‘A Nation Reborn’: Right to Law and Right to Life in The Purge Franchise

ABSTRACT

Popular culture matters for helping make sense of our political lives. This article addresses the value of dystopian horror films in challenging narratives about the state. It is situated within broader understandings of popular culture and politics, and specifically within narrative understandings of the state as a performative body. It presents The Purge film franchise as an example of such a challenge to state narratives, and argues that through its distortion of dominant state narratives, the franchise reveals and challenges the intersections of economic and racial inequality in the neoliberal United States. It examines in particular the emergency broadcast featured in all four films, which positions citizens in a relationship with law and life where the right to law conflates the right to life, and argues that the films present an understanding of vulnerability and abandonment that are in some ways already present in the state. It concludes by questioning what, if any, the capacities are for resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Horror film
• neoliberalism
• popular culture
• state of exception
• state narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Megan A. Armstrong is an LSE Fellow in Gender and Security at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has previously held positions in the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham, and the Politics Department at Newcastle University, where she was awarded her PhD in 2015.

ORCID

Megan A. Armstrong http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1514-0877

Notes

1. Neoliberalism and the neoliberal state are complex and contested concepts, and are here understood in line with Hamann (2009) and MacLeavy, Birch, and Springer (2016). Neoliberalism applies a competitive market relationship to broader social relations and valorises the individual and the responsibility of the individual for themselves (see MacLeavy, Birch, and Springer 2016, 28), what Hamann (2009, 47) refers to as an ‘economisation of society and responsibilization of individuals’.

2. Individually, The Purge (2013) received an average critics’ score of 38% out of 146 reviews counted, Anarchy (2014) a score of 56% out of 131 reviews counted, Election Year (2016) a score of 54% out of 147 reviews counted, and The First Purge a score of 53% out of 174 reviews counted on the website Rotten Tomatoes. All four films preformed worse or on par in audience scores on the same site. I chose Rotten Tomatoes for this information specifically because of its aggregation of reviews and its juxtaposition against audience reactions.

3. The First Purge (2018) performed best overall, grossing $136,236,795 in total ($69,086,325 in the US). The Purge (2013) grossed $89,328,627 in total ($64,473,115 din the US). (IMDb n.d.)

4. While not discussed in this article, as it is outside the film franchise, the recently released Amazon series The Purge addresses this by naming hospitals as safe zones that are off-limits to Purge activities.