Making America hate again
The sledgehammer cinema known as the Purge franchise has never been about great moviemaking, but it strangely has become more socially current than anybody could have imagined.
The “societal catharsis” of a White House-sanctioned night of murder, rape and mayhem across America seemed like wild dystopian fiction five years ago, when The Purge became a surprise summer hit during the administration of U.S. president Barack Obama.
Now comes The First Purge, the fourth film in the series and the first under the presidential thumb of Donald Trump, a man who brags of committing sexual assault, who advocates beating protesters at his pep rallies and who is evidently dedicated to overturning all social norms, just for the hell of it.
Suddenly, fictional horror feels like factual news. The First Purge unsubtly doubles down on it with visual inference to Trump’s “p---y grabbing” boast (Trump is never mentioned by name) and via newsreel re-enactments of recent U.S. domestic turmoil, including a murderous white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Va.
Directed by Gerard McMurray (Netflix’s Burning Sands), working a script by franchise creator James DeMonaco, and released on America’s July 4 national holiday, this seriously bloody movie shows how something as insane as a
Purge might actually go down. It begins as a 12-hour “experiment” on New York’s Staten Island, authorized by the ruling patriarchy known as the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA). It’s a long night of lawlessness designed to test a theory by a leading behavioural scientist, played by Marisa Tomei, who believes in the cleansing effect of a great rage — something like the “Two Minutes Hate” of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, an obvious influence.
The NFFA has zeroed in on a lowincome housing project on Staten Island, where the residents are mainly Black and brown. The government cynically assumes that poor people of colour are more likely to riot than affluent white ones and, to encourage them to stick around and attack each other, they’re offered cash bribes that begin at $5,000 and incrementally increase accordingly to the risks participants take and violent acts they commit.
Such appalling social engineering sparks a pushback movement, led by spirited community activist Nya (Lex Scott Davis), for whom the Purge is very much a personal affront. It’s happening right in her neighbourhood, and involves many of her family and friends.
These include her brother Isaiah (Joivan Wade), who is easily influenced and nursing a grudge against a psychotic bully called Skeletor (Rotimi Paul); and Nya’s ex-boyfriend Dmitri (Y’lan Noel), who leads a crew of drug dealers who want to protect their turf and who are suspicious of random amateur violence, as opposed to the efficient professional kind they administer.
Dmitri emerges as an unlikely hero of the piece, stripped down to a musclepopping Rambo vest and laden with weaponry as he defends his island home. It soon becomes apparent the NFFA is upping the ante by sending in waves of mercenaries dressed in blackface masks and KKK hoods to incite the locals, who appear reluctant to run amok. The feds also make Purge participants wear video cams disguised as contact lenses, which give eyes an eerie blue glow.
(One of the few credible scenes in the film is the sight of ordinary people stag- ing a giant block party in the early hours of the Purge, using their new freedom to have fun rather than to kill each other, much to the dismay of a government stooge played by Patch Darragh.)
The First Purgemay be the most believable film of the four, despite encroaching franchise fatigue, sketchily drawn characters and numerous instances of the idiotic horror film trope of people wandering alone into deadly circumstances. It’s no longer hard to conceive, if it ever was, of a U.S. president demonizing minorities and doing terrible things in the name of patriotism.
This is also the first Purge movie that paints itself into a corner. We already know this Staten Island “experiment” will become America-wide law, according to events seen in the previous three films, which are set in the near future.
The most terrifying thought is that in both this fictional movie franchise and in real life, the worst is yet to come.