The film critic who linked actor Seth Rogen and director Judd Apatow’s work to Elliot Rodger, the shooter who recently went on a killing spree before taking his own life near the University of California, Santa Barbara, responded Tuesday to the moviemaking duo’s criticisms.
In a column published over the weekend, the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday argued that young men like Rodger who “watch outsized frat-boy fantasies,” such as those depicted in Rogen and Apatow’s film “Neighbors,” may lash out because they feel “unjustly shut out of college life.”
Rogen and Apatow took umbrage and Apatow in particular accused Hornaday of “using tragedy to promote herself.” Hornaday responded directly to those criticisms Tuesday in both a video and a column.
In the video, Hornaday explained that the troubling YouTube rant that Rodger, himself the son of a filmmaker, had left behind fell under her purview as a film critic.
“The whole reason that I weighed in on this issue was that [Rodger] had created this video on YouTube that seemed to be such a product of the entertainment industry that he did grow up in, literally and also just as a member of the culture,” she said.
“In singling out ‘Neighbors’ and Judd Apatow, I by no means meant to cast blame on those movies or Judd Apatow’s work for this heinous action — obviously not,” she later added.
Hornaday further expanded on her intentions for writing the piece that so offended Rogen and Apatow in Tuesday’s column.
“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 wrote. “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.”
Rogen turned down an opportunity to film a video segment responding to the original column, according to Hornaday.
