The Purge: So much potential they'll never use

Cafe Society
1

So, I just watched The Purge: Anarchy and found it to be a well-made action film with extremely unsubtle class satire thrown in. I skipped the first movie since I heard it was mostly just a lazy home-invasion flick that did nothing with the concept.

As I’d heard, Anarchy does do a bit more with the idea of The Purge, though it does still sticks to rape and murder. And that’s what’s got me bummed out, since the concept has a ton of potential to explore.

For the uninitiated, The Purge universe is set in a near-future US with a (presumably) democratically elected government called “The New Founding Fathers.” The NFF has supposedly ushered in a new era of prosperity by implementing a social pressure valve called “The Purge,” an annual twelve hour period where anything* is legal. The movie almost exclusively focuses on murder, and they seem to be setting the next film up for a revolution. I’d much rather see a miniseries that explored various aspects of the society, both during and in-between Purges.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a massively stupid idea and I have no clue how this could have led to a prosperous society. The damage to infrastructure and the economy would be catastrophic, insurance rates would skyrocket, small businesses would cease to exist. Even the movie’s thesis of how the rich are using The Purge to cull the underclass doesn’t make sense, though it may have made more sense if they’d set it a couple more decades into the future and robotic automation had become widespread enough to eliminate most low-wage jobs.

Still, I like it in a “Twilight Zone” kind of way, considering all the stories that could be told in such a world. Did small businesses survive by forming a massive union so they could afford protection? Has legal precedent yet been set regarding the prosecution of crimes that start during but end after The Purge (e.g. a man is shot at 6:55AM but bleeds out at 7:09AM)? Do only the big cities become murderdomes while smaller towns tend to have less violent crimes? Since all emergency services are suspended during the duration of The Purge, what about a child whose mother died during labor because she couldn’t get to the hospital?

Personally, I like the idea of a mid-size city becoming a haven for non-violent Purge activities. Say they get together and form a militia that keeps the peace during The Purge, while also providing infrastructure for other seedy activities that don’t involve murdering everyone in sight. It would be interesting (though disgusting) to see a movie explore a city like that.

So, assuming the premise of the movie is stable, and society wouldn’t collapse under The Purge, what kind of stuff could happen?

*Except using “restricted” weapons and attacking government officials above a certain rank

TL;DR: What sort of stuff can you imagine happening in a society where the premise of The Purge is possible?

2

Well, you’ve hit it right on the head, there should be looting and theft on a grand scale, and the economic implications have to be more destructive than I can figure out. As a real life glimpse, when Venezuela and Argentina are undergoing serious economic strain, a store, either a chain supermarket or warehouse supplying a small grocer, just won’t stock what they can’t sell for a cash profit that will likely be useless tomorrow. So people have nothing to live on. So they complain. So the government forces large suppliers to stop hording. So suppliers just simply funnel stuff to the black market. And there are more government arrests. But effectively, commerce stops, at least for a short time leading up to the Purge.

On the other hand, there’s that dictum of the Broken Window effect. Day after the purge, people are going to need lots of supplies to rebuild. That’s when theft, assault (You asshole, that’s MY window, I saw it here at Loews first) are going to be at their highest. For one day off, you’re going to need a least a month or three of law enforcement overtime, if massive natural disasters like Katrina are any example.

Discuss.

I haven’t seen either Purge film, nor the internet’s consensus “better” one – You’re Next. But I just saw The Invitation. So I’m really getting a kick on the whole killing your dinner guests meme.

3

The society should no longer have a functional economy.

See, embezzling and graft and all forms of economic corruption is parasitism. It’s like a leech attaching itself to the economy as a whole. You can see this in the Third World: Those countries are poor for multiple reasons, but a big reason they stay poor is systemic economic corruption strangling economic activity. As long as there’s effective law enforcement to keep the leech from growing too big, the economy won’t be damaged too terribly, but the whole point of the Purge is a suspension of all law enforcement activity.

Therefore, anyone with any kind of access to other peoples’ money will be embezzling to beat the band during the Purge, using the lack of economic export laws to funnel money to offshore accounts at broadband speed. It will be like a moose being drained dry by a massive whirlwind of mosquitoes. No economy could stand up to that.

In a larger sense, an economy is built on investments, and investments are built on trust. A bank invests in a debtor every time they make a loan; they can get back something of what they invested through a foreclosure process or lawsuit or some similar action, but, ultimately, a bank which has to do that too often is going out of business in a fairly short order. Therefore, a bank has to be able to trust that most prospective debtors will not default. On the flip side, a lending institution which stomachs a high rate of defaults is a payday loan operation and/or a loan shark.

Zooming out even further, what precisely is a bank investing in? Why do people take out loans and mortgages? Houses. Cars. Small businesses. Medical care, so they can retain their health and can keep working. Precisely the kinds of tangible chattels and real estate which are going to be destroyed in the Purge. If someone is still on the hook for a loan they took out to fund a car they lost, they’re likely in serious shit, financially speaking. Even worse if they’re in debt over a destroyed business. Worse still if they’re in debt over a seriously damaged body.

So, yes, the films left a lot unexplored, because exploring it reveals massive logical holes in the premise.

4

The Purge’s premise, as stated, isn’t what the fictional purge is meant to be. What we don’t want is one day of lawlessness. What humans want(apparently) is one day of “killin’ everyone what needs a killin’.” Whether its that asshole father who thinks your 19 year old self shouldn’t marry his 17 year old daughter (I mean, really, who died and made HIM arbiter of this topic, we’re mature enough) or that homeless guy, who thinks he’s got the right to stink up my nice clean park bench (Oh wha, wha, wha, vertan-smertan). So somehow, grand theft and property destruction have to be policed. Its just meant to be like the fictional old western film scenarios, where someone acts like an asshole, gets told off, draws, but Doc Holiday gets his shot off first and the sheriff runs in to the dialog …"

What happened.

He drew first.

Oh, so that’s OK then.

5

The Archons will fix it when they get back, just you watch!

6

I agree with what other people are saying. The greater world of the Purge doesn’t get explored because the premise is fundamentally unworkable and greater examination would reveal this.

You couldn’t have a society with 364 days a year of our society and one day a year of anarchy. As others have said, the effects of that one day of anarchy would leak out on to the rest of the year.

A basic premise of our society is that you have to live with other people and other people have to live with you. We all have to figure out ways to make acceptable compromises with each other. This permeates our social lives, our economy, our legal system, and everything else.

But this premise wouldn’t be true in a Purge society. There’d be no need for long-term compromise. Any conflict you have with somebody would just be postponed until the next Purge. Then you’d fight it out; one of you win and one of you would lose.

The rest of the year would be spent preparing for this settling of accounts. Why would people go through the pretense of working together when they all know that it’s just temporary? You’re better off preparing yourself so you’ll have the greatest advantage on Purge day.

7

I’m waiting for the prequel, Binge.

8

I prefer Patton Oswalt’s idea: once you hit 90, every year, one law no longer applies to you.

It starts off slow: at 90, you can legally litter. His example is crumbling up a cheeseburger wrapper right in front of a cop. “Hey, guess what today is, whee!”

At 95, you can steal anything that you can carry off under your own power and take home. Get it to your house, and it’s yours.

At 100, you can legally commit murder. Not with guns, but anyone you can strangle or pummel to death with your bare hands. “And really, if you heard, ‘Help, a one hundred year old woman is punching me to death!’, would you go help them?”

9

You and I think alike. When I saw they were making the premise of **The Purge **into a series of movies, the first thing I wondered about is whether they’d ever get to a making a heist movie. However, I then realized if they wanted it to be believable, it would probably consist entirely of a guy tapping on a computer keyboard and last seven minutes including credits.

10

The knowledge that So-and-So is or was a killer during the Purge would be very awkward for 364 other days.

11

I recommend The Last Supper, then.

12

[QUOTE=oft wears hats]
Personally, I like the idea of a mid-size city becoming a haven for non-violent Purge activities. Say they get together and form a militia that keeps the peace during The Purge, while also providing infrastructure for other seedy activities that don’t involve murdering everyone in sight. It would be interesting (though disgusting) to see a movie explore a city like that.

[/QUOTE]

I could see that happening very easily, if only to mitigate how big of a PITA life after the Purge would be.

Let’s say that on Purge Day I stuff my coworker who whistles nonstop all day long into a log chipper, because in a perfect world that’d be a capital crime. Now his wife is a widow, and chances are she’d lose their house because she can’t afford the mortgage on only her salary, and their 3 kids are suddenly without their father.

Plus, our bosses have to go through the process of hiring a replacement, and in the meantime there’s no one to do his work because it requires specific qualifications that take time to get (he’s the building codes officer, and issues construction permits and stuff) and plus he has years of experience. So no one can get building permits, which pisses them and their customers off, because half the houses in town got trashed during the Purge. That’s an awful lot of people who are going to be really really mad because I killed one specific person.

Multiply that by the ripple effects all the other murders, theft, arson etc. It would be impossible to live even sort-of normally for a long time, and then you get to do it all over next year.

Since law enforcement is out of the picture, I think the natural result would be fed-up citizens forming anti-Purge gangs, where they use nonlethal means to stop others from committing the worst crimes. It would be easier to rebound from stuff like vandalism, looting etc. if the infrastructure was undamaged and half the city wasn’t murdered.
I also wonder how crimes comitted during the Puge would be handled the rest of the time. If I break into a jewelry store and steal all the diamond rings, then go to pawn them the next day, would “it’s all right, I stole them during the Purge” be accepted as an excuse? How would I prove it, ask the store owner to sign a receipt stating I stole them during the allotted time?

13

It wouldn’t just be the “fed up” - it would be everyone.

The first thing I would if the Purge was real would be to contact all my neighbors and start a neighborhood fund. We’ve have movable barricades, an arsenal of guns, and extra money available to hire mercenaries/guards. My current neighborhood would be hard to fortify, but I could (and would) move somewhere more secure.

I think this where the concept gets the idea of it suppressing the underclass - only the poor would live somewhere unsafe and only the poor wouldn’t hire an army of guards. If only the poor are valid target, then there’s hardly any reason for the rich to purge, so it would just be poor people killing each other.

Someone in the creative process, on the first movie at least, just didn’t get it. And I for one, won’t bother giving any followup movies a second chance. There’s too much else competing for my time.

14

It’s worth pointing out that the Purge doesn’t just allow murderers to kill - it also, indirectly, by way of self-defense, gets some of those opportunistic murderers themselves killed and eliminated from society, too.

15

All I know is during the previews for something I saw relatively recently, Deadpool I think, they ran the trailers for both The Purge sequel and a parody of the series, Meet the Blacks and I was very confused.

The trailer for Meet the Blacks ran first and I remember thinking, “That’s an interesting and bizarre choice I’ve never seen before; they’re making the sequel to a horror movie as a comedy!” then two trailers later they ran the trailer for the real sequel and then I was thinking, “How many of these are they going to make at the same time?!” Probably just movie-theater-brain-farting, but I seriously didn’t realize Meet the Blacks was an unrelated parody until I looked it up later. :smack:

16

Maybe the premise should have been tweaked a bit: it isn’t that nothing is illegal on Purge night, but that just somehow the police and other emergency services are strangely unavailable that night. As a result people get away- well, with murder. And anyone who files a complaint the next day is told “Good Luck” because of the enormous backlog of cases, most of which will never be solved or prosecuted. It could be that Purge night isn’t even official, and the authorities deny it’s deliberate- people started calling it that and taking advantage of it after the recurring pattern was noticed.

17

But what if some of your neighbors are Purge killers themselves?

18

Like the drug dealer who lives three doors down? Oh, I’d have plans, trust me. We’d get that neighborhood whipped into shape real quick. :cool:

19

So do scary mask sales spike just before the Purge, like for costumes and pumpkins in late October?

20

I’m not sure I agree with your thesis. It’s only one night a year. To prevent looting, shops might have pre-Purge sales, for instance, to clear stocks or booby-trap their products. Offices just need to be sufficiently protected to encourage potential invaders that there are easier pickings elsewhere. And so on.