Did This Photographer's Provocative Work Inspire 'The Drama'?

A made-up photography book in Kristoffer Borgli's new film is drawing attention for a reason: it closely recalls a real publication that examined women and guns without trying to turn the subject into a manifesto. In The Drama, which stars Robert Pattinson and Zendaya, the fictional book Brainrot becomes an object of fixation for Charlie, a chief curator at the fictional Cambridge Art Museum, after he encounters images of young women posed with rifles.

The comparison has pointed viewers toward Lindsay McCrum's 2011 book Chicks with Guns, a project that approached the same visual territory from a very different angle. McCrum said she began the book after noting that 20 million American women owned guns at the time. Her subjects ranged from police officers to women who might not immediately fit the stereotype of gun owners, including Victoria, a young woman from Stamford, Connecticut, photographed in camouflage in a green forest with a cocked rifle.

McCrum has said she did not approach the work with a political or ideological agenda. Instead, she was interested in why women owned guns and how viewers read those images. That question sits at the center of the book's power. A portrait of a woman holding a weapon can register as self-possession, performance, protection, or provocation, depending on who is looking.

Borgli's film uses that same instability for different ends. In The Drama, Emma reveals that she once planned to shoot up her school as a child, and Charlie's fascination with Brainrot becomes entangled with desire, fear, and projection. The fictional images are described as sleek and sensual, closer in spirit to the polished provocations associated with Torbjørn Rødland and Heji Shin, while McCrum's photographs remain grounded in ordinary settings and a more restrained visual register.

What links the two works is not simply the presence of guns, but the way they expose the viewer's assumptions. As McCrum put it, when someone looks at a portrait, they project onto it. Add a gun, and a woman, and that projection intensifies. Borgli's film appears to build its tension from that very charge - the uneasy space between what an image shows and what a viewer fears it might mean.

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