation.

He might as well not have bothered.

In the end, the best thing that can be said about the speech was that Trump did not follow through on his threat, made earlier that day, to withdraw the United States from NATO. But there was little news about a conflict that now seems likely to continue for at least the next few weeks. Trump provided no real indication that a ceasefire is in the offing, nor any real path toward fixing one of the major crises that the war has provoked: Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz, through which some twenty per cent of the world’s oil and gas passes. (His suggestion: nations that rely on the energy supplied through the strait, which includes many of our NATO allies, should “build up some delayed courage . . . go to the strait, and just take it—protect it.”)

Other than that, the President’s nineteen-minute speech struck many of the same themes as the voluminous social-media postings and quickie phone interviews through which he has been narrating his version of the conflict over the past few weeks: “We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran”; “We are unstoppable as a military force”; “We are going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong.” I suspect there was not a speechwriter who worked on this effort so much as an intern whose job it was to cut and paste the President’s Truth Social feed into a document that could be fed into his teleprompter.

One of the big problems with what Trump had to say is a familiar one: it’s hard to know what, if anything, is actually true. Until now, essentially all his comments about the four-week-old war have been contradictory, confusing, or just outright false. I was reminded of this on Wednesday morning, when Trump announced on his social-media network that “Iran’s New Regime President, much less Radicalized and far more intelligent than his predecessors, has just asked the United States of America for a CEASEFIRE!” Putting aside the fact that Iran denies it has asked for a ceasefire, what can one do but cringe at Trump’s assertion that the new President of Iran is so vastly different from the old President of Iran, given that Iran has the same President today, Masoud Pezeshkian, as it did at the start of the war a month ago?

During the past month, Trump has variously claimed that the war was about regime change, that it was about obliterating the nuclear program that he said he had already obliterated, and that it was about stopping the threat from Iranian ballistic missiles to the U.S. homeland, even though, according to America’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, Iran does not have the ability, nor would it anytime soon, to threaten the U.S. homeland with ballistic missiles. In his address on Wednesday night, he repeated much of this, except he denied that regime change had ever been the goal of the operation, while also claiming, as in his early-morning social-media post that same day, that regime change had, in effect, already occurred.

At times, Trump’s many false statements raise almost existential questions: If, as he said a couple of weeks ago, Iran’s military was a hundred per cent destroyed, then how is it still firing missiles, such as the barrage launched at Israel on Wednesday, sending millions of people to bomb shelters and safe rooms across the country as they were preparing to begin their Passover Seders? More broadly, can everything be going according to the plan if there is no actual plan? Is a President required to articulate a clear strategy in order to claim that he has brilliantly executed it?

You will not be surprised to know that Trump in his speech did not mention these complicated matters. He did, however, announce that America, in this war as in so many things, is “winning bigger than ever before.”

No doubt Trump’s political advisers had genuinely pressing reasons for wanting him to make the case to the American people now that he should have made at the outset of the war. The latest CNN poll, released hours earlier, found that just thirty-one per cent of Americans currently approve of his handling of the economy; his over-all disapproval rating had risen to sixty-four per cent, which is about as bad as it has ever got for a President, at least since the start of modern polling. Before the speech, one of those anonymous “people familiar” with the Trump White House’s plans, who are always being quoted, told Politico that, although it would be a tough assignment, Trump would hopefully manage to be both nonconfrontational and “reassuring” in the address.

Well, it’s hard to see how threatening to destroy every single one of Iran’s electrical plants was nonconfrontational. (To be clear, bombing a nation of ninety-three million people back to the Stone Ages would also be an international war crime, given the effect this would have on the civilian population.) As for reassuring, it took Trump eleven minutes to mention the economic disruption that the war has generated. His main argument to Americans about skyrocketing gas prices was not to worry about it because, once hostilities end, whenever that is, they will just “naturally” go back down. I can’t be the only person who thought that sounded a lot like Trump circa 2020, when he told us that the coronavirus would magically go away.

A few hours before his address to the nation, Trump previewed his plans for it: “Tonight, I’m giving a little speech at nine o’clock, and basically I’m going to tell everybody how great I am.” For once, he wasn’t lying. When he got to the part where he gave himself credit for doing “what no other President was willing to do,” in attacking Iran’s nuclear program, Trump looked like a happy warrior indeed. “They made mistakes and I am correcting them,” he said of his White House predecessors. This was his essential point: not how he planned to succeed in the war but why all those who came before him failed.

The political boost from the speech may well be as nonexistent as the clarity it failed to deliver about the aims of a conflict whose stakes could not be higher. But the ego boost for a man who plans to place a giant golden statue of himself in the amphitheatre of his Presidential library—now that was priceless. ♦

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In the new HBO miniseries “DTF St. Louis,” Jason Bateman plays a weatherman living with his wife and kids in a sleepy town just outside of St. Louis. He befriends a co-worker, Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour), and the two sign up for a dating app that specializes in clandestine affairs. By the end of the first episode, Smernitch is dead. So begins a whodunnit set against the backdrop of suburban America and the discontents simmering beneath. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz survey how the setting has been used over the decades, from the films of Douglas Sirk and the stories of John Cheever in the nineteen-fifties and sixties to the fantasy of that era seen in the 1985 movie “Back to the Future.” Today, the locale is being assessed anew. Like “DTF,” the recent docuseries “Neighbors” strips the suburbs of their glamour, focussing instead on petty grievances and property disputes. “They are small stakes, but, of course, everything that is quintessentially American—property, the right to violence, the right to protect land—are all intensely operative in this space,” Cunningham says. “And if something goes wrong somebody pays for it.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“DTF St. Louis” (2026—)
“ ‘DTF St. Louis’ Peers Into the Suburban Male Psyche,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)
“The Swimmer,” by John Cheever (The New Yorker)
“Judy Blume: A Life,” by Mark Oppenheimer
“Wifey,” by Judy Blume
“Back to the Future” (1985)
“All That Heaven Allows” (1955)
“Desperate Housewives” (2004-12)
“American Pie” (1999)
“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1997-2003)
“Adventures in Babysitting” (1987)
“The Five-Forty-Eight,” by John Cheever (The New Yorker)
“Neighbors” (2026—)
“All Her Fault” (2025)
“Friendship” (2025)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.