"Y'all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It's kind of long but full of suspense 😂😭"
— A'ziah "Zola" King in her original thread
.
.Zola is a 2021 Black Comedy drama film directed by Janicza Bravo, based on an infamous 148-post thread from Twitter and the Rolling Stone article, "Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted".
Struggling Detroit waitress A'ziah “Zola” King (Taylour Paige) meets and befriends a woman named Stefani (Riley Keough), the two women bonding over shared experiences with pole dancing. Stefani later invites Zola to Florida to make money at strip clubs, joined by Stefani’s boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun) and her “roommate” X (Colman Domingo). What follows is a weekend filled with sex, lies, and violence.
Has nothing to do with French writer Émile Zola. Or the Zoras from The Legend of Zelda, who were originally called "Zolas".
This film provides examples of:
- Accent Slipup: Whenever X gets serious or extremely angry, he speaks with a heavy Nigerian accent. Lampshaded by Zola when he loses his cool in the car.Zola: Nigga, where you from!?
- Actor Allusion: This isn't the only movie where Riley Keough's character is involved with the life of a stripper in Florida. It's also not the first time she's played an escort/sex worker (although her character in The Girlfriend Experience was more of a High-Class Call Girl).
- Adaptation Name Change: The woman Zola befriended was named Jessica Rae Swiatkowski, but is named Stefani in the film. Likewise, her boyfriend was named Jarrett Scott but renamed Derrek in the film.
- The pimp's alias was Z in real life, but was changed to X in the film, as was his real name (Abegunde Olawale in the film, Akporode Uwedjojevwe in real life).
- Adaptational Dumbass: Mixed with Adaptational Jerkass: Jarrett in the original thread carried on a long, interesting conversation with Zola despite his bipolar swings, and it turned out to be one of the only high points of Zola's trip to hell. Derrek is a whiny, melodramatic idiot who is slavishly devoted to Stefani despite her constant exploitation of him, whose only bright spot of intelligence is keying Zola into the fact Stefani has deceived several other strippers in the exact same way before, though he also clearly does care about Stefani and is stuck in the trap of thinking that if he tries hard enough, he'll finally get her to give up that life.
- Adapted Out: Two notable instances from the original thread that were left out include a moment where the pimp forced Jessica (the real life counterpart of Stefani) to have sex with him while her boyfriend watched, and the conclusion to the saga where Jessica, the pimp, and his fiancé were arrested for the events that transpired.
- Ambiguous Situation: Is Stefani's heartfelt plea to Zola that convinces Zola to stay genuine?
- Arc Words: Stefani has what seems to be a Trust Password with Derrek where she says "who's is this?" (points towards Derrek's heart), to which he replies "yours", and "who's is this?", to which he replies "mine." It comes up multiple times in different contexts, most notably when X humiliates Derrek by doing it with Stefani.
- Bittersweet Ending: Stefani is rescued and Zola is able to return home mostly unscathed, but their brief friendship is ultimately destroyed by Stefani’s deception.
- Black Comedy: Much of the stuff that happens after the group reaches Tampa is this, in particular Derrek attempting suicide near the end, since Baybe (X’s lover) openly goads him to go through with it, and Zola has a deadpan reaction to it afterwards.
- Book Ends: The film opens and ends with Zola saying verbatim the words of the first post from the original thread:Zola: Y’all wanna hear a story about why me and this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.
- Bungled Suicide: Derrek jumps from a balcony after the ordeal with Stefani. He only gets a nasty head wound and is left blubbering on the way home.
- Extremely Short Timespan: Takes place over a weekend, from Friday to Sunday.
- False Friend: Dion befriends Derrek only to turn on him and rob the group since Dion is aware of the business they are getting into. Stefani herself is also arguably this once Derrek drops that this is nowhere near the first time that she has lured another woman under false pretenses to try and procure another bitch for X.
- Fanservice: The two female leads dancing at a strip club in bikinis or pasties.
- Fan Disservice: Several close-up shots of the callers visiting Stefani unzipping their pants to reveal a variety of deformed and/or small penises. Quite a few of the callers (especially the first one) are drug-abusing rednecks not in the greatest of health, and it shows.
- Faux Affably Evil: X is an absolute garbage human being, but for a while, he at least seems to respect Zola on some level, and is generally charismatic and somewhat charming when he isn't demonstrating his ownership of Stefani. Then he agrees to allow Dion and his boys to make her their bitch while trying to negotiate his way out of the robbery, and allows Dion to sexually assault her in front of him, and it becomes clear that at the end of the day, he's a truly monstrous human being through and through. The original thread revealed he was a human trafficker, which Derrek alludes to when he tears into Stefani for repeatedly luring marks down to Florida under the same false pretenses.
- Hate Sink: Stefani is a vulgar, obnoxious, selfish, treacherous, manipulative, and racist (as evidenced by her "version" of events) person whose aggressively affected AAVE is only the tip of the iceberg as far as her deeply unpleasant personality goes, and she is so prone to saying whatever she thinks will get her out of trouble or back into Zola and Derrek's good graces that it is unclear whether her few apparent moments of vulnerability are genuine or if they're just another cheap attempt at emotional manipulation and/or a calculated weaponization of white womanhood. As a person who is not only accustomed to the abyss, but thrives in it, Stefani, like her even more repulsive pimp, is clearly intended to be loathed by the audience, and Riley Keough even apparently felt the need to apologize to the cast and crew for her portrayal of her because she was so disgusted by her. At best, she can be seen as a victim of her situation and especially of X, but her absolute unwillingness to take responsibility for what she puts others through, coupled with her willingness to exploit the good will of Zola and Derrek for her own ends helps eliminate whatever sympathy may have been had for her.
- Jerkass Has a Point: X is a violent asshole, but he was dead-on about Derrek endangering them by sharing far too many details about their location with Dion. Sure enough, Derrek being played by Dion leads to Dion kidnapping Stefani and Zola sexually assaulted.
- Kindhearted Simpleton: He may be extremely dull, inarticulate, and immature, but Derrek is one of the few truly sympathetic characters in the story, as he clearly cares about Stefani and wants her to give up that life for her own good, and while he seems to be aware on some level that she is exploiting him, he still seems to believe that he'll eventually be able to get through to her.
- Little People Are Surreal: There are several background extras who happen to be in the background that get increasingly weirder (like an impromptu steel band/hula dance by some strangers while a bored hotel worker stuffs his face with food). The very last one as Zola and the gang run for their lives after X caps Dion in the neck, brandishing shotguns, is a little person in a suit (likely one of the hotel valets) who tiredly and sarcastically tells them to drive safe as they flee the hotel.
- Lower-Class Lout: Stefani is a dictionary-perfect depiction of the stereotypical trashy sex worker, and
Word of God is that the depiction was actually toned down, namely the real-life person's apparent fondness for the N-word. - Manchild: Derrek, in addition to being not being very bright, is also very emotionally underdeveloped and behaves like an overgrown teenager. At the end of the film, he whines he's going to kill himself exactly like an Emo Teen and botches that, sobbing the entire way to the hospital.
- Mononymous Biopic Title: The film's name refers to "Zola", A'ziah King's personal nickname in real life.
- No Ending: Compared to the Twitter thread, the film ends with an incredibly tired and shellshocked Zola leaving Tampa with the gang, X driving them all to a hospital for Derrek's half-assed suicide attempt. Stefani tries to act like it was all one big misunderstanding. Zola rolls her eyes and leans her head out of the window. Roll credits.
- Not the First Victim: When Derrek is fighting with Stefani, he reveals that Stefani has brought other "new" friends to Florida with him and X before. Given that they run into sex traffickers and that X is a violent pimp, it probably didn't end well, but it's not made clear how.
- Not What I Signed on For: As soon as Stefani dropped that X "[took]" care of [her]" (which Zola stated was stripper code for "I have a pimp"), Zola made it clear that while she took no moral issue with the setup and was more than content to live and let live, she came to Tampa to dance, not to take part in prostitution, and was ready to leave then and there before Stefani put on a good enough show of vulnerability to convince her to stay (though the jury is out on how genuine it was).
- Only in Florida: Although Stefani and Zola are both from Detroit, the majority of the story takes place in Florida.
- Predatory Prostitute: Stefani is an extremely racist Lower-Class Lout and a stripper who only reveals to Zola that she's also a sex worker after convincing Zola to come to Florida. She then gets Zola trapped with X, her violent pimp, nearly gets Zola sold into sex slavery, and then tries to pretend that it was all a big misunderstanding when they finally escape. And, on top of all this, her boyfriend Derrek reveals that she's done this to other women before.
- Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Stefani's exaggerated ratchet mannerisms, affected AAVE dialect, and white girl cornrows are all defining traits of hers. According to the real-life Zola, the actual person was also extremely fond of the N-word and casually dropped it at every opportunity.
- "Rashomon"-Style: Played with, as we see Stefani's version of events, but unlike Zola she's very clearly lying.
- Running Gag: An increasingly annoyed and abrupt "They started fucking, it was gross" mercifully cutting off any scene where Zola has to witness Stefani having sex in the same room as her.
- Scary Black Man: X, as shown when he threatens Zola after she attempts to leave him and Stefani by snarling he knows where Zola lives to force her back in the car. It doesn't get better from there as he continually threatens Zola's life and beats Derrek up at every opportunity.
- Sex in a Shared Room: This is actually the core of the Running Gag listed above, that Stefani has a lot of sex in front of Zola, both with Derrek and her various clients.
- Suicide as Comedy: Derrek's abrupt jump from the balcony during his Anguished Declaration of Love for the disinterested Stefani and speechless Zola, especially as he actually survives.
- Stylistic Suck: Halfway through the movie, Stefani suddenly launches into her own version of events. She depicts herself as a wholesome Christian girl trying to make ends meet while Zola is a grotesque, astoundingly racist caricature of a stereotypical ratchet who shows up with literal straw in her hair and literally wears a garbage bag to the trip.
- Tempting Fate: No, Dion, you really shouldn't have dared X to shoot you after he already seized your guns.
- Too Dumb to Live: As detailed above, Dion was stupid enough to continue to antagonize someone who he had just tried to rob, who had just seized all of his guns after his boys surrendered, and who was holding him at gunpoint and was clearly itching for a good excuse to shoot him.
- Uncle Tomfoolery: Invoked in Stefani's version of events, which depicts Zola as a cackling, loud, jokey animal who butts into our sweet white heroine's business and gets her all mixed up with urban crime. (None of it is true.)
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Derrek, in his naive and dimwitted but ultimately well-meaning ways, divulges that he's tagging along with Zola, Stefani, and X for a few days while they try to make as much money as possible at the strip clubs, and Dion correctly deduces that they're actually turning tricks instead and decides to rob them.
