Warning: this article contains major spoilers for The Drama.

In season one of the animated TV show Smiling Friends, there’s an episode that follows an anthropomorphic shrimp on a quest to win back his ex-girlfriend. This involves going into a clothing store to swap his outfit for something an “actual adult” would wear, but it doesn’t pan out. When he emerges from the changing room wearing a leather trenchcoat, thick glasses, and a black metal t-shirt, another character named Charlie tells him: “You look like you’re about to tell your friend not to come to school tomorrow, man.” Equally, Shrimp looks like he might have just walked off a Vetements catwalk circa 2017, or from backstage at an Anne Imhof performance. The joke lands because the aesthetic stereotype of the school shooter – dating back to the Columbine high school massacre in 1999 – is so instantly recognisable, filtered through years of fashion collections, art projects, music subcultures, and films.

In Kristoffer Borgli’s 2026 film The Drama, another Charlie (played by Robert Pattinson) gradually comes to terms with his fiancée’s admission that, as a teenager, she planned but didn’t carry out a school shooting. In the aftermath of the confession, his soon-to-be wife Emma (Zendaya) explains that she was mildly bullied and isolated at school, but was ultimately drawn to the ‘subculture’ that surrounds school shootings for another reason. “It was just the aesthetics of it,” she says. Imaginary images of her as a slightly nerdy, awkward teen, sharing romantic moments with current-day Charlie, are played for comic effect.

Regardless of how ingrained it’s become in our culture, committing mass murder for the “aesthetic” might sound like a shallow – and very 2010s – excuse, but Borgli makes it believable. It’s why, despite bringing a gun to school, Emma is easily dissuaded from going through with her plan by a simultaneous mass shooting, and ultimately sympathises with its victims, even becoming a spokesperson for a gun violence prevention organisation. She seems more interested in being the ‘kind of person’ who might commit a horrendous act of violence than actually committing the act itself, putting far more time into taking swamp selfies with her dad’s rifle and recording a cliché-laden confession. When she’s offered an out – and somewhere else to direct her emotions – via the anti-gun violence group, she grabs it with both hands.

This turn as an activist is arguably as performative as her stint as a prospective school shooter. As her dad alludes to at the wedding, she went through lots of phases, and played many different characters growing up, which leads to the uneasy question at the heart of The Drama: is Charlie marrying the ‘real’ Emma, or is she still LARPing, deep into adult life? Is her ‘normal’ persona just another role?

There’s another question that’s raised throughout the film, though, which is: why are we so drawn to transgression in the first place? Why does Emma initially find solace in the most horrific act imaginable? Borgli suggests that the fault lies, at least in part, with the internet. Or, as one X user puts it: “the drama is all about what it’s like when a millennial starts dating someone from Gen Z and they find out what unsupervised internet access does to a mf.” (Emma isn’t quite Gen Z, but there’s a big enough age gap that we can assume they grew up in very different online environments.) This echoes a very real phenomenon in the wake of the Columbine massacre, which saw cultish online communities – first on YouTube, then Tumblr – idolise the two shooters. The so-called “Columbine effect” inspired copycats across North America and Europe, including the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook shooting.

It would be reductive to blame the internet alone, though. Offline, artists, designers, musicians and filmmakers have always existed in a tangled relationship with extreme subcultures. In The Drama, this manifests as a book that appears on Charlie’s desk in the museum he works at: titled Brain Rot, it shows sexualised portraits of women posing with guns, which contribute to his fantasies about Emma clutching a rifle on their bed. IRL, though, Columbine sparked a moral panic about Marilyn Manson’s influence on young fans (a connection that the musician strongly rejected) while years later the fashion brand Bstroy drew criticism when it promoted a series of hoodies bearing the Columbine name, alongside Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas, complete with bullet holes.

More recently, we’ve had Kanye West mining the violent, often racist subculture of European football ultras – long before he started selling t-shirts with swastikas on the front – as well as Dimes Square’s flirtations with far-right ideas and iconography, including gun violence. Maybe the most obvious recent example, though, is the looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular taking to the runway at an Elena Velez show in NYC, staged in collaboration with the notorious collective Remilia Corporation. This is despite (or because of) his connection to yet more controversial figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate.

This is not to say that the examples listed above are all the same in terms of their impact or intent, or that transgressive art, fashion, film, etc shouldn’t be allowed to exist. In many cases listed above, aesthetics are used to critique, or reflect, the extremes of the culture we’re living in; others would be better described as mindless provocation at best, or at worst, a wholehearted embrace of violence and xenophobia. (We’ll let you decide which is which.) Ultimately, the line between critique and glamourisation is a blurry one, especially in the online spaces that The Drama’s Emma grew up in, where the image is presented out of context, copied and pasted to a Tumblr moodboard.

What does this mean for The Drama? Arguably, it makes it easier to forgive Emma’s past if you haven’t already. Steeped in images and stories of glamourised gun violence, it seems a pretty obvious place for her to have channelled her feelings of anger and loneliness. And, as Borgli shows us by the end of the film, we all require a degree of LARPing to get through life with our sanity and relationships intact. However, in an ironic twist, the film itself – and its marketing by A24 – has also been criticised by the anti-gun organisation March for Our Lives, which posted a statement to Instagram asking: “What kind of conversation is this meant to start?” Elsewhere, a Columbine victim parent and gun reform activist told TMZ that the filmmakers’ choice to use a school shooting as Emma’s revelation is “awful”, adding that it could help “normalise” shootings and “humanise” the people who carry them out.

In a different interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Jackie Corin, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting and co-founder of March for Our Lives, was more nuanced about The Drama, calling it “an inevitable evolution in storytelling” as gun violence becomes increasingly embedded in our cultural conversations. “Art has the capacity to deepen public understanding and create emotional clarity and awareness,” she told the publication (although she hadn’t watched the film yet). “But it can also flatten and distort reality, especially when it leans on shorthand or tries to make something more palatable than it actually is. With something like a near school shooting, even small tonal choices can shift whether a story feels productive or dismissive.”

Whether The Drama feels “productive” probably depends on what category of transgression you think the film falls into: mindless provocation that exploits the imagery and culture surrounding America’s gun violence crisis, or a work of art that inspires real engagement with the subject, its causes, and its long-term fallout. As Borgli is all too aware, aesthetics, and what you choose to do with them, really matter.