Growing Up in Hollywood
May 28, 2014
PHILOSCRIBE writes:
I don’t know if the divorce of Elliot Rodger’s parents played a role in his deranged mental state. But you don’t have to be a psychologist to think it surely didn’t help prevent the abyss into which their son was sinking.
Incredibly, this is the second time that a son of a Hollywood director committed a rampage murder in Santa Barbara near the University of California campus. The second time! The first occurred in 2001 when David Attias plowed his Saab into a crowd, killing four students on the spot and severly injuring a fifth victim. Attias was found guilty on four counts of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in the state mental assylum. A judge recently granted his request to be transfered to a less restrictive facility. Here is a link.
One might ask what is driving the sons of Hollywood’s elite to go on killing sprees. I mean, what are the chances?
If there is a present day Babylon, it exists in certain pockets of West Los Angeles where live many of the “extended” families of those who work in the entertainment industrial complex. To be sure, there are normal, healthy, and even devout families where one or both (typically both) parents work in the factories that produce our popular entertainment. But they are the exception and viewed by many as out of place. The reigning ethos is the unmitigated pursuit of commercial success, gobs of money, materialism and an exhausting work schedule that leaves kids rarely seeing their parents during production cycles. Marriages rarely last. Drugs and sex begin in middle school if not sooner. Religion is viewed with suspicion if not hostility. Kid has problems? Get a therapist and send me the bill. Then give him a BMW because he’s really trying hard to get better.
Outsiders rarely have a glimpse or appreciation into just how unhinged and off the guardrails this segment of society has become. Of course, Hollywood has never been known for its Mayberry mores, but there was a time when it wasn’t so inhospitable and destructive to family life.
In this light, the nihilistic acts of these young men isn’t such a mystery. Sadly, it will happen again.
Laura writes:
The celebrity news on a daily basis does give us all a good sense of the horror of growing up in Hollywood. You have to be pretty far removed from reality to fail to see what a mess it all is. It was always bad, but now it’s much worse, especially since single motherhood is so cool and new babies can be purchased from anywhere in the world. When narcissism, materialism and personal ambition are carried to such extremes, it’s surprising that anyone comes out normal.
Elliott Rodgers was the demonic manifestation of the hell of Hollywood. He was a living demon emerging from that famous pit of fire.
— Comments —
Matthew H. writes:
Question:
Elliot comes off like Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice, except all the women are cruel Monette Moio’s and he is a vapid wanna be. In a different culture he might have been fine.
What do we make of this idea that he was born to “young parents” – 26 and 30? Is everyone in LA on IFV that this seemed young to him?
My response:
In upper-middle-class LA, parents who are 26 and 30 might as well be teenagers. My boys were born when I was 31 and 33. Today I am 42, and I am the youngest father among the parents of the children in my eldest son’s fourth grade class, and the second-youngest father among the parents of the children in my youngest son’s third grade class. Each class has approximately 45 students, so I am younger than 88 of the 90 fathers of third and fourth-grade students at the school my kids attend. You should see some of the parents of even older students. Imagine a distinguished looking CEO or judge, the kind of person who is on an oil painting. At the school my kids attend, that person is the parent of a seventh-grader.
My third-grader has one friend whose father is 62, and another whose father is 61. Those boys were born when their fathers were 53 and 51, respectively. The 61 year-old father has older children from a previous marriage, and his trophy wife was in her 30′s when she gave birth. The 62 year-old father does not have any older children. His wife gave birth (via IVF) at the age of 47. They’d been trying to have kids for 20 or 30 years but were unable to do so; advances in fertility technology finally made it possible. There are several other third and fourth grade moms in their mid 50′s.
At a recent dinner party, I was talking to the head of the Lower School and her husband; they are in their late 40′s or early 50′s and are newlyweds, neither has been married before. The husband noted that I was quite a bit younger than he was, and I joked that “around here, I feel like a teen father.” Instead of changing the subject away from such a controversial topic, the head of the Lower School burst out laughing — it was so obviously true that she could not deny it and had to laugh.
My kids attend a very conservative, religious school. Most of the parents are deeply religious; almost everyone is ultra-conservative; and in general people are focused on their kids to the exclusion of basically everything else. There are a lot of old money families at the school, so many of the parents are not subject to the same financial pressures as the rest of us; they did not delay fertility for economic reasons. And if THOSE conservative, religious, family-oriented people are waiting until they are in their 40′s to have their first kid, you can just imagine what a freakshow that procreation and family life is among the ultra-liberal, heavily mortgaged Hollywood crowd. “Freakshow” does not begin to describe it, you cannot imagine how old some of those parents are; how they live their lives; and what they believe. Add in the second and third marriages, the materialism, etc. – I shudder to think of raising kids in that environment. So much of this kid’s dysfunction is undoubtedly due to his environment. He probably had very few positive role models, and I’m sure he was never taught any values beyond conformity, compliance, achievement and pleasure-seeking,.
Getting back to the issue of maternal age, my wife is 8 years older than I am, so when she was pregnant at 40 and 42, (we did not need fertility treatments, we got lucky) we wound up with an obstetrician at UCLA who specializes in “AMA” (Advanced Maternal Age) pregnancies. We became friendly with the obstetrician, and she mentioned that my wife was one of her YOUNGEST patients; during one appointment, the obstetrician said that she had 15 patients in their 50′s at that particular moment in time. Not 15 patients in their 50’s over the course of her entire career — 15 patients in their 50’s who were pregnant as of the date of our ultrasound appointment. If the killer’s parents were 30 and 26 when he was born, that really is incredibly young in the milieu that he was raised in. I’m sure the parents of his classmates were much, much older, on average. In my experience those people seldom have a well-developed sense of morality or tradition, they have no idea how to be a parent and really do see kids as a lifestyle accessory, even though they are in their 50′s and 60′s. You cannot imagine how shallow and selfish most of them are, when they are forced to act as parents they simply go through the motions and ape the behavior of their own parents from 50 years ago, all the while carefully avoiding anything that could be seen as uncool, judgmental, or old-fashioned That is why I try to keep my kids as far away from people like the shooter’s parents, and the shooter himself, as possible. That crowd is going to produce many more lost souls, mark my words.
Well that is certainly true. Like gum he picked up every value and world view articulated and unarticulated in that environment and accepted them uncritically and unqualified.
The fact that he thinks his parents were young means something:
“I was born to young parents. My father, Peter Roger, was only 26 when he impregnated my mother Chin, who was 30″.
Why the ages at “impregnation” and not birth?
It might be the case that he contrasting their current lethargy with their previous vitality. Or perhaps the emphasis if on the “mistake” of his birth. Or it might be the case that all of his peers in Hollywood really are being raised by elderly people. John Moio, father of the obnoxious Monnette Moio, is 75 now and his daughter would be 21 or so.
So the world view would seem to be that you become sexually active around 14 or 15 and then remain in a prolonged adolescence until your 40′s. It would be fascinating to see how prevalent that outlook is in LA. You would think that Elliot would assume he still had a large window of opportunity to fit in. But maybe he viewed it as looking at a long stretch of being an outcast.
My response:
“So the world view would seem to be that you become sexually active around 14 or 15 and then remain in a prolonged adolescence until your 40′s. It would be fascinating to see how prevalent that outlook is in LA.”
That’s exactly right. You’ve perfectly captured the essence of the worldview. That pattern of thinking is the DEFAULT in the LA entertainment industry. It is exactly how 98% of the people in the industry live their lives.
