The Purge - A Film that Gets It

Some time ago, in that murky way that isn't yesterday but could be six months ago or 14 months ago or 48 months before that, my husband and I saw a preview for The Purge: Anarchy. It looked like a bloodbath, and as much as I love horror movies, I feel little affection for bloodbaths, which overwhelm me to the point that I ignore the screen and start thinking about things like . . . . grocery shopping.  And I don't need to pay anybody $9.75 to shop for butter in my imagination.  So. I dismissed The Purge franchise from my mind, and I moved right along - at least until we went to see Deadpool, and with it, the preview for The Purge: Election Year.  Well, that did it.  I blame you, Juliet from Lost.  By the time the preview ended, I knew I was going to go back and watch The Purge.

Now, I had heard - the way one hears things out there in the world - that there was a satiric angle to The Purge, but that it was seriously facile and weak.  I fear I do not share that opinion.  Indeed, I think the satire is pretty sharply on point.  I'll explain how, but please, if you don't want me spoiling the movie for you, go. Run.  Lock yourself in behind an expensive security system.  I'll wait.

As we see in the opening of the The Purge, "Unemployment is at 1%.  Crime is at an all-time low.  Violence barely exists.  With one exception . . ." That exception, as you can surely guess, is The Annual Purge, a 12-hour period, transpiring once each year, during which all crime, including murder, becomes legal.  At first, The Annual Purge is presented in generic terms as a "release," a way to vent humanity's innate violence and aggression, but it shortly becomes clear how the purge actually works. 

Let's pause a moment to clarify a few plot points.  The Purge transpires within one neighborhood, and indeed, primarily within one house, occupied by a dad (Ethan Hawke); a mom (Lena Headey, aka Cersei Lannister from "Game of Thrones"); a daughter, Zoey (Adelaide Kane); and a son, Charlie (Max Burkholder, aka Max Braverman in "Parenthood").  The inciting incident in this film transpires when Charlie, looking at the security monitors, sees a Black man running down the street.  Charlie turns on the audio.  The Black man is screaming, pleading for help to escape those pursuing him on this annual night of bloodshed.  Charlie lets the man into the house.  (The Black man's character has no name.  He is "Bloody Stranger" in the credits, played by Edwin Hodge.)

The Bloody Stranger (Edwin Hodge)

Soon enough - inevitably, one might say - the people hunting the Bloody Stranger show up at the door.  They are young.  They are white.  They look like they just came from a prep school assembly, except with masks.

No, Virginia, they don't want to have a game of baseball out back.

Their spokesman, the Polite Stranger (Rhys Wakefield), demands access to the Bloody Stranger, whom he identifies as a homeless man.  Now it starts to become clear how The Annual Purge really works.  Those with privilege prey upon those without: The poor, the homeless, the elderly.  The privileged profoundly enjoy the dirty, violent work of weeding out society's "non-contributors"; indeed, they claim they are ENTITLED to purge.

Now.   I have seen some critics roll their eyes at all of this.  Charlie Jane Anders is having none of it.  She writes: "In The Purge, a suburban family is put through hell because right wingers came up with a plan to eliminate the poor and the sick. And we all come face to face with how broken the American dream really is. Yadda yadda."  As Bryan Bishop writes in his review, the Bloody Stranger role is "played by a black actor, because the film’s class warfare is subtle like that."

Uh.  Class warfare?  The American Dream?  Can we talk about race for a quarter of a second?  Why are the (predominantly, if not exclusively) white kids wearing white masks?  They don't need to protect their identities.  All criminal activity is legal; that's the point.  I'd argue the masks are there not only to amplify the fear factor, but also to suggest that it doesn't really matter who these white kids are as actual individuals.  They're white.  They're well off.  They're predatory.  Candidly, they seem like extensions of the affluent American white kids who, each and every day, consume Black culture, Black music, and Black slang, acting all the while entitled to do so.  The extension of that behavior is to consume a Black man, whole.

As for this being a ridiculously obvious stab at American culture, I'm not sure why a film needs to be subtle when white supremacy is anything but.  What the film basically suggests is that individuals with wealth - who are predominantly but not exclusively white, as we see from the demographics of our protagonist family's neighborhood - would rather invest thousands upon thousands of dollars in elaborate security measures and "just in case" weaponry than be in any way involved with the creation of a more just and equitable world.  Put another way, privileged white people would rather kill poor black people than make the social changes necessary to ensure more equal access to resources.  Why do I say that?  Within the story of the film, there was a staggering Depression, with unprecedented poverty.  The government that came to power, under those conditions, was not a government that attempted to employ people or to redress previous wrongs, but a government that exacerbated and extended the problems we already had under the white supremacist patriarchy.   They are the "New Founding Fathers," a phrase that rings wrong, even by the standards of 2013, when the film was released.  Founding . . . Fathers?  This is an explicitly patriarchal order that has been reasserted, even more viciously than before, since the prosperity that abounds does not extend to everyone.  And candidly, the New Founding Fathers haven't gone too much farther than our most radical politicians already do.

That, by the way, seems to me the crux of the complaint about this film: That somehow, good, decent white people would never lock themselves away while their white friends and their white children go out and slaughter Black people.  Except. 

This past week, to take one example, Senator Arthur Orr from Alabama proposed serious cuts to TANF and SNAP.  Under his terms, people who own a vehicle would not be eligible for support.  Now, let's set aside that the vast majority of those benefitting from TANF and SNAP are children.  Does Alabama have some state-wide public transportation system of which I'm not aware?  How in holy hell is someone without a car supposed to go out and find a job, let alone keep one?  And how is a person without a job supposed to feed his or her children?  Oh, what's that?  It doesn't matter?  The important thing is that someone might be defrauding the system, and the brave Arthur Orr will stop that?

No.  Sorry.  This is a measure that denies people basic sustenance, that would rather punish a thousand people who are struggling than permit one single abuse of the system to occur.  That might not be murder, but it's pretty damned close.  And while the truth of the matter is that in America today, there are more white people on welfare than there are Black people, white people still associate poverty with blackness and blackness with poverty, which is the reason why critics of this film almost universally talk about class, but not race, and why Bernie Sanders, when speaking about Black people, immediately started talking about the ghetto.  It's also the reason that Arthur Orr feels comfortable proposing something like this.  He's tilting at windmills, taking shots at stereotypes of lazy Black people in his mind, an action that also (he presumably feels) will earn him votes.

For everything about it that is not sophisticated, The Purge is still pretty much on the money, because white people in America absolutely DO hole up in gated communities, spending money on electronic security and high-end locks, willfully ignoring how the system that permits them wealth and privilege is crushing and killing Black people.  It's happening right now, without sophistication, without pretense, and wholly without subtlety.

The Sanctity of Bodies

When I sat down at my computer this morning, I learned that legislators in my home state of Indiana had once again made the news in a completely horrifying way, this time by sending a bill to the Governor called HB 1337, which legislators see as their big pro-life bill for this session.  The bill does all kinds of things, including mandating ultrasounds 18 hours in advance of an abortion (the woman can sign a form indicating her intention not to look, but since the ultrasound may well be transvaginal, she certainly won't fail to notice) and making it unlawful for abortion providers to perform an abortion based on sex, national origin, ancestry, race, or disability.  Governor Pence is expected to sign the bill, even though it was opposed by numerous Republicans who consider themselves pro-life.  As reported by Cosmopolitan, Republican Rep. Sharon Negele "told CBS, '. . . It's just penalties.'  Rep. Sean Eberhart, also a Republican, said . . . 'Today is a perfect example [of] a bunch of middle-aged guys sitting in this room making decisions about what we think is best for women.'"

Of course, many more middle-aged legislators were only too happy to move the bill to the Governor's desk.  Brian Bosma, the Speaker of the House, said, "Those unborn children are Hoosiers, and they have constitutional rights. . . . We're not making a determination about women's health. We are trying to protect the right of the unborn."

Oh, Indiana.

Children in Indiana do of course have rights, which Bosma did not work quite so hard to protect back in 2007 when he voted "nay" on a bill (HB 1337) meant to outlaw smoking in a car with children under the age of 13.  He also voted "nay" on a mandatory seat belt law in that same year for people in the front and the back seats.  Presumably, Bosma felt that the arm of government should not reach into an adult's vehicle, and that any rights retained by children in those instances are trumped by the rights of adults to do as they please in their own vehicles, their private property.

So to be clear, if you're the driver of a car, your rights outweigh the rights of others, including children.  If you're the driver of a pregnant body, the passenger's legal rights should limit, constrain, and even eclipse yours.

BUT LIFE.  BUT UNBORN BABY.

Yes, I know.  The state, it is noted in all relevant court opinions, has an interest in life. However, the state's interest in one life does not override another individual's right to self-determination and bodily autonomy - and I am indebted to @absurdist words on Twitter for reminding me about this line of thinking, which is not his originally, but which I had forgotten about until his recent series of tweets.

Courts routinely both respect and protect individuals' rights to put themselves first, even when someone else's life is at stake.  The most famous precedent in this regard is Shimp v. McFall, a 1978 case in which Shimp sued McFall, his cousin, in an attempt to force McFall to donate bone marrow.  From the court documents: "The question posed by plaintiff is that, in order to save the life of one of its members by the only means available, may society infringe upon one's absolute right to his 'bodily security'?" Although the judge famously characterized McFall's refusal to undergo the procedure as "morally indefensible," he still found that the state could not require McFall to make the donation against his will: "For our law to compel the defendant to submit to an intrusion of his body would change every concept and principle upon which our society is founded.  To do so would defeat the sanctity of the individual, and would impose a rule which would know no limits, and one could not imagine where the line would be drawn."

In the 1990 case of Curran v. Bosze, a father tried to save his 12-year-old son by demanding that his three-year-old twins by another mother be tested as possible bone marrow donors.  The mother, meanwhile, refused, based on the risks to the twins.  The New York Times reported: "Judge Monica Reynolds of Cook County Circuit Court . . . refused to order blood tests for the twins. In her decision, Judge Reynolds said that 'to subject a healthy child to bodily intrusions' would 'seriously infringe and forsake the constitutional rights of the child and render him a victim.'"

What all this means is that there are a fair amount of conservative politicians who want to put  women in the position of having fewer rights than 3-year-old children, compelling those women to proceed with pregnancies for the sake of the fetus while pretending that maternal health is not involved, not relevant, not even broached.

Ah, you may say, but these cases aren't ultimately relevant, because unlike those twins, who were simply minding their own little toddler business, women consent to sex, and in so doing, they accept that pregnancy may result!  When I get on a roller coaster, I accept that death or injury may result.  I am cheerfully, even eagerly accepting that risk, solely for the sake of my own physical pleasure; otherwise, I would never ride the roller coaster.  Does that mean that if I am injured on the roller coaster and break my arm, I should be made to heal without medical assistance? I got on the roller coaster.  I'd had two beers at the time.  All I was thinking about was my own selfish fun.  Shouldn't I be made to march about with my arm broken until it heals naturally?  Because didn't I know the risks?  And isn't that broken arm a fairly minor inconvenience to me that is not putting my life in danger?

Isn't that the basic argument lots of folks advance for compelling women to remain pregnant?

In the real world, obviously, no one equates roller coasters and sex because in America, the former does not register on a moral scale, while the latter more or less IS the moral scale, at least where women are concerned.  According to a couple of major religions, I shouldn't be having sex outside of marriage or for any other purpose than to make children, and if I am having sex outside of marriage and/or just for fun, I'm a slut who gets what I deserve: My very own punishment baby.  The problem there is that we don't use holy books for our legal code.  We keep those things separated.  We also don't refuse to treat STIs in men who engaging in sex outside of marriage; deny medical care to convicted murderers in prisons, even if they're on death row; or in any other way insist that people undertake health risks because we find their behavior immoral or even evil. (And if you think pregnancy doesn't screw around with bodily health, you need to do some reading.)

You might regard abortion as "morally indefensible," but you cannot fairly say that women must put their bodies on the line for the sake of life while everyone else in society is excused.