Two days ago, America got a deadly demonstration of Hollywood values, and what they can do to people. But most people won’t think of that. They should.

On the evening of May 23rd, Mr Elliot Rodger, a student at Santa Barbara City College, lured three men into his apartment and murdered them. He then drove to the house of the Alpha Phi sorority chapter at his school. There he shot two women to death in front of the house. The next drove to a delicatessen and went on a shooting rampage. One man fell dead. He then jumped into his car and drove wildly through the streets of Isla Vista. Sheriff’s deputies tracked him down, cornered him, and forced him to stop. At that point, according to most accounts (like this one in The New York Times), he shot and killed himself.

Most people trying to figure out why he killed those people, concentrate on his emotional disturbance. He seems to have been an extreme narcissist, with a very high sense of entitlement. Classmates made fun of him, and sometimes bullied him, all his life. While at college, he could not persuade any woman to have any kind of relationship with him, intimate or otherwise. He resented them for this, and made and published several videos declaring his resentment and threatening retribution. Several times he deleted the videos, and then republished them. He published one last video, which YouTube took down, but which WND still has a link to. He used three semiautomatic rifles and at least one knife to kill those six people.

The gun control refrain

The usual chorus of people who believe no civilian should even have a gun, already are protesting that yet another person, heavily armed, has killed many people. When, they ask, will society finally disarm all civilians and thereby guarantee the safety of all civilians? The answer to that question should be obvious. Had any of his targets been armed, that target could have stopped his rampage immediately. The real crime is not that Elliot Rodger was armed, but that his targets were not armed.

But so far, no one is talking about the real cause of this rampage, and the influences that turned Elliot Rodger into a murderer. That cause is the Hollywood values he lived with, and that pervade American society today.

Elliot Rodger and Hollywood

The Hollywood Sign, atop the Hollywood Hills. Photo: Sten Rüdrich, CC BY-SA 2.5 Generic License

Elliot Rodger is closer to Hollywood than most people are. His father was the second-unit director for the motion picture The Hunger Games. Elliott Rodger boasted of attending the premiere of that film. Furthermore, we now learn that Elliot Rodger liked to play video games. Specifically he liked to play the massively multiplayer online role-playing game called World of Warcraft. In his videos, he imitates a particularly vicious character from that game. He even repeats some of the words and phrases this character uses.

So Elliot Rodger spends much of his time in a world of make-believe. His father takes an active role in making that world of make-believe. Mr Rodger also absorbed all the warped moral values one finds in most Hollywood films today. Among them is the notion that sexual intimacy is the birthright of every young adult, and especially every young adult male.

In the days of the Hays Office, even Hollywood producers understood that sexual intimacy was the exclusive privilege and prerogative of the married. Hollywood abandoned that notion when they abolished the Hays Office. What has this to do with Elliot Rodger and his motives for murder? Everything. If he had held the same understanding of the proper role of sexual intimacy, and that he must first make himself marriageable before he can think of being intimate with anyone, then maybe he would not have been ripe for murder when he observed that certain women bestowed their sexual favors on other men but not on him. He would have been less likely to measure his self-worth on whether any woman would be willing to grant him sexual favors, as women commonly do in modern Hollywood films.

Another problem that might have driven him to distraction, was that he lost the ability to distinguish fact from fancy. Hollywood encourages people to emphasize the fanciful at the expense of the factual. Having a father who helps direct Hollywood films did not help him. He seems to have believed that someone should direct a film in which he, Elliott Rodger, finally lands the girl of his dreams. This did not happen, so he took an awful revenge against innocent people.

Who’s to blame?

Today six people are dead. We can blame the man who killed them, because he was too much in love with himself. But the Hollywood establishment must also accept its own responsibility for contributory negligence. Hollywood taught Elliot Rodger, and teaches many other Elliot Rodgers, to love themselves above all else and believe in fantasy.

More than that, Elliott Rodger was one step removed from having an active role in Hollywood. The motion picture everyone should remember when thinking about this case is not The Hunger Games, but Sunset Boulevard. Elliot Rodger reprised the role of Gloria Swanson, against six William and Wilhelmina Holdens. The motives were the same. The sickness was the same. And the contributory negligence of Hollywood, in creating that sickness, was also the same.

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