Crisis: The Forever Purge (Everardo Valerio Gout, 2021)

First things first: Be Not Afraid #3, the third issue of my horror comic with the great Lisandro Estherren, is out today. It's only available at real, physical comic shops, the kind you have to enter with your feet and body, so go there today to get a copy you can hold in your actual meat-based hands. Here's a preview to get you excited.

This is always how America was going to end, I thought, driving down from New York to Virginia this summer. 

A national narrative is a weird thing. America has several: Melting pot, land of opportunity, great experiment, land-of-the-free-home-of-the-brave. All of those are just stories, though, superimposed on the brute fact of land, and the land on the drive down from New York is uncommonly beautiful. All those big, rolling misty hills in rural New York, all those wide plains dotted with old farmhouses. 

All those McDonalds, all those Burger Kings, all those Shells and Love’s and Oncos and rest stops, all those chain restaurants and hotels and strip malls that look like every other strip mall and hotel and chain restaurant, so that no matter where you are, everything looks like home. Everything looks like America, an endless assortment of towns where you can buy more or less the same things in more or less the same places. That’s what this country is. 

So for that one moment, as the car made its way down the country toward the beginning, I saw the story of America, and how it ended: America was a cash grab. A resource-rich country with an under-defended Native population, a golden opportunity for a lot of rich guys to invade, plunder, and wring the land dry. When every resource had been extracted, when the wealth had piled up to truly obscene levels in some quarters and basic daily life had become impossible for everyone else, America was always going to fall apart. We just happened to be living through that end game now. 

This was a very dramatic revelation to have while being driven past a Popeye’s Chicken, and I’m sure it sounds dimwitted and liberal-arts-white-boy-stoned to anyone whose understanding of these things surpasses my own. (It isn’t hard to surpass me, for the record.) But when historians comb through this period, trying to understand the end of America, I can only hope they will find the one historical document as tacky and disposable and plastic and somehow endearingly stupid as this country is. I hope they will find The Purge. 

So, here we are, at the fifth and (so far???) final installment of The Purge. I’m sure our readers remember the ending of The Purge: Election Year, in which the majority of America turns on the Purge, and elects President Chappell Roan (Juliet from LOST) to outlaw it, only to be stymied when the Purge die-hards begin rioting and Purging in the streets, in an attempt to save their beloved racist institutions. 

Good news: All of that context is completely irrelevant to this Purge movie, which opens with the information that America has just gone ahead and re-elected the Purge party. (“There’s no way they would elect the Purge party again!” — Me, living in the country that very recently elected the Purge party again.) No other series in history has been this allergic to its own canon; every few years, in Purgemerica, the slate gets wiped clean and the story has to start all over again, like the whole country has Memento disease. 

Hey there: I'm still selling cheap subscriptions to make up for the unexpectedly big hosting bill I got from Ghost – 35% off for the first 6 months. This is the last week, so grab them while you can, and I will appreciate you greatly.

For instance, if you can’t remember the Revolutionary Leaders of the Resistance, and their heroic doings, it doesn’t matter, because each movie introduces an entirely new Revolutionary Leader, and does not acknowledge that any of the others exist. This time, it’s a Native American man named Chiago, played by the always-welcome Zahn McClarnon, doing his usual job of adding unearned gravitas to a goofy script. Enjoy him while he lasts, because, like all great revolutionary leaders, Chiago shows up in a talking head at the beginning of the movie, then disappears until fifteen minutes before the end credits.  

So: With the entire storyline of the Purge franchise duly wiped from our memories (franchise? What’s that?? There are other Purge movies????) it’s time to meet our heroes. They comprise two couples: Adela and Juan, recent immigrants from Mexico. Adela is an antifa super-soldier and expert marksman who earned her skills fighting the cartels in Mexico. Juan is Tenoch Huerta, and also an ultra-powerful cowboy who can tame a wild horse just by looking it in the eye and whispering “calm down” in manly, confident tones, like the horse just smoked weed in another horse’s basement and is freaking out about whether its horse parents can tell it’s high. 

Contrasting with these two — but just as important! Apparently! — are the white couple, Cassidy and Dylan, who own the ranch where Tenoch Huerta hypnotizes his horse friends. They, too, have characteristics. For instance, Cassidy’s characteristic is that she is pregnant. Dylan’s is that he’s racist. 

I’m not reaching here. Dylan’s deal, explicitly, is that he does not like Tenoch Huerta, because he’s Mexican, and Dylan doesn’t like Mexicans. He conveys this by doing harassment and employment discrimination to Tenoch Huerta, whom he has hired for reasons that are unclear to me, and also by giving speeches — to Tenoch! — along the lines of “you don’t understand my culture any more than I understand yours! We should all just stick to our own!” 

Tenoch Huerta is going to save this guy’s life, like, 230 times in the next 24 hours, and he is going to roll his eyes about it maybe twice. America demands that a movie about racism feature a racist guy who learns his lesson, although I would argue that a much better lesson for Dylan might be “don’t insult  your employees, or they will leave you to die during the Purge.” 

So: If the movie’s conflict is not about the supporters of President Roan vs. the Purge party, and it’s also not about Chiago AKA Zahn McClarnon versus the Purge, what is it about? I’m glad you asked. It’s between the Purge party and the people who voted for the Purge party, who believe their beloved party has betrayed their trust by not doing enough Purging. Rather than a yearly Purge, they would like to Purge every day — a “Forever Purge,” if you will — and they are now committed to overthrowing their own fascist government, that they elected, so that they can live every day like it’s the Hell footage from Event Horizon. 

This approach raises some questions. (“Why would you want to live in a country where it’s always the Purge?” — Me, living in a country where it’s always the Purge.) The Forever Purgers’ explanations don’t shed any more light on the matter. One of them, a white man who works on Dylan’s ranch, waves his holiday bonus in the air and yells “this money is just to keep us alive so they can keep using our slave labor!” I do not think that is how “slave labor” works. He also explains that he’s doing it so that Dylan will “find out what it means to be penniless and powerless — to be like us,” although, again, he just got done giving a speech about his holiday bonus, so it’s less than convincing. 

With the word “speech,” however, I have summoned the glittering, eloquent spirit of Screenwriter James DeMonaco, whose contributions will not be ignored. Say: Have you ever wanted to hear James DeMonaco explain exactly what the underlying politics and message of the Purge franchise is? Do you feel that all the other speeches, in all the other Purge movies, left too much room for the imagination? Well, brother, here comes your man, in the shape of a cranky grandpa with a heart of gold and only a few moments left to live, all of which he will use delivering the following Speech: 

You’re right, Kirk! You’re right!! You’re talking about life in America! The way the rich get rich off the backs of the poor!! The way it’s been ever since we robbed this land from the Native Americans!!! But you got no right — to complain about the very system you’re supporting — by picking up that gun — and sanctioning the goddamn Purge!!!! Which is ALL about money!!!!!!!!! You know who created the Purge, don’t you?! A bunch of fat, rich businessmen in Washington D.C.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Technically, it was not fat, rich businessmen. Technically, it was Marisa Tomei, and we saw her do it in the last Purge movie. But the broader point stands! 

Nonetheless, Kirk and his ilk now run this country, and the fascist government is dispatching troops to all major cities to shut down the Kirks, and thus, Adela and Juan will have to join Racist Cowboy and Racist Cowboy Bride — along with their extended families, who are mainly there to provide cannon fodder — in fleeing over the border into Mexico, thus making Racist Cowboy the illegal immigrant and Tenoch Huerta the majority-occupying citizen, in what the Mexicans call “el Switcheroo.” So I would like to pull back, for once, from the pure plot recap — which is hard, because so many things happen in a Purge movie — and talk about what it all means.

Look: There’s an Anohni song I always inadvertently laugh at, and that my husband always gets mad at me for laughing at, called “Crisis.” The reason I laugh is its opening verse, which features Anohni intoning — gorgeously, in a voice fraught with quavering portent, as Anohni is known to do — the following lyrics: If I killed your father…. with a drone bomb…. how would you feeeeeeeeeelllll?????

It just cracks me up, because it’s a question with such an obvious answer, posed as if no-one has ever asked it before. The people who drop drone bombs on civilians don’t do it because they’re unaware of the victims’ feelings; they do it because they don’t believe those feelings matter. She’s not wrong that it’s horrible, and she’s right to care, but trying to halt an imperial enterprise with an appeal to basic human sympathy is like trying to mop up a tidal wave with a Kleenex. It just won’t work.

If you had to immigrate to another country… because your own had become unsafe to live in… but they wouldn’t let you across the border…. so you had to get Zahn McClarnon to sneak you in… while also making observations about how the Native Americans have historically had it pretty rough… in between gun fights… how would you feeeeeeeeeell??????? is not at all a bad question to ask America’s white people, even if it’s being asked in silly ways here. (And even if The Day After Tomorrow did this in 2004.) There are parts of the movie that work, even if they mostly feel like Alex Garland directing Civil War after a bad head injury. 

I just really, really doubt that if you were a racist cowboy, and you showed up to The Forever Purge hoping to connect with its racist cowboy character and his struggles against the Mexicans that he’s hired specifically in order to be mean to them, you would walk away from this movie regretting your inadvertent complicity with the fat, rich businessmen in Washington, D.C. I don’t think movies change people, except in the rarest cases, and even then, they can only work if you’re ready for them. They can be a catalyst for the realizations already bubbling inside you. They can’t force those realizations on their own. 

As for me: I already know how I would feeeeeeeeeeel, because I already feel that way, because I, like indie legend and chanteuse Anohni, am transgender. I now receive marketing emails telling me the Top 10 Countries for trans people to flee to. Our queer neighbors offered to take us over the border into Canada on their vacation so that we could scope out potential new cities. I know people who’ve left the country, and even if they don’t leave the country, everyone is heading toward the coasts: New York is experiencing exponential growth in its trans population, partly because it’s where all the trans families fleeing other states end up.

How would I feeeeeeeeel???? Mostly, what I feel is that I’ve built a life here, and I don’t have the money or the flexibility to just pick up and move, and if it’s this way for me, then it must be much harder for working-class and poor trans people, or for kids, who don’t get to pick where they are born or which families they are born into. But I am never not aware that, while I figure this out, other people are being picked up off the streets or taken out of their cars and disappeared to prison camps where they are tortured, just for immigrating. Just because they are doing the same thing me and my queer friends routinely talk about doing over coffee. 

There’s no if it were them or if it were me — it already is them, and it already is me. We’re just at two different points in the process, and that process is accelerating. The Purge franchise achieved its uncanny prescience the same way all sci-fi does, by extrapolating from the undercurrents of its present moment — it was not hard to figure out where this country was going, though it felt a lot harder in 2013, when the franchise started — but it’s hard to think of any other sci-fi that has operated on such a compressed timeline. Within eight years — five, if we’re honest — the future it predicted became the present that its audience was living through. 

“America is everything,” Adela tells her beloved husband, Tenoch Huerta, in The Forever Purge. “America is Africa, America is Mexico, America is Italy… everywhere is here.” 

I can remember believing that, too, about America: That we were the best of all worlds because we contained all worlds, that every culture wound up touching ours. I remember thinking that you could not kill America, because America was always changing, adapting, becoming what we made of it. But this is a Purge movie. They’re stupid, they’re silly, but they’re never once wrong about where the country is heading. This is its final prediction, the near future that will be past soon: America is over. Get out while you can. 

FIFTH ANNUAL PURGE AWARDS, or:

WHAT WAS THE PURGE? 

Here we are, at last, at the end of the Purge awards. We’ve seen glitz; we’ve seen glamour; we’ve seen elderly lesbians booby-trap an alley with exploding baby dolls. There will never be an outpouring of aesthetic America-themed violence to match the Purge, and we can only hope that all of the artists we’ve honored are proud of their contributions. From Los Angeles to New York, from Ethan Hawke to Miley Cyrus Candy Lady, we’ve witnessed greatness. Now, one final round of awards. 

Quantity of Purge: 10/5. I don’t know if I’ve made this clear: These people intend to spend forever Purging. 

Quality of Purge: 3/5. You hate to see it — despite their supposed commitment to Purging, mostly these people only blow things up. There’s barely a spooky mask in the bunch, let alone a  top-down aesthetic. 

Best Purge Equipment: That said: A Goat Cage That Turns Into A People Cage And Executes People Goat-Style (After They Get Scared By The Slowly Descending Anton Chigurh Forehead Poker Thing) is one of the most needlessly elaborate Purge builds we’ve seen in a while. It’s nice that someone came to this thing prepared to compete. 

Best Purge Concept: The goat cage operators are also wearing bunny masks and chain-mail aprons, signifying intent to dominate this category. Still: The award goes to perhaps the best sight gag in the series, a guy in a police van protesting that the police have got the wrong guy, and that  he’s “done nothing wrong,” right before the camera pulls back to reveal a huge swastika tattoo on his face. 

Most Committed Use of “to Purge” as a Verb: “People are still Purging all over the country, and ‘Ever After Purge’ is popping up all over social media, continuous Purging dubbed ‘The Forever Purge.’” 

Most Pointlessly Specific Prediction: Once again, Apollo’s dodgeball beans Screenwriter James DeMonaco right in his backwards-baseball-capped head when a newscaster intones that “the NFFA has declared martial law across the country” and that “U.S. Military will be sent into nearly every city to stop the violence and restore peace.” This marks the first Purge prediction to come true while I was watching the Purge movie in question, a truly, pointlessly specific feat. 

Most Gratuitous Purge: RIP, Speech Grandpa. You died doing what you loved — giving voice to the political beliefs of screenwriter James DeMonaco. 

Where The Hell is Frank Grillo?: Coming back for the “sixth and final” Purge movie, supposedly. One can only hope we’re alive to see how it ends. 

The Forever Purge is available to rent on Amazon and YouTube. Also, it's happening right now.

I'm sorry for laughing at your song, Anohni.