WIHFL: The Purge 2 & 3, bagged frozen veggies
What I'm Having Fun With Lately, 7/11/2024
I’m continuing my retrospective on the Purge franchise — which began in April, so revisit that if you need to — but tl;dr it’s an extremely weird franchise with an extremely robust cultural legacy.
In the last post I revisited the context in which The Purge (2013) was released, and called it a surprisingly tight action thriller that manages not to bludgeon you with its central theme. In this post, I’m reviewing The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election Year, which are… the opposite of both of those things, and nearly indistinguishable from one another!
The Purges: Anarchtion Year
I’ve taken to calling this pair of sequels the Good At Purge cycle, because the main concept introduced in these movies is that some people are just really good at the Purge.
Both films follow a group of normies who, for various reasons, are stuck outside on Purge night and forced to navigate… Los Angeles I think?… under the auspices of this cycle’s premiere Guy Who’s Good At Purge, police sergeant Leo Barnes.
But what does being Good At Purge actually mean? Mostly it means having a lot of firearms, saying things three times (“door! door! door!,” “go! go! go!”), and occasionally doing that “hold up” hand gesture and peeking around corners. In practice, it makes you an action star.
That tension between genres is my second-biggest gripe with these movies. At their best, the Purge movies come from a defunct literary tradition, exemplified by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or The Little Prince (he said, straight-faced). The characters ramble from scene to scene, glancing down alleyways at whatever outlandish vignette is taking place there.
As opposed to the first movie, which is still recognizably a thriller, its sequels are more like museums of ghoulish bullshit. Here, someone has erected a full guillotine. There, big bearded men fight to the death with battleaxes. On the roof, a woman declares herself the “fatherfucker, son of a bitch and holy shit” through a megaphone.
I’d be remiss not to mention the on-fire bus, which was instantly immortalized among my viewing party despite its 0.5 seconds of screen time. Whose Purge wish was to light a bus on fire and drive it around? What’s their endgame?? Questions like these are beneath director James DeMonaco.
On the other hand, the movies are unflagging in their interpretation of Purge economics. Like, of course the holiday would attract psycho tourists. Obviously the wealthy would pay terminally ill people’s medical bills in exchange for killing them.
In the small-picture, the Purge is extremely entertaining nonsense. In the big-picture, it actually stays cohesive. Which makes it all the more disappointing when it devolves into pow pow pow bang bang bang copaganda.
DeMonaco never tips his hand further than at the end of Election Year, in which the core cast, including Leo and another Purge celebrity in Laney Rucker — recognized as “Pequeña Muerte” in one of the cringiest line deliveries imaginable, and implying a sort of WWE culture around famous Purgers, but I digress — attempt to rescue an anti-Purge senator from being ritually killed in a church.
They do this by standing on a balcony and FIRING INDISCRIMINATELY INTO A CROWD OF PEOPLE FOR TWO WHOLE MINUTES, instantly giving them the highest body count of anyone else we’ve seen in the whole series. And then the senator has the gall to plead with Leo not to kill an architect of the Purge, because doing so would “make us as bad as them.”
When I said in the last post that these movies get worse the more they try to say something, this is what I meant. I just don’t believe this series is capable of real commentary, because if these movies are about anything, they’re about how it’s never OK to kill people unless those people are unimportant.
Which brings me to my last point, and my first-biggest gripe with these movies. As badly as they seem to want to dwell on inequality and marginalized people, they just can’t help themselves from leaning on the most blatant stereotypes.
None of the writing is good: recently immigrated deli employee Marcos carries a lawn chair to the roof. “Why do you have a chair?” he’s asked. “I like sitting,” he answers. But when that same character nails a perfect headshot and justifies his skill by saying, “Every day was the Purge in Juárez,” then maybe bad dialogue isn’t the only problem here.
I won’t dwell on it, because in the end it all blurs into the edges with the rest of the series’ weirdness. The only Black character in the main cast is an ex-Crip? Sure, why not. The unnamed homeless guy from the first movie appears in Anarchy under the name Dwayne, and in Election Year as a resistance leader named Dante? Whatever, man.
I wish the movies had thought about their themes, plot, characters, or dialogue even a little bit as hard as they thought about worldbuilding. But, hey, that’s nothing that can’t be solved by watching with the sound off.
What else I’m having fun with lately
Bagged frozen vegetables. I have a food waste problem, so I’m taking the advice every person I know who’s good with money and making use of my freezer. Did you know some bagged veggies come with little sauce packets?? Game changer!
Doing stimulants with friends. I live an extremely buttoned-up life, substancewise. And I like a beer with my friends, sue me!! But they took me to my first hookah bar this weekend, where I felt like a giant poser, except that they had great Turkish coffee and I drained like four cups. Caffeine will water the resistance, get it twisted.
Oh Deer. One player is the hunter, trying to pick out players in a forest full of deer. The rest are trying to blend in, while concealing the fact that they aren’t quite regular critters. Time out, and the hunter has one chance to flee through the dark forest, pursued by unspeakable horrors. If you don’t mind the FPS elements and lack of variety, I haven’t been this delighted by a game in a long time!
My Cousin Vinny. This is… a perfect movie. I don’t know what else to say. I love a movie full of dialects, and between Joe Pesci and Maris Tomei’s Brooklyn English and the surrounding Alabama English, this movie is an earworm in addition to a totally flawless courtroom comedy.
What I’m listening to: MF DOOM (if you aren’t familiar with his game, I recommend “Rhymes Like Dimes” as a place to start); a bunch of country music, including Sierra Ferrell (“The Sea”), Odie Leigh ("Crop Circles”), Colter Wall (“Cowpoke”), and Nick Shoulders (“Snakes and Waterfalls”).
What I’m watching: “I Don’t Know James Rolfe” by Folding Ideas, “Psych: the BEST Sherlock Holmes adaptation in existence” by Talis Adler, “Analyzing Every Torture Scene in Call of Duty — All 46 of Them” by Jacob Geller, “In Praise of Great Exposition” by Thomas Flight
Thanks for reading!
DR
re: frozen veggies - i also have a huge problem with food waste (sometimes to the point where i will eat random items just because they're about to expire. looking at you, random block of parmesan), so let me introduce you to the complement to bagged frozen veggies - keeping a gallon ziplock bag in the freezer where you keep all your vegetable and herb scraps! (not broccoli or cabbage or some others.) once it gets to a few pounds you can make a stock with it, just toss in a couple bay leaves and some peppercorn and never buy vegetable stock again. god i wish i had a garden so i could compost everything that i can't make into a stock.
re: my cousin vinny: spell marisa tomei's name right you barbarian.
Maybe you just didn't get the Purge movies. Have you considered they're about how fricked up in the head some people are?