5 Things The Purge Franchise Gets Wrong
5 Things The Purge Franchise Gets Wrong
Maxine Cox | December 3, 2016
After the release of the third installment of the franchise, The Purge has become the biggest grossing horror franchise of all time. The premise of The Purge is that once a year for 12 hours, all crime, including murder, is legal. According to the opening of the second installment, The Purge: Anarchy, “America. 2023. Unemployment is below 5%. Crime is virtually non-existent while every year fewer and fewer people live below the poverty line.”
Ok, so a violence flick based on lazy plot points isn’t exactly atypical or surprising. But The Purge: Election Year, the latest installment, clearly makes an attempt at some serious commentary. Even if the philosophy just comes from laziness, the effect is the same and deserves to be addressed.
So, at the risk of taking a silly movie too seriously, here’s 5 things horrifically wrong with The Purge franchise.
1. Where’s the private sector?
With an entire year to prepare for a Purge, imagine the privatized solutions that would emerge in absence of government ones. Motivated by huge profits instead of mere legal obligation, private security and other private protection solutions would replace law enforcement with gusto.
It would not be smart for blood-lusting purgers to descend on middle to upper class neighborhoods as they did in the first movie because in absence of legal restrictions, home owner’s associations and individual families would be free to exhaust all measures imaginable to protect themselves and their families.
2. Last minute price hikes on Purge Insurance.
Another market opportunity– Purge insurance. The franchise does play with the concept, but for some reason the insurance companies operate on awful business models. This is a major plot point for Election Year. The shop owner who is unable to make payments for his Purge insurance because the company steeply increases the price hours before commencement. Of course, that’s just bad business. There’s no incentive to get rid of your customers. Who’s going to buy your insurance in preparation of the next Purge?
3. Purging only reduces poverty by killing poor people.
The only thing that would reduce poverty in The Purge is the fact that people below the poverty line are disproportionately purged. As seen in the movie, affluent families mostly take measures to protect themselves from purgers. The people affected the most are people who are not in a position to protect themselves as well. Either way, the idea that less people equals more wealth for everyone else is the Fixed Pie fallacy.
4. Social order is confused for social control.
You don’t have to have any sort of faith in the innate goodness of humanity to think The Purge relies on a bullshit premise. Most people fear being killed themselves more than they want to join a free-for-all killing spree just for the lulz.
Except for some drug trafficking and other minimal-risk crimes, making crime lawful wouldn’t suddenly remove all social repercussions of immorality. Perhaps law adds onto the list of reasons why 99% of people don’t care to go out in the streets and murder people. But fear of sovereign punishment is only one incentive on a long list for nearly everyone.
Even for the small portion of the population with senseless violent inclinations, the social risks are still too high. Among many other things, they face being ostracized from their community and workplace in addition to the straightforward chance of being killed in self-defense.
This leads into the last and most important problem with The Purge…
5. Human nature is gravely mischaracterized.
Would you ever forgive your friend, coworker, sister, fellow man, or anybody for slaughtering innocent people, even if it was technically lawful?
The base line assumption of The Purge is that humans, if left alone in a state of nature, would deteriorate into a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” This is the common notion that the state is the glue that holds society together and without it we would descend into barbarism. All it takes is a little bit of honest introspection to see The Purge has it the wrong way around. It’s not an artificial social structure that holds society together — it’s human nature.
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