I can't wait until we move on from this particular tragedy cum media fixation. It's not enough that Elliot Rodger has become the poster child for male aggression. Now he's the personification white privilege to boot (despite being half-Asian).

Try these on for size:

Another indigent black man has decided that his disillusionment with his life should become somebody else’s problem.

Another jealous woman has decided that her disillusionment with her life should become somebody else’s problem.

Another disturbed transsexual has decided that his disillusionment with his life should become somebody else’s problem.

See any problem here? Stereotyping an entire race/class/gender based on the actions of a psychotic individual is logically fallacious and morally repugnant, which is obvious when you replace the villain.

Yet because Rodger is a (half) white guy who hated women, all such compunctions go away. Instead of being an exceptional psychopath, he now represents every sexist male and, apparently, upper middle class white kid in America.

I'm all for airing social injustices. I'm just nauseated by the way so many have exploited this tragedy to do so.

WaPo film critic Ann Hornaday reviews the final video and sparks a much needed conversation on the way Hollywood's adolescent male fantasy fixation is misshaping culture.

In a final videotaped message, a sad reflection of the sexist stories we so often see on screen. 

As deranged manifestos go, the final YouTube video made by suspected Isla Vista, Calif., mass murderer Elliot Rodger was remarkably well-made. Filmed by Rodger in his black BMW, with palm trees in the background and his face bathed in magic-hour key light, the six-minute diatribe — during which he vows revenge on all the women who rejected him and men who were enjoying fun and sex while he was “rotting in loneliness” — might easily have been mistaken for a scene from one of the movies Rodger’s father, Peter Rodger, worked on as a director and cinematographer.

Indeed, as important as it is to understand Rodger’s actions within the context of the mental illness he clearly suffered, it’s just as clear that his delusions were inflated, if not created, by the entertainment industry he grew up in. With his florid rhetoric of self-pity, aggression and awkwardly forced “evil laugh,” Rodger resembled a noxious cross between Christian Bale’s slick sociopath in “American Psycho,” the thwarted womanizer in James Toback’s “The Pick-Up Artist” and every Bond villain in the canon. 

[...] 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”?

 

Movies may not reflect reality, but they powerfully condition what we desire, expect and feel we deserve from it. The myths that movies have been selling us become even more palpable at a time when spectators become their own auteurs and stars on YouTube, Instagram and Vine. 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.

Now here's a shallow comment for you...

When I first saw ER, I thought, "He's a pretty good looking guy. He couldn't get a date? Being mentally unstable never stopped a bunch of good-looking guys from bedding a lot of women."

It is the gun manufactures, their supply chain, the 1% that is invested in it and the salesmen that is the problem.  They pay for the lobbies and the NRA that own congress.  It is their fear of job loss, the loss of investments and the loss of their business that pushes back on gun legislation. This is what trumps the loss of lives because of easy access to weapons.  It was OK as long as it was in poor urban neighborhoods but now it has spilled into upper classes people are beginning to relate to the tragedies. It will continue as long as we allow politicians to cater to that lobby and allow the status quo to go on. I see no changes in the horizon because of the conservatives has the country over a barrel with gerrymandering. It is going to be a long hot summer and there will be more tragedies.  Talking about how nutty this guy was is useless.  The blame lies with the manufactures and the congress they own...Not the crazies or the criminals or the gun owners. 

Our forefathers would have never allowed the mass murder of our citizens to be the price of freedom to own weapons of war.

When are we going to push back on the miss information that permeates through our society by the Conservatives and gun lobby?