One of the most constant issues facing most societies for as long as people can remember is class disparity. This issue was the basis of many political art and movements of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The films I am examining today – John Carpenter’s 1988 science fiction action film They Live and Gerard McMurray’s 2018 film The First Purge – both unambiguously tackle this issue. The fact that they come from two different eras, released exactly thirty years apart, underscores how pervasive the politics of class struggle are.
They Live stars “Rowdy” Roddy Piper as John Nada, a drifter hitching his way around the country looking for work. Upon arriving in Los Angeles, the only work he can find is an under-the-table construction job. The only place he can find to sleep is in a homeless shanty town, which quickly gets raided by the police in an attempt to thwart the local “conspiracy theorists” hiding there.
The following day Nada retrieves a box of sunglasses that belonged to the conspirators. Wearing them reveals a different world to him. Advertising billboards subliminally display commands such as OBEY, STAY ASLEEP, and CONFORM. Others suggest actions like WATCH TV and CONSUME, or offer the disturbing admonition $$$THIS IS YOUR GOD$$$. Even pornographic magazines bear messages to MARRY AND REPRODUCE. The glasses allow Nada to see a chilling truth: almost every facet of society has been manufactured to keep people unaware and obedient. Most frighteningly, however, the glasses reveal that the wealthy, upper-class people and authority figures around him are not, in fact, people, but rather grotesque aliens. The police, the wealthy, lawyers, bankers, media personalities, and news anchors – all are hidden agents of a secret alien invasion of the planet, maintaining these rigid class structures to keep themselves in power.
The Purge horror franchise stretches across four movies and a television show. Set in the near future, the franchise’s main premise is that the United States has become dominated by a political party called The New Founding Fathers, who have implemented a yearly holiday called the Purge. During the Purge, all crime, including murder, is legal for a 12-hour period. This holiday has supposedly brought yearly crime rates down to 1%.
Each entry in the franchise highlights how relatively unaffected wealthy and middle-class white people are by the holiday, while the poor and lower class communities – primarily populated by people of color – suffer in immeasurable numbers. The first three films present the subtextual possibility that the Purge’s intended purpose was to drastically reduce the country’s population of poor and people of color, so that The New Founding Fathers can maintain their political power. This subtext becomes direct text in the franchise’s fourth film, the prequel film The First Purge.
The First Purge explores the government’s first early experiment with the Purge, which was set in a poor “projects” neighborhood in Staten Island populated almost entirely by black and Hispanic residents. The government offers each resident $5,000 to stay in the area for the duration of the “experiment”. When most citizens chose to simply party and do drugs instead of committing violent crimes during the Purge, the government sends in a military assassin group to stage gang murders.
The film’s two focal characters are Nya (Lex Scott Davis), a black civil rights advocate leading a campaign against the Purge taking place, and her ex-boyfriend Dmitri (Y’lan Noel), the local drug lord. Over the course of the film Nya and Dmitri find themselves defending their neighborhood from military soldiers wearing leather Nazi fetish outfits and attempting to murder them.
The similarities between these films are fairly self-evident. Both They Live and The First Purge directly take to task the oppressive systems of class disparity, and illustrate how the elite and wealthy create and maintain those systems to stay in power. Both feature active resistance groups that are directly targeted by the police. And both advocate fighting back against these oppressive systems instead of allowing yourself to be their tool or pawn . In message, theme, and goal, these films are closely aligned. Where they differ is largely in their approach and perspective.
John Carpenter approaches the issue from a distinctly white and working-class point of view. The main character of the film is a white, blue-collar working man straight out of a Springsteen song. His name, John Nada, functionally means “everyman nothing”. The resistance fighters are disguised as a church group, invoking the tin-hat, southern libertarian aesthetic: a militia of mostly white people stockpiling weapons against big government. Frank Armitage (Keith David), the film’s primary black character, at first buys into the system, and must be convinced that it is rigged through a physical fight with the white protagonist.
In contrast, The First Purge recognizes that the people most often victimized by oppressive class systems are poor people of color. The resistance movement in The First Purge directly references imagery from modern anti-police brutality protests and the Black Lives Matter movement. McMurray pulls no punches; the point he is making by including this imagery in his film is clear. Using the modern, real-world iconography of resistance and class/racial justice in the United States directly connects the white supremacist, militarized government of the Purge franchise to the real-world U.S. criminal justice system. Just as with They Live, the characters’ names in The First Purge have meanings that connect to the message: Nya means either “purpose” or “tenacity”, while Dmitri, “a follower of Demeter,” implies a follower of a powerful female – she fights with purpose, he aids her in the fight.
These differences between the protagonists go hand-in-hand with another key difference between the films’ approaches: the nature of the inherent force behind the class struggle. In They Live, Carpenter
depicts the upper-class elite oppressors as literal aliens – an outside force of inhuman invaders infiltrating humanity to create and enforce the class divide. This sci-fi element allows the audience to keep the issue at arm's length. Carpenter even presents a positive, optimistic ending: the evil is unmasked, and humanity can now unite against it.
McMurray, in comparison, allows no such distance or optimism in his film. The oppressive system in The First Purge is not the result of an alien outside force. Instead, it is merely people – wealthy, powerful, white people have purposefully designed the system to be the way it is. There is no need to unmask the villains; everyone already knows who they are. There is no way to unite humanity against itself. Carpenter gives us the possibility of humanity united against the system, white and black fighting a system that wants to keep them passive. McMurray shows us humanity divided – people fighting each other exactly the way the system wants.
A similar contrast in optimism versus pessimism is apparent in the means by which the elite control the lower classes in each film. The aliens in They Live seek to control and enforce conformity. They kill with impunity, but primarily only to protect their identities from being revealed to the public at large. On the other hand, the elite wealthy class in The Purge franchise are flat-out murdering as many people under the poverty line as possible. They are determined to wipe out the lower classes as a means of class and population control.
The films also differ in their framing of the people who are complicit in, but not directly responsible for, the oppressive systems. They Live depicts a version of “upward class mobility” that is effectively people being bribed by the aliens to aid in maintaining the rigid class structure. It is very reminiscent of the poor and middle classes fighting each other for scraps from the wealthy, rather than turning their sights on said wealthy. The First Purge goes about depicting this differently. The poor residents are desperate for the rich’s scraps, agreeing to stay in the area for money, but their complicity only extends as far as hard drugs and partying. The powers that be in First Purge are forced to stage the complicity of the local population in order to manufacture a demand for the holiday.
The difference of era is an important factor as well. Both films were made under a regressive, conservative Republican administration – Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, respectively. However, the message of the film created under Reagan’s rule was resistance against the aliens, pushing back against exploitation and conformity. Carpenter himself said, “The picture's premise is that the 'Reagan Revolution' is run by aliens from another galaxy.” Getting rid of the aliens, or allegorically, removing Reagan from office, will solve the problem. The system is okay; what’s needed is more trustworthy people running it.
By contrast, in The First Purge, a film made smack in the middle of the Trump administration, the enemy is the system itself. The people in power are incidental; they are in power, so they do what they must to perpetuate the system from which they benefit. This easily correlates to the modern disillusionment felt by large portions of society not just with Trump, but with the entire system of government, elections, and criminal justice that have been corrupted under his influence.
Class disparity and class warfare, especially across racial lines, is a constant, ever-present societal and political issue. They Live and The First Purge are two films with quite a lot to say on this topic, made by filmmakers who refuse to be coy or subtle about their intended messages. Each film tackles this issue with a unique perspective, bringing different important details to light about the ways and means by which elite, wealthy and powerful people perpetuate a system that allows them to control and subjugate the people beneath them on the economic ladder.
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