California dreamin’

Five years ago, on this day (if I can get it uploaded in time, two days to go), Elliot Rodger took to the streets of the small California town of Isla Vista with revenge on his mind. You might think that revenge is the wrong word, in Isla Vista he was targeting complete strangers (although people forget that earlier that morning he had also murdered his roommates) not people that had personally wronged him, but I have already explained this before here. The post you’re reading right now is going to be more specifically focused on Elliot Rodger, but building on that post. I also think most people don’t understand who Elliot Rodger was really, even those who obsess over and/ or celebrate him. So perhaps this post will provide a new perspective.

Elliot Rodger is almost the perfect example of what I was talking about in that post, in that everything that we actually get directly from him is part of this big performance. It’s fitting I suppose that his father was a filmmaker, although in Elliot’s case the performance isn’t entirely fabricated like a major Hollywood production that his dad would work on. No, he is performing but he’s performing the role of Elliot Rodger. There’s a very weird sense of derealisation to the whole Elliot Rodger experience when taken as a whole in fact. He expresses his true feelings but when on camera this is clearly not the person that most people he knew in real life ever met, he shares certain information in his manifesto but excludes other things that we’ve since found out about and are just as important, and of course during the shooting itself he was attacking representations of those he wanted revenge against rather than the various named individuals who bullied him or made him insecure or in some way were remembered negatively by him.

I’ve read his manifesto My Twisted World multiple times and I suppose what I (and everyone else) have always missed despite it staring you in the face is that it isn’t a manifesto, but neither is it an autobiography. Or at least it’s not merely an autobiography, there is something more to it. You might argue with this, after all he ends the document with a few pages on his supposed new political vision, that’s the definition of a manifesto. This vision is of a world that resembles the one from the Gor novels if they were run by Ramsay Snow. I’m talking about the Ramsay from the ASOIAF books, not the show adaption Game of Thrones who is quite a different character both superficially and in motivation/ desire. If you want to know how the book character looks, think of Advanced from the youtube documentary Shy Boys IRL. Now I don’t know if Elliot ever read any of the Gor novels but he was certainly a fan of ASOIAF and GoT, and he quite liked that character as well even using that name on some forums. In fact I’ve heard a rumour that he filmed a review of the most recent book in the series (A Dance With Dragons) but never uploaded it to his channel, or it was there but kept in private mode.

So was this absurd image of women kept in permanent servitude, chained up and used for breeding purposes alone, really something he seriously saw as a feasible future for humanity? Does anyone really think he actually believed he would pile up mountains of skulls and shed rivers of blood? I hope not, because it would be rather silly to take something so precisely written at face value like that. So on first reading (or watching, he provides us with a very similar hyper-violent vision in his last video from the night before the killings) I suppose it’s understandable to do so, he deliberately presents himself as delusional throughout the story, the most well known and memed example being of course when he talks about a period of time where he became obsessed with winning the lottery. Yet I must remind you that it is all deliberate, we know it’s deliberate because there was plenty of stuff he left out of the manifesto that has since been dug up by people. That is what I meant by saying it has been staring us in the face all this time, that My Twisted World is not just a manifesto and or an autobiography. See what is a manifesto, it’s an expression of intent. Before Elliot we didn’t think of mass killers when we heard the word we thought of political parties, in fact it’s funny how since Elliot included a manifesto as part of his whole project other shooters have started to do the same.

This is an aside but I’ve been writing up another post recently which talks about the old spaghetti westerns from the 60s and early 70s and while there were around 500 of them made there were only a few big trendsetters. Most famously of course the Sergio Leone films, but a few others, and what would happen is they would introduce a new kind of trope and then all the hundreds of copycats would try and include it. So in 1964 the world was introduced to Clint Eastwood’s infamous silent gunman Manco, and soon there were scores of stoic quick shooters in cinemas across the world. The second time The Man with No Name appeared he was working with a smartly dressed older gentleman played by Lee Van Cleef, and it wasn’t long before older mentors/ sidekicks were appearing all over the place, in many cases also played by Lee Van Cleef. If you take the mass shooting as a new performance tradition as I suggest it is in my other post on the subject, then the leaving of a manifesto is one of it’s tropes. There’s a lot of talk about how superhero/ comic book movies are the new spaghetti westerns, but I think that mass shootings have just as solid a claim to that legacy.

Now going back to the what I was talking about, My Twisted World isn’t a manifesto. No, the document is just another part of the performance art piece that is everything Elliot Rodger did publicly following the 20th July 2013. If you’ve read MTW before you’ll remember that as the night where he was beaten, robbed and humiliated. Now his youtube channel was also started after that date. Thanks to some helpful anons in a thread today I was able to confirm that his first video was uploaded on February 10th 2014, some time after he had finished healing from getting beaten up, and it was during that healing period where he started planning The Day of Retribution.

The Day of Retribution is not just a specific day though, and I know I’m beating a dead horse here, it is a grand art project with a deliberate message. That message is not merely “I’m angry about not getting laid!”, but rather that life for people like him is one that makes no sense. You’re given conflicting information, you’re told things you know are lies, and after long enough periods of isolation the whole world around you starts to seem a bit off or weird. I’ve actually been meaning to write a whole post about derealisation, and it was while thinking about the subject that I finally think I understood Elliot. A manifesto is a mission statement, it implies intent but it isn’t a vehicle of it, it doesn’t do anything itself. As I’m sure you’re aware though, I think that MTW does achieve something, and I think it was designed to.

Believe it or not it isn’t actually referred to as a manifesto within the actual document itself, there’s no subtitle or subheading where the word “manifesto” is used. No, only in the filename of the original PDF file he released is the word actually used. So here’s what I think, I believe that he kept that word in there as a reminder to himself. The filename is something he would see every time he went to open the document to keep writing on it, and as I’ve explained a manifesto is a mission statement. He was making sure that every time he went to keep writing he would be reminded that he was working towards something.

In his videos he’s clearly playing a character, all the ones where he’s standing in front of the camera anyway. He walks with a ridiculous swagger, he grabs his expensive designer shirt and accessories to wave them in your (figurative) face, he makes these silly smug and self satisfied facial expressions, he’s of course complimenting himself and talking about how great he is constantly, it’s like he’s trying his hardest to play the biggest “Chad”/ alpha male caricature he can think of. He’s going all in, and frankly while he was admittedly kind of short he was certainly rather handsome, enough that the character isn’t entirely unbelievable. If you didn’t know any better and weren’t paying attention to the subject and context of the video, you might very well just take this guy at face value. Yet it’s impossible to ignore what he’s talking about in these videos, that’s what makes it all so jarring. You have this overconfident Californian rich kid, who you’d assume has no trouble with girls whatsoever if you just saw him walking down the street, whinging and moaning about exactly that. It’s surreal, and I now see that this is deliberate.

MTW is full of contradictions, some passages are full of statements that imply a self loathing on his part and then the very next page he’s talking about fabulous and awesome he is, the supreme gentleman. He talks about his many insecurities, about how he hated being shorter than all the kids in his class, about how he always wanted blonde hair (and of course, we are all aware of his obsession with blonde haired women), about how all those “obnoxious brutes” were getting laid while it seemed like most people didn’t even acknowledge he existed. Then he goes on to talk about how perfect he is, how he’s got all these fancy items of clothing, a better car than anyone else at his university, or college as they call it in the US. He likes to mention that he’s descended from the aristocracy, and he was originally born here in England.

Again, if you take the “manifesto” at face value then sure he just comes off as deluded. Yet now I’ve gone through it a few times and really thought about this I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s meant to create a sense of derealisation as I said, it’s like in American Psycho where in some scenes Patrick Bateman is a narcissistic maniac who thinks he’s better than everyone and in other scenes his whole ego is at risk because he doesn’t have the best business card in the room. Now Patrick Bateman the character is deluded, it’s implied that he hallucinated all the murders, but the writer of the original novel and the director of the film aren’t.

See he says something that is incredibly revealing in his final video to us, “you always treated me like a mouse”. This line is deliberately there as a “character break” for those who would pay attention to show he was nothing like the Elliot from his videos that everyone knows him as, the bravado and bluster was a fiction. The line also further adds to the many disparities and contradictions which are used to create the sense of derealisation and disconnection from reality that runs throughout everything he released before the shooting. It wasn’t this line that really made me see this though, no it was actually some footage that he probably didn’t even know existed. I can’t find the video right now, only a shortened version, but there’s footage of him from the Hunger Games premiere (his dad had worked on the film), and there in the company of other people do you actually get to see the real Elliot Rodger.

He’s not a self confident, wealthy, west coast pretty boy. He’s a timid and, in the eyes of normalfags, weak and contemptible individual. He also reveals this side in the few videos on his channel where he interacts with other people, all of which have him behind the camera other than one very brief and unintended interruption from a car driving past. In fact, he actually very quickly tries to get out of shot as the car comes by, but those brief few seconds before he manages it are enough, you see his body language and demeanour change immediately. In those videos where he’s talking to other people, there’s one in particular where he returns to a park he has fond memories of visiting as a child, you can’t see him obviously but his tone of voice is completely different. All taken together, the videos on his channel, the candid footage of him, the remark about being treated “like a mouse” and the picture of what his day to day life was actually like if you pay close attention to My Twisted World and don’t just focus on the wacky highlights, a quite clear picture of who he really was comes to the fore.

Every time Elliot is brought up on r9k, every time there’s a thread about him, some fucking moron thinks he’s making an original statement by saying that he wasn’t like robots and that they shouldn’t relate to him. It’s been five years and they’re still ironically so self absorbed that they don’t consider that their basic fucking opinion might have already been considered before, but that’s not important. They say he was a narcissist, he was a dumb deluded rich kid who thought he was owed sex and affection. I don’t want to get into the many many stupid hot takes various normies have had about Elliot Rodger, but this one in particular does kind of relate to what I’m talking about. Because he did kind of play that character, so it’s at least understandable to think that is who he really was, at least if you’ve only seen a few videos or maybe just skimmed MTW once. If you’ve seen all this extra stuff, if you’ve read through some of his many forum posts and social media updates like I have, you should have a better understanding.

So why did he play this character, what was the point of it all? Well, I think it was in order to elicit that exact kind of criticism. That people would take this false persona, or at least this version of Elliot that was still in some sense the same person but also drastically different from who he was truly, and claim that it was his personality or character that was the reason he was lonely and miserable. The great irony being that of course if he actually had the balls to be the kind of person he was in his videos he would have never had any trouble whatsoever with women. If you’ve spent any amount of time thinking about these kinds of things, and if you’re a self identified robot (or incel, or foreveralone, etc.) then you have, you know this. Elliot really was just like you, and don’t let yourself be misled to believe otherwise.

I’ve talked before about normalfag “”””advice”””” and why it’s completely useless before on this blog, and I think Elliot came to a similar realisation. It’s not hard, I think most of us see through it that’s why phrases like “bee yourself” and “fake it ’til you make it” are memed so much. If it were so easy to fake it until you make it then Elliot from the videos would have been Elliot Rodger the real human bean, but as I’ve done my best to show in this post he wasn’t. So often will you hear people telling robots to be more confident, confidence is the key. PUAs and “manosphere” types are the most overt about this, they’ll literally tell you to act like a douchebag or a “asshole” as you say in the US, and it does actually seem to work out for them doesn’t it? It’s not just them though, even completely standard tier normies who live entirely within the overton window will tell you “confidence is the key”, “be assertive”, “be a man“. Even die hard radical feminists who rage and scream about how toxic gender roles need to be done away with find quiet/ creepy men repulsive.

There’s the thing though, they find you repulsive, and why on earth would someone want to help someone they see in that way? It makes you start to reconsider the supposed advice they’re giving you, if you don’t already see through it. So after the shooting happened suddenly that’s not the case at all, suddenly being overconfident and appearing to have a positive self image is actually the reason he was failing to get love and affection. As I said before all the contradictory statements and ways he presented himself were quite meticulously planned in order to create this sense of derealisation, like you can’t trust anything. Well he did it again, he got hundreds of thousands of people to start saying the exact opposite of what they had been saying before the shooting without batting an eye. Proving quite effectively I think that these people never wanted to help you, if anything they want to hurt and mislead you. I don’t want to hurt or mislead you, I love you. Happy retribution day!