Elliot Rodger’s
“Day of Retribution”
video has been widely
described as “chilling.” Judging from his intermittent
movie-villain-style laughter, that is the effect he was trying to
achieve. But he ended up with something much more banal. “Tomorrow
is the day of retribution,” Rodger says, “the day I will have my
revenge against humanity, against all of you.” But he says this
with such a lack of conviction that most viewers probably would not
take it seriously if they did not already know about the six
murders he committed in Isla Vista, California, on Friday night.
Combine the wooden delivery with his whining about all the girls
who would never give him the time of day (“I’m the perfect guy and
yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me,
the supreme gentleman”), and the overall impression is not chilling
so much as pathetic and ridiculous.
There is a lot more such whining in Rodger’s 140-page
autobiography, which further illuminates his motivation,
although to call it a “manifesto,” as many have, is a bit of a
stretch. In his telling, a happy childhood was followed by a
confusing and frustrating adolescence from which he never emerged.
He was socially awkward, depressed, and desperately lonely. These
feelings left him angry at “those evil, slutty bitches who rejected
me” and the “obnoxious jock[s]” they preferred. You can ascribe
this attitude to “mental illness” if you like, but it was an
understandable reaction to the situation he faced. Having decided
that he no longer wanted to live as a 22-year-old virgin who had
never so much as kissed a girl, Rodger resolved to kill himself and
take as many of his tormentors with him as he could. In short, he
was pissed off about never getting laid, and he took out his anger
and frustration on a bunch of innocent people.
If we instead say that Rodger was in “an early phase of
pre-psychosis,” as a psychiatrist interviewed by Los Angeles
Times
suggested, does that add to our understanding? Psychosis is
usually defined as a break from reality. But judging from his
autobiography, Rodger had surprisingly strong self-insight and a
pretty clear (perhaps too clear) sense of what was going on around
him, despite his occasional flights of grandiosity and magical
thinking. Although he keeps buying lottery tickets in the hope that
riches will be the key to attracting women, for instance, he
acknowledges how unlikely that scenario is. He also concedes that
his plan to free men from their baser instincts by banning sex,
perpetuating the species by artificially inseminating enslaved and
segregated women, is an impossible dream, not least because no one
would ever trust him with such dictatorial powers. Furthermore, he
admits that his political fantasy grows out of his own bitter
experience (or lack thereof) with the opposite sex.
Having despaired of attracting women or reorganizing the world
so that his inability to do so would not matter so much, Rodger
settles on murder and suicide. He admits that he will not be able
to kill as many people as he would like (and in the end his crimes
fell far short of the elaborate, gruesome plan outlined in his
autobiography). But he expresses the hope that his homicidal
rampage will show that he mattered after all, that he was not a
“mouse” but “a living god” with the power of life and death. “At
long last,” he concludes, “I can show the world my true worth.”
There are many depressed, lonely, and alienated people in the
world, of course, and almost none of them do anything like what
Rodger did. That is one of the reasons identifying
mass murderers ahead of time is
so difficult. Although Rodger’s awkwardness and isolation were
obvious to relatives, neighbors, acquaintances, and therapists,
none of them seems to have recognized the depth of his anger or had
an inkling of his homicidal intent. The cops who interacted with
him after he was injured in a drunken fight and after his mother
reported her concern that he might be suicidal perceived him as
harmless. And despite the
hindsight-aided criticism they have received for being too
easily reassured, they did not have enough evidence to force him
into a psychiatric evaluation or to search his apartment, where
they would have found his pistols, knives, and ammunition, along
with “my writings about what I planned to do with them.”
Since the vast majority of people diagnosed with mental
disorders (including psychoses such as schizophrenia) never commit
violent crimes, giving someone like Rodger a psychiatric label
hardly qualifies as an explanation. His emotions were common, but
the way he dealt with them was rare. We can call his murder spree
the symptom of a mysterious and unverifiable disease, or we can
call it an evil response to a recognizable human condition.
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