So a 22-year-old son of Hollywood privilege goes on a murder spree, killing 6 and then himself. People who write for a living mount their favorite hobby horses and tell us “what it all means.”
Since we are all critics now, I want to get in on the action. What do we know? Quite a lot, actually. The killer wrote a “manifesto:” apparently a must-do for people who want to go out with a bang, and who have the time and leisure to chronicle their lives. I read the whole thing and it's fascinating because it reads like a movie script for a really bad film.
It seems that his hang-up is that he couldn't get girls. Living in Hollywood, rich, and couldn't get to first base. Which is strange, but also quite revealing. He lived in the epicenter of getting girls. Hollywood is all about getting girls. It is Jannah, the Islamic Paradise of girl getting. Men go there to find sexual objects – both female and male. Women go there to be gotten, advertising their attributes, real and enhanced. They are not shy or demure about it. Miley Cyrus rides an inflatable phallus and gets rich and famous for doing so. Some of the town’s hottest starlets made their debuts starring in their own home-made porno-flicks.
Closer to home, the killer’s father was not only in the movie industry, but sold “art” pictures of naked women. So what’s a 22 year old virgin to do when the thing that's at the center of his entire culture is denied to him? When his sexual pressure-cooker gets overheated? He blows up. And takes six people with him. His victims were the victims of a nut, made crazy by a culture where sex is literally everything: money, power, validation, gratification and identity. At one point he concludes that the route to sex is more money, lots of it, so he buys lottery tickets. He urges his mother to marry one of the wealthy men she knows so that he can be part of a uber-rich family and blames her for his sexual failure.
In other times and other places, people like Elliot Rodger may have become a hermit, a priest or found another objective. But he was living in a place and time where sex was the center of everything. In a strange and inverted way, Elliott Rodger, insane killer, was made by Hollywood.
1 comment:
I had much the same thoughts when I listened to this tormented young man. Sex was the ultimate goal, and he was not even getting to first base being described as socially awkward. Socially awkward seems to be a description of more than one serial killer. Maybe that should become a clinical diagnosis.
On the other hand I understand his father said he was totally opposed to guns. Since Elliot also used a knife and his BMW to reek havoc on the rest of the population, I wonder why he only singled out guns as something to which to be opposed. But then that is the popular thing to do in Hollywood other than promote sex which really seems to be the culprit in this case. But who in Hollywood wants to go down as being opposed to BMW's and sex. Surely not Miley Cyrus.
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