*SPOILER WARNING*
☆
There’s a seminal double feature opportunity in the cinematic landscape right now that begs addressing. While watching The Drama, there were multiple moments that reminded me of another new film, Our Hero, Balthazar—which I already raved about here. I’ll go ahead and acknowledge the fact that OHB has a much smaller theatrical window, so the accessibility and reality of actually doing this double feature may be a challenge. Whether or not you can actually view these movies together is kind of besides the point. It’s the fact that they’re both coming out at the same time that speaks to a larger, more germane, cultural conversation. This pairing is of two movies that likely wouldn’t have been possible, or even conceivable, five years ago, as both films tap into a modern mythology we’re only just beginning to fully grasp.
The Drama as a whole does so much more than the moment I’m about to isolate for the sake of this article. It’s a sharp, unsettling romance, layered with commentary on morals, relationship dynamics, gender, race, and the uneven calculus of who gets away with what. But the single admission by Zendaya’s character, Emma, ends up reframing everything around it.
After Emma and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) catch their wedding DJ smoking heroin on the streets, they counsel their friends about whether to intervene or ignore it. That moral dilemma slips naturally into a tipsy conversation escalator of, “Well, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” When it’s Emma’s turn, she hesitates, then admits that in high school, she planned a school shooting. Not just fantasized about it—planned it. Mapped it out, recorded a manifesto, brought a weapon to school. To me, Emma’s hindsight perspective is more striking than the admission itself, as she reduces it to a phase she grew out of, describing it with a kind of detached embarrassment.
A Cultural Paradigm
This points to an emerging archetype that could only really take form in a post-Columbine generation. The “school shooter” is a cultural figure now, something that can be studied, aestheticized, and sorted into types. In that context, it starts to resemble something closer to a subculture than an anomaly. Not quite equivalent to being emo or goth or a jock, but operating with a similar logic: a recognizable set of references, a visual language, a script. It’s something this generation can try on for size, then, ideally, discard. Yes, for some, it escalates into real violence. But for others, they grow out of it just as quickly, forgetting that side of themselves until it comes up at a wine tasting.
The Drama, refreshingly and boldly, asks what happens when the kids raised on, and at times consumed by, this idea grow up and become functioning members of society. Charlie even says, in a desperate attempt to rationalize, that Emma is probably just one of many grown-up “weird kids” you might encounter one day and never even know once fantasized about killing their bullies.
Our Hero, Balthazar acts as a spiritual counterpart to this concept. It shows how this phase functions in real time. Solomon/Solly (Asa Butterfield) is a stereotypical disenfranchised incel, seeking connection on online forums where he details his mass-shooting ideations. He has one line in the film that quietly but imperatively sums up this entire quandary. He shows his new friend Balthazar his stash of guns under his bed, revealing some Nazi paraphernalia and a pride flag, and explains “I’ve had a lot of phases.” That line rang in my head as Emma explains why her past self was drawn into these violent fascinations; “It was just the aesthetics of it,” she says.
The Modern Motivation
In flashbacks, we see a young Emma (Jordyn Curet) fully entrenched in her school shooter era: walking around the swamplands, posing for selfies with her dad’s rifle, documenting it all on her iPhone 5. She lines her eyes in black, throws on a camo jacket, and films video manifestos with her webcam, à la Elliot Rodger, trotting out the deeply unoriginal “by the time you see this, I’ll be gone,” speech. She crafts a digital footprint that will inevitably be exposed and circulated once her act is complete, positioning herself for maximum virality and notoriety. She’s anticipating an audience. Watching this process unfold removes the air of fear that this type of person so badly wishes they had, and instead, shows them as completely unserious losers.
As one recent study out of West Point Academy puts it, “what initially appears as random violence or isolated personal grievance reveals itself as participatory engagement in a transnational subculture where attacks function as symbolic contributions to a collective narrative.” Those at the highest level are acknowledging the evolution of motivations for mass shootings. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold may have very well been the last school shooters with an authentic motivation. After them came a generation of copycats and fangirls— a frightening number of mass-shooters refer directly to Columbine as their inspiration. But on a cultural level, Harris and Klebold also bore the very concept of a school shooter aesthetic with the Trenchcoat Mafia, and it persists because of the extraordinary level of infamy they received and still have. (See: Columbiners).
The sheer cultural impact received by most mass-murderers has become the reason, an article published on RAND concludes, “for a subset of mass shooters, fame is partially, if not entirely, their motivation. Researchers have linked the increasing number of fame-seeking mass shooters to a variety of social drivers, such as heightened desires for fame across American society at large.” The fame-seeking nature of this subculture grows from a familiar desire: to be popular, liked, seen. That desire feels especially high-stakes in adolescence, and is the same impulse that plagues both young Emma in The Drama and Solomon in Our Hero, Balthazar. For a generation raised with active shooter drills, that jump from “I want to be seen” to “this is how I’ll be seen” doesn’t seem that far fetched.
On the other side of the same coin, both films tap into how easily these identity phases can be refigured into something more socially legible. Balthazar (Jaeden Martell) constructs himself as a performative anti-gun activist to impress his crush and get social media attention. In a similar vein, Emma explains that she didn’t go through with her plan because a different shooting was dominating the news cycle, rendering hers an inconsequential afterthought. She finds another way to be seen, recasting herself as a sort of March For Our Lives anti-gun activist instead. Were Emma or Balthazar’s motivations to rally against the 2nd amendment truly virtuous? No. What really matters is that the underlying impulse—to be seen—remains intact, just the form changes.
Even in The Drama’s present-day timeline, that same instinct to posture appears in softer, more socially acceptable forms, like Rachel’s (Alana Haim) reflex toward reactionary outrage theatrics and performative morality. She has an urge to quickly find moral superiority in everything, to assign blame and position herself on the right side, even when that positioning exposes its own contradictions. Rachel represents the everyday counterpart to Emma and Balthazar’s more extreme iterations of identity as performance.
Look The Type
Underlying all of this is, as Emma said, the aesthetics: the visual presentation that makes these identities appealing before they’re even understood. Both films, but especially The Drama, explore the visual appeal of the shooter aesthetic. In an evolved form of the Trenchcoat Mafia, more current iterations of it can be reduced to, say, Ethical Cane Vinnel core: Salem, pre-Safdie Julia Fox, post-Donoghue Lana, Snow Strippers, @neoliberalhell, et al. Essentially, skinny girls with rifles, midwest America nationalism, real tree camo, and nostalgic Southern gothica. Those influences have trickled down to even more overt fashion statements available on the market, notable in brands like SKIM MILK, BULLY, and PRAYING. In The Drama, this subculture is referenced when an art book entitled Brainrot filled with photographs of bikini-clad girls holding guns lands on Charlie’s desk. It’s not a real book (I checked) but it very well appeared to be something coming out of the aforementioned pastiche.
The Brainrot book is one of many signs that the universe gives Charlie that his soon-to-be-wife is a gun-toting fanatic, a brand that his British brain can’t fully digest. Eventually, Charlie can’t even look at Emma normally, and gets flashes of hallucinations of his beautiful bride in bed holding a semi-automatic. The shocking juxtaposition of having someone as ethereally stunning as Zendaya holding this brute, violent weapon, is an intentional provocation, and as one X user aptly pointed out, triggers a pavlovian response. The visual aspect of this identity is crucial, and it’s part of what makes it so seductive. It has to look right in order to mean anything at all.
Radical Acceptance
There’s an understandable impulse to reject this framing, to insist in a very Rachel-coded style that this isn’t an aesthetic, not a phase, not something that can be absorbed into the same logic as other adolescent identities. That reaction aligns with the way that sectors of the general population are angry that A24 didn’t issue a personalized trigger warning for The Drama. But refusing to see it that way doesn’t make it disappear. Neither of these films show someone actually carrying out an act of mass violence. Neither of these films glorify or normalize real psychopathy (do any movies actually do that?) If anything, both The Drama and Our Hero, Balthazar strip it of its mystique, exposing something far more banal beneath it: an ordinary desire to be seen.
The fact that these two films engage with the same subject and are being released at the same time is one thing that speaks volumes. But, it’s their shared understanding and nuanced portrayals of this minefield of a subject matter that is the real impressive part. It’s a cultural recognition that both Oscar Boyson and Kristoffer Borgli—directors of OHB and The Drama, respectively—are attuned to, one that could only emerge now, from a generation raised within this mythology and finally old enough to look back on it.
The phase feels very real when you’re in it, like life or death. But the phase eventually ends. The person moves on, grows up, gets married. What remains is the unsettling secret that, for a time, it made perfect sense.
