When They Go Low: The Purge: Election Year (James DeMonaco, 2016)

Welcome back to the Summer of Purge! This installment is our most Purge yet. But first, book announcements:

Be Not Afraid #2, the second issue of my horror comic series with Lisandro Estherren, is on stands now. Pick it up at your local comic shop now so you can be all caught up when Issue #3 comes out 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 the UK, you can get 25% off the cover price this week if you pre-order at Waterstones.

Finally: If you're in New York on October 14, I'm coming back to my old neighborhood in Astoria (!!!) for a conversation with the amazing Heather Hogan of Autostraddle. Get tickets and learn more here.

There’s a moment in the middle of The Purge: Anarchy when you can see the Purge franchise figure out what it wants to be. Frank Grillo — he of the comically masculine name and discount-Jon-Bernthal affect — is driving a custom-plated muscle car through the streets of Los Angeles, and behind him, so fast you almost don’t see it, a fire truck that has been set on fire careens driverless down the street. 

This is what my mind says when you say Purge movie, the archetypal image of chaos that the sacred verb Purge invokes. I want to believe that utterly bonkers shit is happening, every second, even when I can’t see it; I want to be assured that everywhere I am and am not looking, an endless variety of logistically improbable yet visually impactful murder-as-street-theater is taking place; I want Frank Grillo to be there, frowning and driving a muscle car.

The Purge: Election Year is all of those things and more. The people of Washington D.C. do some conceptual Purging. High art Purging. Avant-garde Purging. We’re talking pageantry. Glamour. Staging. Outfits. We’re talking: 

• A twelve-foot guillotine pop-up in a random alley, including a full complement of dramatic stage lighting! Purge. 
• Tying three screaming people to the hood of a car while you and your best friend drive around with your heads sticking out of the window wearing mirrored M.F. Doom masks and swinging medieval flails! Purge. 
• Sitting perfectly still on a park bench eerily singing “Daisy” in front of a flaming corpse that is presumably your husband! Purge. 
• Menacing a blonde female U.S. Presidential candidate while dressed as Uncle Sam and/or the Statue of Liberty and speaking in heavy Russian accents! Purge. 
• Writing P, U, R, G, and E in blood on five successive columns of the Lincoln Memorial! So Purge!!!

Yet all of this is as nothing compared to this year’s true Purge Queen, the one Purger so thematically and conceptually on-Purge that it is my pleasure to crown her the MVPurge of the entire series: 

But we’ll meet her later. It’s time to focus on the plot. Come with me, friend, to the far-distant future, when a fascist party holds the Presidency, the opposition party has nominated a female candidate, polls are close, protesters fill the streets, political violence — indeed, even assassination — is being used as a tool to decide the outcome of the race, and even removing a fascist candidate from office is likely to spark mass displays of violence from his supporters. 

Come with me to July 1, 2016, seventeen days before the Republican National Convention at which Donald Trump first accepted the Republican party’s nomination for President, and the release date of The Purge: Election Year.