This article includes spoilers for The Drama, which is now playing theatrically.
By now, you’ve probably heard that The Drama, a new film by Kristoffer Borgli that stars Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as a soon-to-be-married couple, has what many are calling a “twist.” In actuality, it’s more of a reveal, and it happens about a half hour in: Emma (Zendaya) reveals to Charlie (Pattinson) and her friends that she planned to shoot up her school as a kid but failed to execute on the plan. This disclosure causes Charlie, a chief curator at the fictional Cambridge Art Museum, to spiral and doubt their relationship.
In one key scene, Charlie comes across a photobook called Brainrot that features young women posed with guns. He becomes so obsessed, in fact, that he begins to fantasize about Emma as though she were posed as one of the girls in the book. In his mind, she’s in bed, wearing only her underwear and suggestively cradling a rifle.
Brainrot is not real, but it does seem to have been inspired, albeit loosely, by an actual photography book: Lindsay McCrum’s Chicks with Guns, from 2011. Salon and other outlets, as well as observers on social media, made comparisons between Brainrot and Chicks with Guns, the latter of which gained so much attention upon its release that it was profiled by NPR, Business Insider, Wired, and other outlets.
McCrum reported in her book’s introduction that 20 million American women owned guns at the time; she wanted to find out why. Her subjects included people you might expect to own arms—police officers, for one—but she also managed to find quite a few women of all ages who seemed less likely to have purchased guns.
One photograph in the book, for example, features a young woman named Victoria who lives in Stamford, Connecticut. Wearing camouflage attire, she stands in a green forest holding a cocked rifle. “I think it’s great that women have begun to hunt and shoot because it’s a fun sport and something that men and women can do together,” she told McCrum. “You can be a girly girl and still shoot just as good as a guy.”
Chicks with Guns does not explicitly address the US’s epidemic of gun violence. “I would always make it very clear there was no political or ideological agenda attached to this body of work,” McCrum told NPR.
The character of McCrum’s images is also quite different than that of the ones in the fictional Brainrot, whose sleek, sensual images recall the highly polished work of provocateurs like Torbjørn Rødland and Heji Shin. By contrast, McCrum’s images soberly picture their subjects in settings they know well.
Yet McCrum’s work knowingly breaks a taboo in a different way, questioning what meaning we attach to images of women with guns—just as does The Drama, a film that asks whether it’s ever possibly to fully know a romantic partner, in this case one who had the potential to commit an act of horrible violence.
“When anyone looks at a portrait, whether it’s a painting or a photograph, they project onto that picture,” McCrum told NPR. “Now you add a gun into the picture, and a woman, and there’s even more projection.”
