Seth Rogen: Anti-Culture Hero

One of the more interesting responses to the tragic murders in Isla Vista, California last spring came from film critic Ann Hornaday in her editorial in The Washington Post. In it she posited the idea that much of Elliot Rodger’s frustration could be traced to Hollywood itself and its obsession with sex. In addition to the presumption of mental illness in explaining his actions, she also states that it is “just as clear that his delusions were inflated, if not created, by the entertainment industry he grew up in.” That's a bold statement. While psychiatrists and sociologists have for decades pulled back from declaring the association between violence and television programming, video games, films and music as anything more than a correlation, Hornaday’s clarity of vision is a startling jolt of reality that, while completely unscientific, is more than supported by the anecdotal evidence. What’s most interesting to me is that the backlash from the piece had nothing to do with her suppositions which, apparently, everyone understands at some level to be true. Her mistake was evidently in using specific examples to support her assertions.

In her editorial she states, “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’?” Of course Seth Rogen, producer and star of “Neighbors,” responded with indignation to the allegation: “I find your article horribly insulting and misinformed,” Rogen wrote in a tweet directed at Hornaday. “How dare you imply that me getting girls in movies caused a lunatic to go on a rampage.” If that had been the actual allegation, he might have had a point, but there were many other references as well, from Christian Bale’s performance in “American Psycho” and James Toback’s “The Pick-Up Artist” to every James Bond film ever made. She was making a point about the kind of films that are responsible for giving kids a distorted view of what life should be like. Was “Neighbors” responsible for Rodger’s killing spree? Of course not. Was the film culpable in terms of its perpetuation of utterly unrealistic expectations and behaviors? Almost certainly.

The fact that Rogen wants to abdicate responsibility for his participation in and creation of these types of films says more about him than his remarks do about Hornaday. I’m sure that Rogen feels he is just creating a product that people want, no different than say, a manufacturer of cigarettes or guns. But there is a much more insidious practice at work here. Film critic David Denby, in discussing popular films in his book Do the Movies Have a Future, makes the culpability of filmmakers abundantly clear: “The studios are not merely servicing the tastes of the young audience; they are continuously creating the audience that they want to sell to . . . constantly created new audiences, arising from infancy with all their faculties intact but their expectations already defined.” The argument that filmmakers like Rogen (as well as tobacco and firearms manufacturers) fall back on is that “Their needs are being satisfied. If they didn’t like these movies, they wouldn’t go.” But that’s not true. As Denby states, “Who knows if their needs are being satisfied? The audience goes because the movies are there, not because it necessarily loves them.”

Author Joseph E. Green, in his book Dissenting Views, calls the product of this deliberate manufacturing “anti-culture,” and writes about it in terms of its export overseas. “If we speak solely of the cinema, music, and television—-the pop cultural milieu that forms one of the last remaining exports of the United States—-we cannot help but notice the overwhelming juggernaut that is most obviously expressed in the worldwide interest in film and music stars.” This statement, however, presupposes the indoctrination of Americans themselves as they glibly sell what he calls a “mellifluous nothing,” the peril of which mainifests itself in the fact that “universal ties between human beings are formed along the lines of reality television stars rather than anything of consequence in the real world.” Taking this idea to its logical conclusion, he quotes French author Jacques Ellul to express what so many of us already know: “Mass production requires mass consumption, but there cannot be consumption without widespread identical views as to what the necessities of life are.” And who creates those views? It’s obvious, the producers themselves, in the form of advertising. Or in the case of cinema, the self-fulfilling images of the films themselves that contribute to creating the very audience it continues to sell to.

But how can young people be that disconnected from the “real world?” After all, they are the most tech-savvy generation in history, connected twenty-four hours a day to the Internet via their cell phones, tablets and computers. Author Mark Bauerlein in his book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future gives lie to the myth that today’s youth are travelling anywhere near the real world on their daily commute along the information superhighway. As long ago as 2006 when a journalist asked a sixteen-year-old panelist at an online news convention whether her reliance solely on self-selected news feeds “made her miss the ‘broader picture,’ she snapped, ‘I’m not trying to get the broader picture. I’m trying to get what I want.’” As a result, today’s generation is even more disconnected from real life role models. “Maturity comes, in part, through vertical modeling, relations with older people such as teacher, employers, ministers, aunts and uncles, and older siblings, along with parents, who impart adult outlooks and interests . . . The Web (along with cell phones, teen sitcoms, and pop music), though, encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age.” Thus, in the absence of real world models, young people relying more and more on media images when casting about for ways to define their own sense of self.

The only thing “horribly disgusting” in this whole tragic episode, are the films that Rogen and his cohorts continue to foist upon the public in the misguided notion that they are providing even an approximation of entertainment. And the expectations they produce are not negligible. As Hornaday makes clear, “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 . . . what may start out as harmless escapist fantasies can, through repetition and amplification, become distortions and dangerous lies.” But television is just as big a culprit in manufacturing these unrealistic expectations. In a Slate magazine article about the spate of sit-coms featuring fat men with beautiful wives, author Matt Feeney articulates the obvious feminist argument. “They perpetuate the view that women shouldn't expect autonomy or fulfillment in romance and marriage. They do, after all, play to a certain male fantasy: living the gluttonous, irresponsible, self-absorbed life of an infant and basking in the unconditional love of a good-looking woman.”

David Denby reinforces this idea when he writes about what cinema used to be: adult entertainment. “Movies, for the first eighty years of their existence, were essentially made for adults . . . For the most part, ten-year-olds and teens were dragged by their parents to what the parents wanted to see . . . and that process . . . laid the soil for their own enjoyment of grown-up movies years later. They were not expected to remain in a state of goofy euphoria until they were thirty-five.” The films themselves perpetuate an idea of what life should be like. Those of us who are secure enough in our own image of ourselves, can see these films for what they are, pandering to the lowest common denominator. But should kids be expected to make that distinction? Are they even capable of making that distinction? Like it or not, the images that young people are immersed in, seemingly from the time they are born, are more likely to influence them than admonishments by adults to the contrary. Hornaday concludes her editorial by making the obvious connection between the product and the results it produces. “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.”

Clichés become so because of the elements of truth they contain. And the old adage that if you’re not part of the solution means you’re part of the problem never held truer than it does here. Seth Rogen may believe that he’s an innocent bystander in all of this, but his very words show him to be part of the problem. Fortunately, film critics like Ann Hornaday and David Denby are able to shine a light on the shameful practices of Hollywood and make the clear connections between the way people in our society behave and the messages they have been absorbing for decades in theaters. Rogen’s ignorance of what educated people have known for the past fifty years shows that he is as much a victim of this kind of inculcation as he is a perpetrator. The German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once wrote that, “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.” Seth Rogen’s comments to Ann Hornaday simply display for all to see the frightening degree to which his ignorance in action has contributed to a national tragedy.