The First Purge

“Is it the end or the begin­ning?” The world has changed. It’s not just that James DeMona­co is no longer at the helm of the Purge series (although he is still writ­ing it), but also that when his The Purge, The Purge: Anar­chy and The Purge: Elec­tion Year came out, Barack Oba­ma was in pow­er, so that their dystopi­an vision of America’s class, race and cul­ture wars being lit­er­alised over one night each year into bloody civ­il strife seemed more a dark alle­go­ry of an Amer­i­can near future than a mir­ror to the there and then. It is iron­ic, then, that even as, with Ger­ard McMurray’s The First Purge, the series now heads back in time into pre­quel ter­ri­to­ries, its chronol­o­gy also catch­es up with some­thing like the here and now of Trump’s America.

The First Purge is an ori­gin sto­ry, as the first pres­i­dent to have come from the New Found­ing Fathers of Amer­i­ca imple­ments a con­tro­ver­sial pub­lic exper­i­ment in the pri­mar­i­ly low-income, non-white com­mu­ni­ty of Stat­en Island, New York. That the NFAA is said to be some­thing dif­fer­ent from the tra­di­tion­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic and Repub­li­can par­ties already gets the Trump sirens ring­ing, as does the priv­i­leged WASP-ish­ness of its rep­re­sen­ta­tives, their covert con­nec­tions to Rus­sia, and their com­fort with white suprema­cist mili­tias and Ku Klux Klans­men. Yet the film is con­cerned less with the polit­i­cal elites behind this exper­i­ment than with the peo­ple on the ground and on the receiv­ing end of this duplic­i­tous policy.

That is peo­ple like Nya (Lex Scott Davis), the work­ing-class activist who, though unlike­ly ever to come into direct con­tact with a dis­tant, Trump-like Pres­i­dent, cer­tain­ly must, on her first Purge night, con­tend with some ​“Pussy-grab­bing moth­er­fuck­ers”. Or Nya’s younger broth­er Isa­iah (Joivan Wade), full of poten­tial yet drift­ing towards crim­i­nal­i­ty and par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Purge. Or Nya’s ex-boyfriend Dmitri (Y’Lan Noël), an organ­ised gang­ster who must decide whether to dig in and pro­tect num­ber one, join the Purg­ing for some internecine pay­back, or lead a rev­o­lu­tion­ary fight for his community.

In oth­er words, The First Purge is a film about moral choice, about tak­ing sides and stands – a sort of Do the Right Thing for the Trump era, and a hyper­bol­ic guide to civic resis­tance. There is even, just as in Spike Lee’s film, a cho­rus of three old­er men who sit out on fold­ing chairs, prof­fer­ing their wis­dom and author­i­ty. And while The First Purge offers all the dubi­ous Colos­se­um thrills of the oth­er films in the series, one of those three men, Fred­dy (Steve Har­ris), express­ly teas­es out the eth­i­cal under­pin­nings of this are­na imagery: ​“The ques­tion is, are we gonna be the Chris­tians or the lions?”

The First Purge is less con­tained than the orig­i­nal film, and less scuzzy than the two sequels. Although race has always played a part in the fran­chise, this is the first entry where all the main char­ac­ters are African-Amer­i­can or His­pan­ic, and where there is no white knight. It also comes with an urgency born of its time. ​“So what do we do now?”, Nya asks near the end, pos­ing a ques­tion for any­one opposed to the increas­ing­ly author­i­tar­i­an, racist direc­tion in which the Unit­ed States are cur­rent­ly headed.