Film

Seth Rogen, Judd Apatow Slam Washington Post Critic For Blaming Their Films For Mass Shooting

This whole thing is getting a little out of hand.

by Katie Booth  28 May 2014

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The Santa Barbara shootings, which took place over the weekend, saw six people murdered before the gunman killed himself — and there are three key issues being debated in its wake: gun control, mental health, and the role men’s rights activism played in the tragedy. ‘This complex and tragic event supports my own view‘, wrote all outlets everywhere — and the latest guilty party, according to Seth Rogen at least, is Ann Hornaday: film critic at  the Washington Post.

In her piece published yesterday, Hornaday implies that Hollywood’s “escapist fantasies [that] so often revolve around vigilantism and sexual wish-fulfillment” played a large part in the tragedy. “Rodger’s rampage may be a function of his own profound distress, but it also shows how a sexist movie monoculture can be toxic for women and men alike.” It’s a fair point — there are a lot of terrible films out there — but she points the finger specifically at Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow. 

“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’?” she asks. “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’?”

She continues: “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.”

Seth Rogen, who stars in Neighbors, was not happy.

Judd Apatow chimed in too.

Overnight, Ann Hornaday published a follow-up piece, where she claimed her column had been “twisted, tortured and torqued out of context”.

“I was not using the grievous episode in Isla Vista to make myself more famous; nor was I casting blame on the movies for Rodger’s actions,” she says. “Rather, in my capacity as a movie critic, I was looking at the video as a lens through which to examine questions about sexism, insecurity and entitlement, how they’ve threaded their way through an entertainment culture historically dominated by men and how they’ve shaped our own expectations as individuals and a culture.

“At a time when women account for less than 20 percent of filmmakers behind the camera and protagonists in front of it, I suggested that it’s long past time to expand and diversify the stories we tell ourselves.”

Apparently CNN picked up on the story, asking Hornaday and Apatow to discuss in on air. Apatow refused, and called on Hornaday to do the same.

Expect this one to keep festering on twitter for a while.
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