Much has been made of Elliot Rodger’s manifesto and the hurt and outrage he felt because of the difficulties he had in finding a girlfriend.
Jeff Yang in his blog for Quartz dug a little deeper and discovered the divorce his parents went through when Rodger was just seven deeply affected him.
His father would later fall into financial difficulties due to a failed movie project and suddenly the luxurious lifestyle Elliot had been accustomed to was taken away.
He urged his Malaysian Chinese mother to remarry someone with money.
“She dated [men] of high class. She had a special way of charming them. I continued to pester her to get married so that I can be part of an upper class family and enjoy all the benefits that would come with that, but she always refused, claiming that she never wants to get married due to her unpleasant experiences with my father. I told her that she should suffer through any negative aspects of marriage just for my sake, because it would completely save my life.”
Rodger admitted to an obsession to being rich and thought tall beautiful blonde women and money went together.
So what do all these misguided obsessive desires say about the American culture and movies which propagate these thoughts? Or are we over analyzing this and perhaps Rodger was just a bad person and bad people do terrible things? Read Jeff Yang’s take on this in Quartz and share your comments below.
RE: Is Elliot Rogers manifesto a reflection of us: Just like the Virginia Tech shooter, Elliot was small and bullied severely in junior high school because of it. In fact, he was bullied so badly in his 8th and 9th grades he had to switch schools, so badly he had a panic attack when he saw some of his tormentors from his old school on the grounds of his new school. And like the Virginia Tech shooter, Elliot seems to have problems with women, who either treated him as an outcast because of the bullying or actively went along with it. I can’t imagine the hell he must have been going through, not one facebook friend even. In October of last year, he went to a party, had his glasses taken and was ultimately thrown off a balcony and suffered a broken leg as a result. While he may have been the author of some of his misfortune, it is appalling that no charges were laid.
In America, racism is bad, and sexism is bad, but heightism is just fine, and bullying on account of it is just hunky-dory.