Discussion for article #223216
In the video, Hornaday explained that the troubling YouTube rant that Rodger, himself the son of a filmmaker, had left behind fell under her purview as a film critic.
I canât wait for her review of âHamster eats tiny burritosâ.
Seriously, YouTube videos fall under her purview? Well there are a lot of videos for her to review.
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âI was by no meansâ, she continued âtrying to imply that we as a society take responsibility for these shootings, when clearly it is the fault of Hollywood elites.â
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âIn singling out âNeighborsâ and Judd Apatow, I by no means meant to cast blame on those movies or Judd Apatowâs work for this heinous action â obviously not,â
??? Incomprehensible, No? ⌠oh so you singled them out so as to NOT cast blame upon them?
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âŚbut now weâre talking about this instead of that. So, you know, mission accomplished. The NRA check is in the mail.
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Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic had a good piece about how this incident highlights the broader issue of women navigating a world where angry, potentially violent men are not that rare. This criticâs standard-issue pomobabble seems a lot less relevant. The killer has gone where we canât question him but I canât imagine that a typical Apatow film or the entertainment industry generally were big factors in pushing him to kill. Letâs keep our eye on the ball: He was an unstable, rage-filled young man in a society where buying guns is trivially easy.
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Seems if you want to blame any âmediaâ it is the he-man woman haters clubs that have sprung up around this idea of being a pick-up artist. And that media is simply internet forums for run-of-the-mill aholes to rate womenâs looks on a scale of 1-10 and swap tips on how to trick them into having sex. Just like we are the change weâve been waiting for, we are the aholes weâve been looking for. Stop raising a**holes people!
Yeah right. If she hadnât meant to blame them, she shouldnât have named them.
How about placing the blame where it truly lies?
This cultural concept of male entitlement stems as much from patriarchical Christianity as from anything else. Pat Robertson said the other day that a wife âowes her husband sexâ if he does the dishes.
The âfrat-boyâ mentality is just this societal meme writ large.
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Thanks for that. So true. I think it is really easy to blame âmediaâ because it takes the pressure off of where the blame really lies.
She was in fact trying to make a statement about male entitlement and how men run the film industry thereby too often presenting male fantasies about women. The men she cited are in that world, but by linking it to the Santa Barbara tragedy she was never going to break through. Theyâre thinking, who me, Iâm just trying to make people laugh.
Itâs easy to dismiss this guy as an unstable hater, but Iâve read quite a bit of his epic autobiography/manifesto, and itâs really not as simple as that. Because this isnât a case of some guy going off the deep-end suddenly and doing this. He had been planning this for YEARS, hoping it wouldnât be necessary; but knowing heâd do it if his life got hopeless enough. He truly felt he had no real talent in life (something I suspect he was right about), so short of winning the lottery (which he played regularly), he felt his only other option was to take out as many people as possible before he went out because he hated us all and was angry that anyone could have anything he couldnât have.
His real problem was that he was mildly autistic and never understood why he didnât fit in with other people. Moreover, he was always given everything he wanted, except the one thing his parents couldnât buy him: The admiration of other guys. Yes, I know thatâs cliche, but Iâve read everything so far from the ages 13-19, and he was literally given everything he wanted. But that wasnât good enough, because he was filled with epic-levels of envy that anyone could have anything that he couldnât have. He states this repeatedly. Itâs not just girls. He was angry that anyone could do anything better than him, and would give up doing anything if he found out someone else was better than he was.
Everyone is obsessing over what he said about girls, but what really angered him was seeing couples together. Or in fact ANY guy with attractive girls, as he always assumed that this always meant they were having sex. But it was the guys he was upset about, as they had something he couldnât have. Yes, he wanted to have sex. But only because he saw it as a status symbol and believed that the reason other guys treated him badly was because he couldnât attract girls. And he was mad at girls about this, because they were âirrationallyâ denying him the ability to impress other guys; whom he considered to be inferior to him. We were all animals to him, but it was only the guys he wanted to impress.
Thus said, blame does lie with those websites that teach that women are objects, but he felt that way long before he joined such sites. Moreover, people obsess on how women ârejectedâ him, but Iâm not sure if he ever even TRIED to get a girl (I havenât gotten to his college years yet, but throughout his teens he rarely even spoke any words to any females besides his family). To him, being rejected meant girls didnât throw themselves at him, which is how he thought it worked; because heâs autistic and didnât understand human interactions at all. To him, girls just irrationally picked guys to be with and he couldnât comprehend how it worked otherwise.
And really, the whole thing is sad all around. If he had been properly diagnosed as autistic, he could have understood better why he was different from other people. Because thatâs what the real problem was. He didnât hate women because they denied him. He hated the human race because he didnât belong to it and couldnât understand why. And if all anyone thinks about him is what he said about women, youâre not even getting half the picture. He hated us all, particularly any guy that had anything he couldnât have. He was given almost everything he wanted in life, and it frustrated him to no end that he couldnât have everything.
His ideal plan was for girls to go away forever, so he wouldnât be judged harshly for not getting one. But short of that, he wanted to kill everyone to show how powerful he truly was, because he had no other way of showing power. Without a gun, he felt he was just a shy wimp with no skills and no respect; because he never understood life beyond that. The whole thing is sad from start to finish.
One thing I find fascinating about his autobiography is how it totally comes off like a work of fiction. Like someoneâs attempt at a modern Catcher in the Rye, and you totally expect for it to end with him realizing that he was his own biggest enemy and the root cause of his own problems. Because everything you need to understand him is right there, and itâs all fairly lucid for a guy caught in a warped world view. And I have to keep reminding myself: Thatâs not how this ends.
So she wasnât blaming them when she mentioned them by name in a piece on the ramblings of a psychotic mass-murderer.
She was just REVIEWING the ramblings of a psychotic mass murderer.
Well, Iâm sure glad she cleared that up, and I hope she enjoyed her buttered popcorn while she watched the ramblings of a psychotic mass murderer.
Which male fantasies are you talking about? You mean the one about the forty year old virgin who finally meets an age appropriate divorced woman that he doesnât have sex with until they get married? I know thatâs my big fantasy. Or how about the one about the stoner who knocks a woman up and eventually learns to be a responsible adult? Or how about the one about the couple who has a frat house move in next door, which is a bad thing because they donât like wild parties? Is that the fantasy life youâre referring to?
And yes, perhaps it is a problem that there arenât more women filmmakers. But is that the fault of Judd Apatow or Seth Rogen? Should they just stop making movies until this situation is fixed? Moreover, I think itâs a bit simplistic to dismiss their movies as male fantasies when I havenât seen a single one of their films that Iâd want to be the main character in. Those might be someoneâs fantasies, but they sure arenât mine.
In fact, now that I think about it, Iâm not sure if Apatow isnât inadvertently making female fantasy movies. Like the one about the divorced mother who typically falls for jerks, yet falls in love with a great guy whoâs only character flaw is that he hadnât had sex with a woman before. Or the one about the career woman who stupidly gets knocked up by a random stranger who turns out to be a total loser, but who cleans up his act and becomes a great husband and fatherâŚand getting pregnant actually helps her career. Thereâs your fantasy for you.
In real life, both these women would have finally given up on these manchildren, as you canât change a zebraâs stripes. Only in movies do we get character arc redemptions where the grownup zero becomes the hero.