One guaranteed result of a senseless tragedy like last week’s Isla Vista, California murder spree is that someone will put on their philosopher’s hat and attempt to link the senseless tragedy of it all to an easy popular culture target.
Often, those claims will come with anecdotal evidence, spotty logic and an overarching message that creative types are amplifying less-than-wholesome societal subtext directly into the brains of our world’s most unhinged inhabitants. Essentially, they crow, entertainers are putting the gun or knife in the hand of a madman.
Nearly just as often, those claims are as shabbily constructed as the crimes themselves, attempting to infantilize the cause and effect relationship between a piece of entertainment and an unstable mind. As though the lifetime of reasons a 22-year-old deranged nutbag like Elliot Rodger would unleash two decades of bitterness and confusion on his community are so easily distilled…
With Rodger’s crimes only beginning to sink in, Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday has appointed herself as this week’s social watchdog, penning an editorial that attempts to draw a straight line between the psychotic virgin’s heinous crimes and skewed world view and the Seth Rogen comedy Neighbors.
Rodger’s screed points to the film as the misogynistic by-product of a misogynistic Hollywood, serving up adolescent male fantasy as some kind of playbook for life that invariably leaves have-nots like Rodger wondering where THEIR hedonistic sorority house orgy is.
“How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like Neighbors and feel, as Rodger did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of ‘sex and fun and pleasure’? How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, ‘It’s not fair’?”
Hornaday doesn’t call out Rogen by name, but the actor saw enough of himself in the attack to take to his Twitter account to respond.
.@AnnHornaday I find your article horribly insulting and misinformed.
— Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) May 26, 2014
.@AnnHornaday how dare you imply that me getting girls in movies caused a lunatic to go on a rampage.
— Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) May 26, 2014
And since Hornaday DID lay Rodger’s crimes at Apatow’s feet, the director chimed in as well.
Remember everyone – ads next to articles generate money. They say something shocking and uninformed & get you to click on it to profit.
— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow) May 27, 2014
Most of Earth can’t find a mate– someone to love. People who commit murder of numerous people have mental health issues of some type.
— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow) May 27, 2014
As pointed out by Crave film site Cinema Blend, Hornaday’s concerns about Hollywood and its under-representation of women are not wholly unfounded. If elevating more female voices into the halls of Tinseltown decision-making were Hornaday’s objective, it would be one worthy of support.
But Rogen and Apatow call out Hornaday’s claims for what they are: bandwagon fingerpointing at an easy target with an end result of driving page views back to Hornaday’s corporate benefactor, the Washington Post.
We’ve never seen one film pick up a weapon and end a person’s life. But unfortunately, we’ve seen scores of societal misfits take out their fears and frustrations on anyone too close to them when the dam breaks. It’s the worst kind of post-crisis navel-gazing and tabloid armchair psychiatry to pin the murders of six people on the lowbrow pop culture curio of the moment.
So…discuss.
