The First Purge was an ok movie, kind of blunt and chunky. The plot was a ice-cream truck, you could hear its sing-song tune from miles away.
Pretty spot on themes, like ripped from the headline themes. America post Nero the Pigfucker, circling the drain, and what comes of that. Funny how they got a doughy-faced actor who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tucker Carlson to play the role of the political slimeball.
There is a bit of a conversation piece to the movie as well, a showcase for what could be a natural consequence/sink for trickle-down economics. Beyond all the gunplay and stabbing, it ties off trickle-down economics with a possible solution, especially trickle-down with the current seasoning of kleptocracy that we have now.
Reverse Robin Hood, steal from the poor, give to the rich, while the discontent grows in the poor class, they are too uneducated and dim to understand where their anger should be directed, so it just floats about like an aimless fog. Then you have the premise of Purge Culture thrown on top, an ignition and a tacit approval of lawlessness for one night. It’s almost downright poetic, after trickle-down economics strangles the economy and creates an immense sea of angry poor people, the 99%, encourage them to kill each other in one night of Purge.
The movie franchise itself doesn’t really stab at this, it only hints at it. Much like a lot of other things in our world, folk don’t really think it is that bad, because how could it? That’s not what America is. Until you trip and fall off the edge and catch glimpses that not only is it as bad as you feared, but it is much worse and much more pervasive and inescapable. In some ways, we are actually already past the drain-hole and heading down the pipe, we just don’t really get it yet.
With these movies, the culture is expressing this novelty, so it is a part of our common cultural discourse now. The media plays for us like a magic mirror, showing us aspects of ourselves in many different ways. You can see it in movies, like this franchise, as well as in popular news media with the monomaniacal passion for equal time and balance. There is good and bad in every story, good and bad with everyone, and a heaping pile of bad requires at least lip-service to something good, even if it must be ginned up to get it over the hurdle.
I don’t really think we’ll ever have a purge culture, but it is fascinating to watch the magic mirror play this out for us as it does.