[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/https___cdn.sanity.io_images_xq1bjtf4_production_907ba39acd473dc6421ded3fa5fadbce18cf5bbd-3996×2160-1.jpeg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
This article includes spoilers for <\/em>The Drama, which is now playing theatrically.<\/em><\/p>\n \n\tBy now, you\u2019ve probably heard that The Drama<\/em>, 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 \u201ctwist.\u201d In actuality, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n\tIn one key scene, Charlie comes across a photobook called Brainrot<\/em> 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\u2019s in bed, wearing only her underwear and suggestively cradling a rifle.<\/p>\n Brainrot<\/em> is not real, but it does seem to have been inspired, albeit loosely, by an actual photography book: Lindsay McCrum\u2018s Chicks with Guns<\/em>, from 2011. Salon<\/em> and other outlets, as well as observers on social media, made comparisons between Brainrot<\/em> and Chicks with Guns<\/em>, the latter of which gained so much attention upon its release that it was profiled by NPR<\/em>, Business Insider<\/em>, Wired<\/em>, and other outlets.<\/p>\n \n\tMcCrum reported in her book\u2019s 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\u2014police officers, for one\u2014but she also managed to find quite a few women of all ages who seemed less likely to have purchased guns.<\/p>\n \n\tOne 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. \u201cI think it\u2019s great that women have begun to hunt and shoot because it\u2019s a fun sport and something that men and women can do together,\u201d she told McCrum. \u201cYou can be a girly girl and still shoot just as good as a guy.\u201d<\/p>\n Chicks with Guns<\/em> does not explicitly address the US\u2019s epidemic of gun violence. \u201cI would always make it very clear there was no political or ideological agenda attached to this body of work,\u201d McCrum told NPR<\/em>. <\/p>\n \n\tThe character of McCrum\u2019s images is also quite different than that of the ones in the fictional Brainrot<\/em>, whose sleek, sensual images recall the highly polished work of provocateurs like Torbj\u00f8rn R\u00f8dland and Heji Shin. By contrast, McCrum\u2019s images soberly picture their subjects in settings they know well.<\/p>\n \n\tYet McCrum\u2019s work knowingly breaks a taboo in a different way, questioning what meaning we attach to images of women with guns\u2014just as does The Drama<\/em>, a film that asks whether it\u2019s ever possibly to fully know a romantic partner, in this case one who had the potential to commit an act of horrible violence. <\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWhen anyone looks at a portrait, whether it\u2019s a painting or a photograph, they project onto that picture,\u201d McCrum told NPR<\/em>. \u201cNow you add a gun into the picture, and a woman, and there\u2019s even more projection.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/the-drama-twist-photography-inspiration-chicks-with-guns-1234781078\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/https___cdn.sanity.io_images_xq1bjtf4_production_907ba39acd473dc6421ded3fa5fadbce18cf5bbd-3996×2160-1.jpeg?w=1024″] This article includes spoilers for The Drama, which is now playing theatrically. By now, you\u2019ve 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 \u201ctwist.\u201d In actuality, it\u2019s more of a reveal, and it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1880444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1880444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1880444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1880444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1880444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}