WaPo Critic Blames Seth Rogen Movies for Isla Vista Killings

Given that the University of California—Santa Barbara killer
cited his inability to get laid in college as a motivation for his
massacre, should Seth Rogen, Judd Apatow and Zac Efron apologize
for making movies that glorify the sex and excess inherent to
college life?

Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday thinks so. In
a recent article about the horrific weekend attack that left seven
dead in Isla Vista, California, she
implicitly blamed Neighbors, a new film that casts
Rogen and Efron as residents of a fictional fraternity row:

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”?

The killer, Elliot Rodger, was a wealthy social outcast with a
father in the film business. According to his 141-page manifesto,
Rodger was rejected by fellow students at the UCSB campus and came
to hate all women for refusing to have sex with
him. Clearly, the version of campus hookup culture
glorified in movies like Neighbors did indeed spurn
Rodger.

But is that what made him a murderer? Hornaday
roped in male privilege and violence in media to
complete her argument:

If our cinematic grammar is one of violence, sexual conquest and
macho swagger — thanks to male studio executives who green-light
projects according to their own pathetic predilections — no one
should be surprised when those impulses take luridly literal form
in the culture at large.

Part of what makes cinema so potent is the way even its
most outlandish characters and narratives burrow into and fuse with
our own stories and identities. When the dominant medium of our age
— both as art form and industrial practice — is in the hands of one
gender, what may start out as harmless escapist fantasies can,
through repetition and amplification, become distortions and
dangerous lies.

Rogen took to Twitter to dispute Hornaday, branding
her “horribly insulting and misinformed,”
according to The Huffington Post.

“How dare you imply that me getting girls in movies caused a
lunatic to go on a rampage,” wrote Rogen in a Tweet.

Apatow had nothing to do with Neighbors, but has worked
on similar bro-friendly comedies with Rogen. He did not take kindly
to Hornaday’s insinuation, either. He tweeted that it
was absurd to blame movies rather than mental illness.

The angry reactions from Rogen and Apatow garnered significant
media attention, and eventually
drew a video response from Hornaday.

“In singling out Neighbors and Judd Apatow I by no means meant
to cast blame on those movies or Judd Apatow’s work for this
heinous action, obviously not,” she said in the video.

But she did defend her view that certain movies—those made by
white males, in praise of wish fulfillment and vigilantism—are
unhealthy for the culture.

In times of tragedy, violent entertainment often plays the role
of convenient scapegoat. Nevertheless, there is good reason to be
skeptical of such claims,
especially in the immediate aftermath.

Expect to hear more media figures blaming movies, video games,
mental health care deficiencies and lack
of gun control in the coming days.