After the gun massacre comes the blame game. It was Hollywood’s fault. Social media is responsible. It’s an issue of mental illness. Or suburban anomie. Or, in this case, male adolescent misogyny and sexual frustration taken to the extreme.
From Columbine to Newtown to Isla Vista, we’ve seen this narrative play out many times, and one understands the desire to cover all the angles and search for something new. After all, it gets a bit boring and repetitive to state what is, nonetheless, blindingly obvious: it’s not Judd Apatow or “Neighbors,” the new frat-boy movie. It’s not the Internet or the “manosphere.” It’s not anomie or misogyny, or too much sex, or too little, or anything else having to do with the dreadful but familiar pathologies of male adolescence and post-adolescence. It’s American gun laws.
Perhaps you need to be from overseas to appreciate this, but tasteless and schlocky Hollywood movies are popular in other countries, too. Take “Neighbors,” which Ann Hornaday, a film critic for the Washington Post, cited in her much read column blasting the “sexist movie monoculture” that, she said, “inflated, if not created” the delusions of Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista shooter. (According to boxoffice.com, the movie has already grossed more than sixty million dollars outside the United States, and in many places it hasn’t opened yet.)
Other countries also have access to YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram—the social-media sites that the author Richard Speer, writing in the New York Post, said helped to turn Rodger into “the perfect embodiment of the kind of creature our digital age has hatched: a navel-gazing loner incapable of social and romantic connection.” For some reason, though, the deleterious effect that exposure to social media has on the young male mind seems to be particularly strong in the United States.
Having said that, I should note that other countries also have lots of angry, alienated, and frustrated young men, some of whom are troubled and disturbed. (They also have plenty of older men who fit the same description.) I grew up in Leeds, an industrial city in northern England where looking at somebody the wrong way in a bar could get you a broken jaw. Every Friday and Saturday night, after the pubs closed, the town center was full of inebriated, feral youths looking to inflict harm on people they didn’t know from Adam. If even a few of these violent misanthropes had been armed with semi-automatic pistols of the sort that Rodger used to shoot his victims, the city morgue wouldn’t have been big enough to hold the victims.
Of course, the louts weren’t armed, and neither was anybody else. Thanks to Britain’s highly restrictive laws, the only firearms I ever saw were the occasional .22 pistol or air rifle, which some loners and “bad lads” used to shoot at squirrels and lampposts. Consequently, a culture of casual violence remained just that: casual. On weekends, the hospital emergency rooms were full of people with black eyes, fractured limbs, bruised abdomens, and faces lacerated by broken beer glasses. However, setting aside the odd stabbing, fatalities were practically unheard of. The victims and the perpetrators of the violence sobered up, tended to their wounds, and got on with their lives. Today in Britain, it’s pretty much the same. In 2011, there were fifty-eight homicides involving firearms. In the United States, there were eight thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
To be sure, Rodger doesn’t fit the profile of an angry-at-the-world English lager lout. With his affluent upbringing, his BMW, and his deep and strident resentment of women, he was clearly a very disturbed individual, with a set of problems that were very unique to him. But that’s the thing about these shooters. They always have their own twisted justifications for going out and killing a bunch of strangers.
Let’s accept that misogyny was at the root, or close to the root, of Rodger’s fury and feelings of inadequacy. It’s hardly an exclusively American phenomenon. In comparison to many countries, it could be argued, the United States does a reasonable job of discouraging it, and keeping it in check. There are many countries where misogyny is officially tolerated, or even encouraged. But it doesn’t seem to lead to gun massacres of the sort that the United States is now famous for.
The reality seems plain enough. It’s the ready availability of deadly weapons that converts individual pathologies into mass murders. It’s the lax gun laws that convert barroom confrontations or family disputes into individual murders. And it’s the failure to prevent disturbed youngsters like Rodger from acquiring guns that converts the treatment of mental illness among adolescents and post-adolescents from a public-health issue into a public-safety issue.
If you can’t see this, and a great many Americans can’t (or won’t), then there’s probably nothing that I, or anybody else, can do to persuade you. As I’ve done in the past, I could cite the examples of Australia and England, both of which banned semi-automatic weapons following mass shootings and haven’t subsequently experienced any of these horrors. I could follow the stirring example of my colleague Adam Gopnik and point you to the words of Richard Martinez, the father of one of Rodger’s victims, Christopher Martinez, who said, “They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop?”
Because it won’t do any good, though, I won’t press these points. But please: don’t blame YouTube, and leave Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, one of the stars of “Neighbors,” out of it, too. I can’t say that I’m familiar with their latest movies, or, indeed, with the rest of their oeuvre. I’m willing to take it on trust from Hornaday, who gets paid to watch this sort of stuff, that some of it is laced with sexist images and misogynistic tropes. If that’s indeed the case, it’s no credit to Hollywood, or to the cinemagoers who pay hard-earned money to see these kinds of movies. But it’s got very little to do with the ongoing tragedy of gun violence.
Update: In the post above defending Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, I also wrote that I took “on trust” Hornaday’s assertion that some of Apatow’s films contain “sexist images and misogynistic tropes.” I think that might have left a clouded impression of agreement. It shouldn’t. What the piece was getting at is that gun violence simply can’t be blamed on the movies—Apatow’s or anyone else’s. Because I haven’t seen the films, I have no opinion of them. The focus, above all, should be on our nation’s gun laws, or lack of them.
Illustration by Jon Han.
