As the world burns

I don't usually like to let major world events, especially tragedies, go completed unrecognized by me on the blog. Only part of that is the fear of looking callous by prattling on about viewing schedule coincidences while people are hurting. The other part is that, while these things are on my mind, I do actually want to write about them, movie blog or no.

I haven't written anything yet about the death of George Floyd or the protests that have followed, or the riots that have followed that, and indeed, I have prattled on about viewing coincidences here on the blog. It wasn't an intentional decision to hide my head in a hole and escape from the world, though that could have been part of it. I suspect it has more to do with the good fortune of living in Australia, where police tend to kill a lot fewer minorities, and the very justified conflagrations in the U.S. this past week just don't need to happen.

But just as not writing anything about it on Facebook ultimately got the better of me, now my apparent neglect on the blog is too much for me to handle as well. So I'm going to come out from that hole, at least for a few paragraphs, and write the post I might have actually written at the start of the pandemic if I hadn't gotten behind.

As I watched the riots start to take hold in the U.S. -- as few as possible, as I have been selective in my video viewing -- my first thought was of a movie I saw only two months ago.

That was The First Purge, the latest in what I am starting to consider a very politically astute series hiding in an exploitation package. I had thoughts I wanted to share about it when I watched it on March 26th, but ended up making mention of it only in passing in a post that was otherwise devoted to Marisa Tomei. (The connection being that Tomei appears in the movie.)

The thoughts were that I was shaken by the world presented in The First Purge, and how little it probably differed from our own. The Purge: Election Year had, you may remember me saying, reduced me to a blubbery mess when I watched it a few weeks after the 2016 election, as it shows a world of evil fascists trying to wipe out poor people and minorities. The fact that it had a Hilary Clinton-like presidential candidate in it, and that she was nearly sacrificed by reprehensible white male politicians in the film's climax, just made the immediacy of it all the more relevant.

In this Purge prequel, we see where it all began. The same extreme right political party has only just taken grip of the U.S. political system, and introduced the concept of a single 12-hour period where all crime is legal. In order to assess the viability of the idea on the rest of the country, they select one confined area -- Staten Island -- as a test site. The site has been chosen, we come to realize, for its large percentage of blacks and other minorities.

Except it's not blacks and minorities who start the trouble that does, eventually, engulf the island. The actual residents of Staten Island kind of just think it's a hoot, and restrict their rebellions to innocuous behaviors like partying in the streets. No, when things flare up, it's because this extreme right government has sent in masked mercenaries with automatic weapons. They start to kill indiscriminately, with two clear goals in mind: 1) to exterminate as many blacks and minorities as possible, and 2) to make it look like they did it to each other.

Can you think of something more prescient for the days we are living through now?

The most chilling aspect of this past week's rioting is that I suspect much of it was started by people who didn't originate in those neighborhoods. I'm sure there are more videos out there, but one particular video I watched showed a figured dressed all in black, carrying an umbrella, his face totally hidden by a gas mask. The interprid cell phone cameraman caught him dispassionately walking along the front of a Minneapolis AutoZone, smashing all its windows with a hammer, then leaving the scene.

Suspicious of his motivations -- and rightly so -- a couple black bystanders follow him and try to confront him. Tellingly, their confrontation is with words only, and the only moment it verges on violence is when he lashes back at them. No, they want to call this guy out on what he's done. When he turns to lash at them, you can see this is a white agent provacateur who has come in just to foment chaos. His only agenda is to frame the black people who would surely be blamed for looting that AutoZone.

It boiled my blood.

How many versions of that guy were dispatched to different places around the U.S., with the single goal of creating the conditions where black Americans would be injured or killed, or at the very least, blamed for vandalism they didn't commit?

It made me think of the cold, military purposefulness of the First Purge mercenaries, let loose to destroy and marginalize and strike a decisive blow in a race war they had already been winning for centuries.