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.]
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.
2 comments:
Speaking of torture, I would like to put in a little plug for the new show Crossbones, which stars John Malkovich as Edward Teach/Blackbeard. Crossbones did a thing in the first episode that I am pretty sure I have never seen on television before. A thing that I have many many times complained and ranted and whined about, especially when 24 was on TV (the first time). Which is this: there is a scene where someone is being tortured for information, and Malkovich comes in, and he says something like, "hey, when you torture people sometimes they lie. stop torturing, because it's not an effective method." Which is like the most obvious basic argument against torture, but it never comes up on TV. People often argue about the morality of torture, but never about the practical downside.
My question about The Purge is a practical one: I understand from the trailer (and from your post) that there is a time when crime is legal, right? And then the rest of the time there is no crime? Why is there no crime the rest of the time? Is it that the criminal justice system is more effective in this world? Or is it the premise of the movie that if you let people do crime occasionally, they will happily not do crime the rest of the time? Also, is it just violent crime? Is like embezzling legal for that weekend too, or tax fraud? I guess I could find out the answers by watching the movie or reading the internet...
I'm glad you asked that question! The short answer is "it's an allegory."
Here's the long answer: tax fraud, as always, is a gray area. The official government announcement launching the purge states the all crime is legal and there are no police or emergency services for 12 hours. It then goes on for a very long time to state that all weapons (excluding those of mass destruction) are legal, and that homicide is legal.
The "theory" of the purge is that humans are fundamentally violent, so if you let them enact that one night a year, they sort of get it out of their system. Don't think about that too much.
It seems like the underlying reason there is no poverty is that on said night all the rich people kill all the poor people. So........I guess the message is that if you kill all the poor people you remove all the people who suffer from the underlying conditions that cause crime and violence?
It's very hard to tell if the message is that humans are violent and the purge works, or if you simply keep poverty and unemployment numbers down by killing the people who would raise your numbers.
Either way, you've definitely just drafted a proposal for the sequel, in which everyone who is poor uses the purge to embezzle wealth from the rich, thus certainly ensuring that this is the last year the purge is legal.
The central moral takeaway from both the movie and yoru comment is this:
Don't torture, kids!
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