We’re about two weeks out from the Isla Vista massacre, and salacious round-ups of available social media information have given way to thoughtful columns about what it all means.
One of the most striking things about Elliot Rodger’s mental state, in his manifesto and elsewhere, is his insistence that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he was “a drop-dead gorgeous, fabulous, stylish, exotic gem among thousands of rocks.”
As many have noted, this and other details seem to indicate a privileged cast of mind taken to the extreme, which is why his rampage made for the perfect ‘teachable moment’ to a media increasingly devoted to narratives about patriarchy and white supremacy — Rodger was simply a malignant version of the latent biases within all of us; his violence an individualized form of the structural oppression embedded in all corners of our society, and so on.
The truth seems somewhat more complicated — the boy really did have a pedigree; one that, like so many others, decayed. The image above is one of Elliot Rodger’s grandfather’s many famous photographs.
George Rodger’s definitive posthumous collection is called Humanity or Inhumanity, covering his many years of work, including most famously his photographs of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. If his work resides in the tension between those things, it seems to have been resolved in his grandson’s only artistic creation two generations later, with Elliot’s realization of “just how brutal and twisted humanity is as a species.”
