They say the truth is always stranger than fiction, and in A’ziah “Zola” King’s case, that’s very true indeed. For how else could a 148-tweet thread be adapted into a movie if it wasn’t the stuff of compelling real-life insanity? While the fantastical tale does not begin in Florida (specifically Tampa), Zola is an unequivocal “Florida movie.” For only in this state could such madness be allowed to thrive. And yes, the Spring Breakers comparison is real. For, as the original article about the tweets in Rolling Stone (that the movie also draws from) points out, “It reads like Spring Breakers meets Pulp Fiction, as told by Nicki Minaj.” Side note: one does so hope that Quentin Tarantino offers a special introduction to the A24-distributed film at his newly purchased Vista Theatre.
And, speaking of A24, it was this ever-increasing in clout company that also distributed Spring Breakers. Not to mention another film with aesthetic similarities to Zola, The Florida Project. But then, St. Petersburg is its own separate animal from the likes of Tampa and Kissimmee, the milieus of the aforementioned movies. Where “St. Pete’s” is pure hedonism tailored to lure the spring breakers set, Tampa is cut from a different cloth of seediness. One rife to attract “guest” strippers looking to make quick cash over the weekend from men who aren’t accustomed to seeing their “faces” (read: asses) as often as the regulars in these girls’ hometowns. So it was that Zola got enticed by such a scheme. Thanks to a girl named Jessica Rae Swiatkowski—changed to simply Stefani for film adaptation purposes.
Which is why, on October 27, 2015 (otherwise known as 2015 B.T. [Before Trump]), Zola tweeted the opening line to her absurdist anecdote that would become immortalized in film by Taylour Paige (who, incidentally, actually has appeared in a Nicki Minaj video): “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me and this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long, but full of suspense.”
This line is wielded as Zola and her so-called “friend,” Stefani (Riley Keough), stand side by side in the mirror applying lipstick during the opening of the film. In that cartoonish sort of way that seems to adopt greater fanfare for the sake of creating an entire scene around the act of female primping. Particularly when the females in question are strippers. The surreal element that commences this moment is one we’re to see repeatedly throughout Zola, directed by Janicza Bravo, who co-wrote the script with beloved playwright Jeremy O. Harris (also slated to co-produce the second season of the Florida-centric Euphoria).
The initial lesbianic attraction portrayed between these two women (also present between Brit and Candy in Spring Breakers) as they encounter one another at the restaurant where Zola works is conveyed in the original Rolling Stone story with the lines, “Jessica Rae Swiatkowski, a bisexual 21-year-old blonde with collarbone tattoos, walked into Hooters for lunch with a friend. Zola caught her eye. ‘She walked past and she was pretty,’ Jessica recalls. ‘I just brought her over to the table.’” While the Hooters isn’t called out specifically as the location, the flirtatious air remains intact, perhaps partly in thanks to Harris’ own queer sensibilities.
As the two get to talking and Stefani compliments how Zola’s titties look like two apples, it’s clear that Stefani is the type to readily overstep people’s boundaries. Which is why she 1) finds out Zola dances part-time and 2) ends up in the kitchen of the restaurant—precisely where customers aren’t supposed to be—asking Zola what she’s doing that night. And if she wants to come somewhere with her a.k.a. dance with her in a club. In the movie, they add in this particular part where Zola and Stefani dance at a strip joint together, as though to make the audience more willingly believe that Zola would trust someone she barely knew, which she did in real life. After the dancing, when they go their own ways in front of a mural of two women shaped in an intertwined infinity symbol (symbolism indeed), we get the sense that maybe they really could be friends. That is, if Stefani didn’t try to talk like she was a Black woman and entrap Zola into a sex trafficking scenario. Cajoling her into going on the trip, however, isn’t as much of an obstacle as it ought to be, with Stefani playing up the “glamor” of Florida with, “I met a rapper down there.” In Spring Breakers’ case, that rapper is Alien (James Franco).
Alas, it doesn’t take long for Zola to learn there is no “elegance” to be had. Made evident by the roach motel they “check in” to. From this point forward, the fine line between “victim” and “willing participant” is one explored frequently in the character of Stefani (and also the characters that comprise Spring Breakers). As the article phrases it, “Zola couldn’t figure out whether Jessica was a willing participant or a victim. ‘I didn’t want to leave her by herself,’ Zola says. ‘I kind of felt bad for her.’” In between utterly despising her, that is—and all while Stefani continues to regard her with droopy-eyed affection, as though she has no concept of what hatred looks and feels like because she’s just that oblivious and self-involved. Characteristics that make up the quartet in Spring Breakers as well: Brit (Ashley Benson), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Cotty (Rachel Korine) and, yes, even “good Christian” Faith (Selena Gomez).
It is the latter character who most embodies Zola’s conundrum of wanting to leave at the first sign of danger, but also feeling responsible for her more reckless friends. As noted in the Rolling Stone piece, “Despite the insanity, Zola was still afraid to leave. ‘I don’t want it looking like, You left her, you didn’t call the police, you went back home, now this girl ended up dead, she says. ‘That’s why I stayed. Just so that if anything went bad for her, she has somebody.’” But in Zola’s case, it makes far less sense to feel that kind of responsibility for a near-total stranger as opposed to Faith feeling that way about the friends she’s known since kindergarten. But maybe it just goes to show that, despite Courtney Love’s feelings, ingrained female solidarity really is a thing. Especially when one works in the stripper trade that can so often bleed into the prostitution one.
Speaking of, Zola’s literary ties to another man with that name—Émile Zola—also further leads in to one of the French author’s most well-liked books, Nana. The titular (pardon the sensual word) character is a disease-ridden whore ultimately characterized by Zola as follows: “All of a sudden, in the good-natured child the woman stood revealed, a disturbing woman with all the impulsive madness of her sex, opening the gates of the unknown world of desire. Nana was still smiling, but with the deadly smile of a man-eater.” This account is a more fitting assessment of Stefani than it is of Zola, who is, in the end, just trying to make it through this trip alive. Particularly after Stefani’s “roommate” (“I won’t know this nigga’s name for another twenty-four hours,” she narrates after first encountering him) turns out to be her Nigerian pimp—the accent also unveiled out of left field along with his role in Stefani’s life.
For the most part, a large aspect of that survival is the widely accepted, garden variety racism of the “Deep South” that is Florida. “You look like Whoopi Goldberg,” a patron tells Zola, killing any chance she might have had of enjoying her dance—even though that was already a challenge to begin with after 1) seeing the establishment’s lack of glitz and 2) being told she has to wear pasties (“Ima full nude type of bitch”). The racist undertones remain rampant, with another client seeing Zola later on in the hotel room “X” (Colman Domingo)—nicknamed “Z” in the true story—gets for them to hook in and disappointedly declaring, “I ordered a white chick.” Zola is then sure to direct him to the “white chick” he will be fucking: Stefani, all decked out in her Britney Spears-inspired “…Baby One More Time” look. Britney is a more pronounced talisman in Spring Breakers, where she’s meant to represent the fine line between female agency and objectification. The same can be said of Stefani’s adoption of her aesthetic influence here as well.
And if Keough, who plays Stefani to psychotic perfection, looks all too familiar, it isn’t just because she was also in that other movie Zola is being compared to, American Honey (wherein Shia LeBeouf channels James Franco’s Alien in Spring Breakers), but because she bears the same face as her mother and grandmother, Lisa Marie and Priscilla Presley, respectively. She’s no stranger to the stripper movie either, having appeared in 2012’s Magic Mike (which, of course, takes place in Florida—and Tampa, to boot).
Her lack of concern with much of anything beyond pleasing X and keeping her puppy dog-like boyfriend, Derrek (Nicholas Braun), at bay with his annoying commentary about her stripping and trapping is in keeping with Brit and Candy’s own reckless self-involvement. Case in point, in Spring Breakers, the professor’s lecture on Black oppression and, later, Hitler doesn’t sink in long enough for Brit to stop herself from writing “I want penis” on a notepad and flashing it to Candy. One imagines if Stefani had made it to college, she likely would have been the same—maybe even worse.
The Christianity-as-false-crutch element is at play in both films as well, with Faith attending a youth group at the beginning of Spring Breakers before she eventually sanctions (after the fact) the violent robbery committed by her trio of friends in order to afford getting down to St. Petersburg in the first place. Conversely, in the middle of Zola, “@stefani’s” perspective interrupts to showcase her more pathological lying tendencies as she describes herself as being with a church group leader at the restaurant where she saw Zola for the first time. And that Zola was the one to be “all up on her,” not the other way around. To play up the absurdity of such a lie, which she told in a Reddit thread in 2015, her perspective also shows Zola dressed in a trash bag when she comes out of her house to join them in the car.
This additional plot device makes one think about the theoretical difficulty of adapting 148 tweets into an entire screenplay. A difficulty that goes out the window when one considers how easy that makes it to take liberties with dialogue that isn’t directly pulled from the thread, including, “Damn bitch we just met and we already takin’ ho trips together?” “Ima full nude type of bitch” and “‘Taking care of me’ in stripper language means that was her pimp.”
Taking the tone of the tweets and creating dialogue for the filmic rendering of Zola also translates to one-liners like, “They started fuckin’—it was gross.” But more than just the dialogue, it is the “random scenes of Florida” that layer Zola with its highly cinematic quality. Like a long shot of a Confederate flag waving on the side of the road on the way to the “Sunshine State.” Or a “movie” on the hotel room’s TV of a scantily dressed woman having car trouble and then writhing suggestively in the seat as she seductively laments, “I’m stuck.” Or a midget in a suit lying poolside shouting “Safe travels!” as the quartet runs out of the hotel they just rescued Stefani from. Or the woman dancing to the steel drums being played in the lobby of a hotel. Or the scene of cops brutally arresting a man on the side of the road. All of these small details combine to create a patchwork lens of the nature of Florida’s insanity, which is also a key purpose of Spring Breakers. The reason both films choose this location as their backdrop is to accent how this is what the “American dream”—making money—has come to. An “on steroids” iteration that knows no limits to what a person will go through, what depths they will sink to in debasing themselves in order to get that cash.
Faith says without a hint of irony at one point in Spring Breakers, “I’m starting to think this is the most spiritual place in the world.” To lend additional “seriousness” to the statement, this is said to her grandma over the phone. At the same time, maybe for America, that really is the case with Florida. Where all of American’s favorite things—sex, drugs, stupidity, excess, exploitation, racism, sexism—coalesce in a single noxious cauldron.
Zola becomes only too aware of that cauldron after it’s already too late. “Which Zola are you tonight?” she asks herself in the mirror before taking the stage at the busted Tampa club, which leads her the chance to fantasize about herself in different guises…almost the way a man would. But Zola is not about glorifying the male gaze so much as what happens when female attraction goes horribly wrong—even when based on, primarily, “friendship goals.” In any event, one such costume is her in a Hooters uniform, which pays homage to the fact that said “restaurant” is where the real Zola met Jessica.
While the natural addition and subtraction of “moments” that go hand in hand with an adaptation occurs in the script, one particularly notable scene left out is after Derrek posts the Backpage ads to Stefani’s Facebook. Per Zola’s story, “Z” took it as an opportunity to get his dick sucked by Stefani in front of Jarrett (the real name of “Derrek”) and then also fuck her to prove where her true loyalties would always be. Zola also seemed to foretell the cinematic nature of her narrative when she used the phrase, “Like some movie shit” to describe how Jarrett is “hysterically crying.” As though that’s the most “movie shit”-like thing she’s mentioned in the thread. And then, of course, there is one of her most iconic lines from the tweets (regrettably not included in the film): “…this nigga lost in the sauce and his bitch lost in the game.”
It also seems that Florida—with all its “spiritual” propensities—leads Zola to have a similar epiphany to the one Brit has at the end of Spring Breakers: “I think that’s the secret to life: being a good person.” Even if the road Brit and Candy take to being “good people” is an extremely sociopathic one. But hey, that’s just the millennial way. Along with the editing style of each film, designed to mimic the attention span brought on by the social media age.
And with social media, “apparatuses” like Backpage. Hence, sex trafficking becoming part of the equation. The Rolling Stone article ends up addressing that sex trafficking aspect of Zola in a far blunter manner, revealing the fate of “X” by referring to his mug shot: “Akporode ‘Rudy’ Uwedjojevwe wears a brown t-shirt in his mugshot, and the tired gaze of a man at the end of his run. The 35-year-old, who is being held in a Nevada jail, has been charged with sexual assault, sex trafficking, battery, attempted pandering and felony counts stemming from a fight in jail.” One wonders if Alien might have met the same fate if he had lived a bit longer.
There are so many kismet elements surrounding Zola and its release, like how James “Spring Breakers” Franco himself was set to produce and direct before the sexual misconduct allegations against him became too vast to ignore. In the end, his brother, Dave, would take advantage of the producer credit. Then there is the fact that the movie was intended for a 2020 release before A24 reconciled they would have to wait until 2021 (the inverted version of 2012, as in the year Spring Breakers debuted at the Venice Film Festival, like Zola is some commemorative homage) for it to get is proper movie theater release.
Rolling Stone concluded “Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted” with, “‘I hope you don’t feel like I set you up,’ she said. ‘I hope we can be friends.’ Zola searched her eyes, and said, ‘I will never see you again.’” This, in all honesty, should have been the final scene of the movie. Which mirrors Spring Breakers by using a “driving down the highway against the backdrop of the ocean” motif. The difference is, Spring Breakers uses this as its coda with more skillful and impactful effect.
