The Purge

Our yearly bike ride starts in two weeks and I haven't really trained. I have been carbo-loading for about six months, though, so I should be fine. In the meantime, I'm training up as much as I can and that means movie-watching while bike training. Expect some reviews of high-adrenaline action or horror.

Here is what you need to know about The Purge. It's an allegory. It's totally an allegory for the real America. No no, not a fictional future America. OUR AMERICA. Like, THIS AMERICA.

[photo: I would make a second image of the man they want to kill with the text "help! help! I'm being repressed!" except that this would give you the misleading idea that he has any lines, or character development, or meaning to the story at all.]

Having seen The Purge, I am now very conversant in the systematic injustice and institutionalized violence that is an increasingly class- and race-divided America. I know this, because the movie informed me of this at every turn. In fairness, it was nice to see the movie really settle in on at least one thing. Tension between the father and the daughter? Failed to really go anywhere meaningful. What is going on with the son's weird tech stuff? Not really important. Will we ever learn even one thing about the mother? Nope. Will the dad have to deal with the fact that he sold shoddy security systems to everyone he knows? No, why? What's up with the neighbors? Meh. Will this family make better decisions in the future? It really doesn't matter.

They even half-assed the pivotal moment in which the family decided they don't need to be monsters like everyone else who inhabits the culture that produced them. Here's how the big moment plays out (spoilers, obviously, but then you're not going to watch this movie yourself are you? No. Certainly not.):

--Looooooong entirely unnecessary sequence in which they needlessly bind and torture a homeless man--

Mother, son, and daughter, almost simultaneously: "LOOK AT US. WHAT ARE WE DOING?!" 

Father: "KEEP TORTURING!" 

Family: "THIS IS WRONG." 

Father: "You know what? you're totally right. Let's not do this anymore. Let's go shoot the asshole prep school kids outside."

--Family leaves the room presumably to take on about 30 machete-wielding affluenza-suffering 20-somethings with only their wits, leaving the tortured man bound to a chair where he can only hope to bleed out before he dies at the hands of Richie Rich. 

The triumph of the right has never felt so shallow.

Bonus: the homeless man that everyone abuses so gratuitously is, of course, African American. Sensing somehow that making your only black character a vaguely menacing nameless plotless line-less target for limitless abuse was a bad idea, the casting directors have hastily inserted two other people of color into the cast, both of whom have precisely two lines, one of which is to say a friendly hello and the other is to demand the immediate torture and death of innocent children. Casting directors: THAT WAS NOT AN IMPROVEMENT.