'Purge' is no excuse to lose control
When it comes to films’ horror genre, I’m an ostrich. Head in the sand, until it goes away. Life is tense enough; I don’t need to experience more and call it entertainment.
That’s probably why, when I read in Tuesday’s Press about a local group of masked, armed men bent on a “purge,” I was clueless. What the heck is “purge” supposed to mean?
Dictionary nerd that I am, that’s where I began, at least of the urban variety. Other than a euphemism for vomiting — surely that wasn’t what those men had in mind with baseball bats — Urban Dictionary lists:
Purge: “To rid oneself of instinctual acts and behaviors considered socially unacceptable like gambling, drugs/alcohol, and prostitution by performing an innumerable amount of those acts over a short period of time.”
“The act of committing or accepting circumstances of all varying degrees of craziness, danger, and outlandishness.”
“To kill for no cause.”
After that disturbing start, the light was on, but remained dim. Until I found film site IMDB’s listings for the “Purge” horror movie series which debuted in 2013, about a dystopian society and its annual night of lawlessness and violence. Bingo.
The centuries-old idea presumes that humans have some inner Id (redundant, I know) which craves senseless violence, perceived revenge, and harm to self and others without consequence. Perhaps those who do crave it would rather comfort themselves with the idea that it’s somehow natural, rather than accepting that others don’t crave it, and they may benefit from counseling.
Anyway, after the last Purge movie “Anarchy” was released in 2014, copycats emerged. Cleveland police warned of a planned purge — defined as 12 hours of total lawlessness — announced on social media with 11,000 near-instant shares. Then again in 2016, another hoax imitated in cities across the country. The Killer Clown scare, with actual scary clown sightings abounding in Europe, was finally labeled another (U.S.) social media hoax, albeit a menacing one. And now we see real, masked, armed men boasting of their own purge?
Yeah, hilarious.
What is this monkey-see-monkey-do mentality? We can’t blame movies, which by definition are imaginative fantasy. Movies and literature are supposed to explore our darker, wilder, and weirder thoughts; art in all its forms is supposed to be the purge, not inspire it.
We need a backlash, including the social media on which society seems to over-rely for dubious information. Using film, Tweets, and Facebook as an excuse to shuck self-control is childish. Unacceptable. Not to be tolerated, for everybody’s sake. How ’bout those 11,000 “shares”?
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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network fed up with the proliferation of excuses for harming others. Email: [email protected]