Tomorrow is Now: The First Purge (Gerard McMurray, 2018)

Welcome back! You probably thought you got out of this one (I forgot to put them in the email version of the newsletter) but I still have book announcements:

Be Not Afraid #2, the second issue of my horror comic series with Lisandro Estherren, is on stands now. In an odd twist, final order cut-off for Issue #4 is Monday, August 25, so pre-order it now and then go pick up your copy of Issue #3 on 8/27.

My non-fiction book DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is due out October 14, and is available for pre-order anywhere you buy books. If you're in NYC on October 14, I'll be in Astoria for a conversation with Heather Hogan. Get tickets and learn more here.

Guys? I have a problem. I wouldn’t normally bring this up, because I’m a professional, but I worry that this particular problem may affect the quality of my work, so I should disclose it. I… I’m starting to think that Purge movies might be kind of stupid. 

Now: Normally, I have no problems with Purge movies being stupid. Their stupidity — bewildering character decisions, thunderingly unsubtle “metaphors,” dialogue so blunt as to induce head trauma, courtesy of writer/director James DeMonaco — is, indeed, their point. The Purge franchise is an accidental prophecy from the least likely source, like watching a four-year-old accidentally invent a perpetual motion machine while watching Bluey. 

However: The First Purge — a movie about the first purge, which is also the fourth movie in the Purge franchise; its bewildering title (could have been The Purge: Origins!) is one of its many winningly stupid features — is a classy Purge movie. A thoughtful Purge movie. It aspires to be, not “good for a Purge movie,” but actually good, and thus comes to confusion. 

I’m not actually questioning the objective-good-ness of The First Purge, which is definitely the most gritty and believable entry in the franchise, and sometimes the most cathartic as well. It’s directed by Gerard McMurray, who was a producer on Ryan Coogler’s first film and directed a well-received indie movie about hazing at Black fraternities. It’s the first Purge movie to center entirely on its Black cast, and it’s unusually explicit about the themes of race and class that have bubbled through the other films. 

It’s also — importantly — the movie where the Purge loops itself, and effectively enters the future it predicted. Back in 2013, The Purge (the first Purge movie) predicted that the first Purge (the fourth Purge movie) would happen in 2018; the fourth Purge movie (2018) is about the first Purge (2018), and coincidentally, America in 2018 actually had recently elected a fascist administration who wanted to do ethnic cleansing (the premise of The Purge). 

The First Purge is no longer about a hypothetical America where fictional characters made bad choices and thus everything is terrible. It’s about America in the present moment, where the bad choices have already been made, and the consequences are playing themselves out. 

You can see why they’d want to strive for gravitas with this one, is my point here, and McMurray really does deliver in some portions. However, he’s held back by two important factors: One, this is still a Purge movie. Two, as a Purge movie, it is still scripted by the glittering golden pen of Screenwriter James DeMonaco, a man with all the wit and subtlety you’d expect of a guy who is wearing a backwards baseball cap in his own headshot. 

So, every once in a while, in the middle of making urgent political points with a reasonable facsimile of taste, The First Purge will just suddenly remember what it’s supposed to be. 

We contemplate how alternative economies spring up in response to systematic impoverishment; then someone has to run through an alley full of exploding baby dolls while elderly lesbians laugh at them. We note that marginalized young men are pushed into a cycle of violence, in which their only way to assert their masculinity or agency is through conflict; then our female lead gets sexually assaulted by a guy who has been crawling around in the sewers with a baby doll taped to his face. (Why baby dolls both times? Look, the movie picks a visual vocabulary and sticks with it.) We contemplate that the “violence” of the poor and marginalized, no matter how demonized it might be, is as nothing compared to the greater violence of the state; then a lady loudly announces that she’s pooped herself. 

It’s a movie, it’s a movie, it’s a good movie — and then it’s a Purge movie, which is good in an entirely different way. So let’s begin. 

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