The First Purge Doesn’t Go Far Enough
Orignally Published: Jul 18, 2018
There is a French expression called “L’esprit de l’escalier” and it loosely translates to thinking of something as you are walking down the stairs. It’s like when you have an argument with someone and hours later, still furious, you finally come up with a comeback. It’s having a good idea, when the moment for it has long past. I think you know where I’m going with this.
The First Purge is the fourth installment in the Purge franchise, a movie series that is predicated on the idea of a government sanctioned program that allows all crime for one day. This movie is a prequel, a sort of retcon to fix some of the plot holes of the movies that have come before. This is the first in the series not to be directed by James DeMonaco, handing the reins over to Gerard McMurray, for his sophomore feature film. This choice of director in McMurray is not accidental or unmotivated, in the new era of racial accountability on social media, handing over the franchise to a black director when the film is directly dealing with race was a smart one (from a financial perspective). It should be noted that McMurray had no initial control over the direction the series is headed, since DeMonaco is still the writer and producer for the film.
The premise of this chapter in the Purge history is that in the guise of conducting a behavioral experiment the government is engaging in ethnic cleansing, or at least class cleansing. The Purge program is a way to get lower class people to just kill themselves off or to be killed in a night where nothing is illegal, including state sanctioned murder. The premise is weak to begin with, why would anyone allow such an obvious race and class based “experiment” to be rolled out? To have something so uncontrolled happen in such a large place such as Long Island is also bizarre, and could lead to so many problems. But there are many documented cases of the United States enacting horrible atrocities on it’s own people, so the narrative reach that it would take to believe the Purge could happen doesn’t require much.
The movie starts with the shot of a black man’s face, from where I was sitting, his yellowed, plaqued teeth were the first things my eyes made contact with. He is scared on his face, deranged and wide eyed, making a manifesto to the audience about his urge to purge. “Purge?” the interviewer replies as though this is the first time anyone has used that word, “interesting”.
Roll Credits.
I’m still unable to decide what exactly is the problem with the movie and in larger regards, the franchise. Is it writer/creator DeMonaco’s writing, is it that the franchise is just now starting to realize that race and racism are a thing or is it that this movie both glorifies and disapproves of violence simultaneously? Or is that this film just so happened to coincide with the current political and racial upheaval that we are going through in this country and is seemingly capitalizing off of that? I don’t know. This movie’s tagline read like a threat to me “The start of a new american tradition”, would I be forced to acknowledge his movie in conversations about race and horror forever? God help me.
Regularly through the film the use of black faces and bodies are shot by the camera to be menacing, whether that’s from peeping through darkened windows or from the Sambo masks of gestapo style mercenaries. The fear of black people is heavily used to incite a fight or flight response from most of the characters. One of the most frustrating aspects of the Purge series, is that it stands by its sense of idiosyncrasy. Who are we to fear? Black people holding knives or white people holding phones ordering death? Is this movie a condemnation of violence or celebration of it? Does this movie glorify black death or is this a criticism of how desensitized we are to it? Why doesn’t this movie answer any of its own questions and and why doesn’t it know how to ask better ones?
Maybe I’m giving this movie too much credit.
But in the age of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown and Charleena Lyles, I wanted a movie to address these issues. I wanted a movie that would touch on the American viewing audience watching a city of black and brown people being held hostage by their government and doing nothing about it. I wanted the filmmakers to make any sort of connection between the current horrors of black Americans and the manufactured horror of the Purge series. It wouldn’t be for lack of material, at any hour on any social media is a video of another black person facing down the barrel of a police gun, for napping, going a pool for socks, or using the bathroom of a Starbucks. The First Purge instead focuses on putting each character through a fun house maze of problems, making no contributions to the conversation, making this feel like the fourth missed opportunity in a franchise of missed opportunities.
The main point of contention is the character of Dmitri, a local drug dealer slash basketball coach with a heart of gold who pumps guns in to the local community, but still has a crush on his childhood sweetheart. The film opens with the story of a brother and sister trying to survive the economic violence that is set upon their community by The Purge financial incentive programs that anyone who contributes to the night’s activities gets money depending on the level of depravity, but ends with hero shots of the Dmitri being carried through the community like a war hero. His character is a cartoon mashup of black masculinity, a cold blooded killer, who is a Drake level softboy, gangbanger, but also woke enough to have a gender fluid person as part of his inner circle. Dmitri was designed by someone who has only ever known black men from movies and TV. The writing didn’t know how to humanize a character that is a black, male, drug dealer without turning him into something he never made any inkling that he was. The First Purge is a movie that condemns violence in the black community from within, in one scene Nya, a sister trying to prevent her brother from getting involved in gang violence, calls out Dmitri for what he’s doing to their community. But the violence that Dmitri enacts through out the movie for people who threaten his community is justified. Why? Why is internal violence better than external violence?
In one of the more unnecessary scenes a church is shot up by a gang of motorcycle riding racists (they looked like little league dads to me, but that’s a whole other conversation). For some reason the writer (who is a white man) thought to invoke the Charleston Church shooting, for entertainment purposes. The depiction of black death is everywhere in real life, on television, on the internet in every newspaper, we are inundated with it. Recently clinical psychologist have been having more conversations about the psychological effects that seeing so much death can have on black people. That it is actually harming us, killing us in some situations. But in the First Purge it is played out like a video game, from the perspective of the killers, as they move from target to target. The effects of the events never really seems to affect anyone, each act of horror is rebuffed by the one liners of Dolores, the movie’s obligatory black, sassy, woman character.
This movie can obviously be compared to another movie that handles race is a much smarter and more nuanced way: Get Out; but that wouldn’t be fair. It would be like comparing Ferngully to An Inconvenient Truth (their both about environmentalism, stay with me). A more appropriate comparison would be 2011’s Attack the Block. This movie is about a group of tennagers who live in a London housing complex, who defend their neighborhood from an alien invasion. Attack the Block deals with how no one from the outside community comes in to help and the people that are supposed to help them, like the police are skeptical and violent towards them. Each character is both shaped by their environment but offers unique personalities that cannot be summarized by “softboy drug dealer”, “funny black lady” and “idiot brother” like in the First Purge. Attack the Block doesn’t reveal plot by having characters literally say what they are thinking but by showing you the circumstance. The claustrophobia of the projects, the hostility of the government, the reluctance of white people to help and the over all looming threat of an outside force that out powers you, is what The First Purge was trying to do and what Attack the Block succeeds in.
The tone deafness of having a movie that shows black body after black body mowed down by gunfire when it is a literal reality for so many black Americans, is really where the horror lies. What is worse is the fact that the voice of this movie is ultimately a white man and the director is a black man and for many this absolves the problematic elements of the script. How can something be racial insensitive and also from a person of color?
The Purge admonishes violence, as a corrupt and morally weak aspect of our society, something that we should fear being a victim of and to but also accuses human nature as being violent at its core. In the First Purge’s first half the film is a criticism of a government that would enact violence on its own people but by the end the violence that the people enact on its government is justified. Whether the franchise is trying to make a point about human beings devolving into violence as a basic animal instinct and is therefore not admonishable or if this franchise is a justification of United States citizens rising up against its government in violent retaliation has yet to be seen by the fourth installment. There is no telling how much longer it will take for these movies to finally understand what they are trying to say. Will we be on The Purge 17 by the time the writers understand what the the Purge is about? It feels as though DeMonaco has finally come to realize that the franchise could have been used as a powerful marker for conversation surrounding classism, America’s love of violence and the abuse of power by those in its government, especially during our current political times, but he missed his window. The franchise has already established canon, it remains to be seen if the TV series will try to further retcon this series into something more substantial, if it will try to capitalize on the current political upheaval and the post-Jordan Peele affect on social-horror.
In Michael Haneke’s Funny Games the senselessness of the violence is the point of it’s depiction. The violence is over the top and ultimately pointless, it doesn’t have a deeper payoff other than to watch these people be tormented and slaughtered, the characters suffering does nothing to impact a larger world than the one they are currently inhabiting and the violence quickly repeats in a never ending cycle of violence. Haneke wanted to make a commentary about American violence and how completely pointless it all becomes when it happens with such frequency. Perhaps DeMarco and McMurray could have taken a few notes from this film and it’s theory. The repetitive depiction of black death we have in the media is causing psychological harm to people, while we grow ever more cynical with every new hashtag or protest. The First Purge could have made a commentary on the senselessness of violence towards black people, but instead just made the senselessness of the franchise more apparent.
Like thinking of something better to say at the bottom of the stairs, this film left me with the impression that neither the writer or the director knew how to handle such large issues. Stuck, with nothing to say in a conversation, a witty response or clever contribution, maybe it was better to say nothing at all.
