SLASH AND CHURN
Escapist entertainment speaks to our fears and reflects them right back to us
In the lead-up to Purge night, an annual 12-hour window of government-sanctioned lawlessness, a news crew files a breathless report from the airport baggage claim. A rowdy group of young Europeans, dubbed “murder tourists,” have arrived to satiate their blood lust on the streets of America, and scores like them have become a boon to the economy, adding another perverse incentive to keep this barbaric night going year after year. Call it cash for slash.
That’s just one throwaway detail in The Purge: Election Night, the third entry in the popular movie franchise, but it says a lot about how the U.S. sees itself — and how the world does in kind. In the months after the Orlando shooting and leading up to the American election on Nov. 8, this is a conversation that’s happening in public debates, and private conversations.
But it’s rarely a conversation that spills over into movies or television shows, because those are the places people go to retreat from uncomfortable topics, not engage in them.
If we directly assess history onscreen at all, it’s usually from the rear-view mirror, enough distance from the events that troubled us that we can safely file them away.
But escapist entertainment may speak to us through metaphor, like seeing the presidential race through the prism of Game of Thrones. The Purge franchise follows a long tradition of American movies that couch the fears and anxieties of contemporary culture in allegory or reflect them right back to us. They’re the space where artists can purge, too — a repository for deep-seated hostilities or the unsettling thoughts that keep us up at night.
At the height of the Red Scare, there was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a 1956 chiller about an insidious alien plot to turn ordinary American citizens into group-thinking “pod people.” As the nightly news trafficked in horrific images of the Vietnam War, young directors including Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper responded with shockingly blunt depictions of human cruelty — Craven with The Last House on the Left, (1972), a rape-revenge thriller shot with sickening home-movie intimacy, and Hooper The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, (1974), which follows members of the younger generation as they’re literally led to the slaughter.
Flash-forward to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and another uptick in extreme horror films, led by two franchises, Saw and Hostel, that reflected a darkening mood.
The undisputed master of political horror, however, is George Romero, who single-handedly turned the zombie sub-genre into a vehicle for editorial commentary.
Starting with Night of the Living Dead, (1968), which has been read as a counterculture allegory for the country’s racial and social ills, Romero’s Dead series accommodated a new theme with each entry: mindless consumerism (Dawn of the Dead, 1978), the arrogance and folly of the Iraq War (Land of the Dead, 2005), and the spinning of media lies (Diary of the Dead, 2007). In their soulless, relentless, deadeyed pursuit of braaaaaaaiiiins, zombies became a catch-all metaphor for conformity.
The new CBS curio BrainDead nods to Romero in depicting political culture as its own kind of zombie wasteland. Although it falls more accurately under the banner of satire than horror, creators Robert and Michelle King’s offbeat followup to The Good Wife is premised on an infestation of space bugs that turn politicians from both sides of the aisle into lobotomized tools of some curious alien agenda. The jokes practically write themselves: This is the Congress we already know.
BrainDead was a political show from the start, but The Purge series has been slower in opening up to provocative commentary. The last two entries, The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election Year, have dabbled in government conspiracy and all-out class warfare, like a real-world updating of The Hunger Games. The high-concept hook of the franchise — that a “cathartic” half-day period of murder and mayhem would drive the crime rate down — is fundamentally ridiculous, but writer-director James DeMonaco keeps bringing in up-to-the-minute political references to justify it.
Election Year folds in messages not only about income inequality but also racial injustice, with its nasty, cartoon vision of America’s future. The film makes a reference to “hands up, don’t shoot,” and the government is run by a white supremacist cult willing to assassinate a political challenger (Elizabeth Mitchell), in order to keep the presidency.
If she survives the night, she still needs to win Florida’s electoral votes. As the 2000 U.S. election demonstrated, that state can be a tricky one.