Hacker Cinema
The Purge
2013 · Film · 85 min
Part of The Purge Collection
Directed by James DeMonaco
Given the country's overcrowded prisons, the U.S. government begins to allow 12-hour periods of time in which all illegal activity is legal. During one of these free-for-alls, a family must protect themselves from a home invasion.
5 negative19 neutralfrom 24 commenters
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25 comments on Hacker News
When my wife and I first started dating, we went to one of those cheap second-run theaters.
I liked that theater because it was super cheap (like seriously $1.50 for a ticket because it showed out of date movies). One time when she and I were watching The Purge, I hear this kind of squishy noise from right behind me.
I turn around, and a guy is getting a handjob. I motion to my wife that we need to move a few seats over.
You know, The Purge isn't the worst movie ever but I gotta admit that it's not a movie that ever really turned me on either. To each their own, I suppose.
From that point forward we always called that the Handjob Theater.
So as the younger iteration, our friend Mark would now own bankrupcy offices now, on top of his shares in Meta, and be protected from impersonation forever.
Your version of the Purge would make an interesting Stephen King movie.
The purge movies are the relevant ones for this idea…
> the rule of law" is the only thing holding together your country, my country, everyone's countries, and civilized society in general. Take that away, and everything around us will collapse, regressing the few survivors of that event to the prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other
I've seen this sentiment expressed before, including with the movie "The Purge" (that I admittedly haven't seen, but I understood the concept as law becomes suspended for a day and everyone becomes violent). That idea that the only thing keeping people safe is the rule of law seems absurd to me.
There's a sense of empathy, there's religion (e.g. desire of heaven and fear of hell), there are family values (keeping extended family ties together which can induce pressure to do what's considered right), a concern over reputation, a sense of unity with one's culture and wanting the betterment of one's people, collectivism (the psychological/social tendency to put others before oneself), stuff like not wanting to bring shame to one's parents and extended family, a hate for hypocrisy, a simple lack of any desire to be violent, etc. etc.
I like to believe that between most people and their potential for violence, there's a lot of things besides the rule of law. Law enforcement is for outliers that have a desire for violence and nothing else to stop them.
If law enforcement would disappear from one day to the next, people would be less safe, but I don't think to the point that you'd have "few survivors of that event", especially if you consider just a single country/culture going through that experiment, since this probably depends somewhat on culture and its particular values. I'm more inclined to think that life would mostly just go on as normal, carried by habit/convention and the values we instill in offspring.
> better for everyone
This is a guess or a bet, and one I'll take the other side of. Let's check back in in a year.
Trump has said he will be a dictator on day one. Trump has said that after this election we won't have to vote anymore. Trump has suggested we give the police "One rough hour" like the horror movie The Purge and that would solve crime.
I expect that people are going to die because of the policies that Trump enacts during his presidency. And because of the hate and bigoted rhetoric that he subscribes to and legitimizes. Better that we go down fighting than willingly be party to America becoming another authoritarian regime that commits atrocities.
But it appears that the American people value their wallets more. I'm sympathetic to that, even if my values are different. And TBQH I hope I'm wrong. But
> When someone shows you who they are, believe them
In other news, French title for “The Purge” is “American Nightmare”[1].
I hope the talk surrounding this event will focus on the absurdity and cringe of how violence is glorified, especially in the US.
[1]: https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nightmare_(film,_2013)
To me it reads like an emotional rambling making assumptions about what I think ("I bet when you see [X] you hold [Y] accountable"), assumptions about people ("most people are too weak to resist the call to dehumanize others"), and invoking Hollywood movies of all things ("The Purge").
Back in reality, most people who commit mass murder do so because they were brainwashed and incited to do it on message boards. There's not much distinction between a soldier acting on orders and a guy on Stormfront trying to impress his comrades. And it's pretty obvious and easy, if you have a platform like say the Rwandan government radio station, to put out messages that encourage people to kill each other. And kill each other they will.
Does that mean that each individual who killed someone isn't personally responsible? Hell no. They're responsible. But someone who puts out the call to kill people and expects - yes, knows for sure - that one in 100,000 of their followers will pick up the gun, is equally responsible.
I bet when you see an Israeli settler kill a Palestinian kid, you hold the Israeli government accountable. I bet when you see a white cop shoot a black kid in the US, you hold the police responsible. I bet when you heard the Jews were murdered in the gas chambers, or all the Sioux died of smallpox, you didn't hold the individual soldiers accountable: You blamed the government that sent them to do the dirty deed.
Governments have free speech, just like corporations and just like individuals. But except for very rare cases where an individual is executed under law by the government, it's always an individual who kills another individual. Yet no killer gets his ideas in a vacuum.
Most people are too weak to resist the call to dehumanize others. That call to dehumanize and kill is usually sent by groups - religious groups, political groups, or in the modern day Facebook groups. To claim that the airwaves are free and no one holds responsibility except the individual who did the killing is like saying that individual Nazis acted alone to kill Jews. It is absurd on its face.
Just look at the situation on the ground. There is a vast mass of people who will murder each other in every country if they feel they have sanction from the powers higher up. (There's a whole wildly popular movie series about this in the US called "The Purge" which is popular because it appeals to this impulse).
For any moderator or company-moderator, or radio station or other controller of the flow of information to permit and profit from the overabundance of dissemination of calls for genocide, is to be complicit in genocide. Whether or not they pull the trigger, they are responsible for manipulating popular thinking. The mob does not operate on the morality of the individual; and manipulating the mob is the job of governments and corporations. One cannot wash their hands after simply standing on a platform 400 ft in the air and saying that someone should die and then that person miraculously being killed.
The people who pull the trigger may have a harder time living with themselves, when they realize they were just pawns. But it's the people who give them the sanction who are equally, if not ultimately responsible.
Do not confer onto the rest of the human race the values you think you would uphold under the circumstances you imagine, where you might act on your conscience to save lives contrarily to the way everyone around you was acting. That's not how things have ever worked in real life.
Some executives and creators in Hollywood say that AI technologies threaten originality in movies and TV. “AI uses what already exists out there and that doesn’t create innovation,” said Jason Blum
Blumhouse produces a lot of great movies, but I think "originality" is doing a lot of heavy lifting considering they've produced 5 Purge movies, the 12th and 13th Halloween movies, etc. That's not even to talk about the industry at large...
Roy Meirom, an investor and startup adviser focused on gaming and entertainment, said that rather than stifle creativity, AI raises the bar. “You’re going to have to be more creative,” he said, “more human and more creative than machines.”
I think previous advances in techniques and technology support this, for example, visual art when photography became more and more widespread: https://www.thecollector.com/how-photography-transformed-art/
Before the pandemic, after Bernie was crushed for a second time by the oligarchs, I often wondered where the oligarchs would run away to once the people have had enough. Some thoughts were China, Switzerland, Israel, New Zealand, or Mars. Post pandemic all of these places seem to have issues that prevent them from being a one stop destination for all of the worlds wealth hoarders. There is still the theory that the US becomes more like Brazil: Large amounts of poverty with secure enclaves of the extremely rich. I know this is a stretch but we are already seeing shadows of it in the pop culture with the popularity of films like the purge.
Zeihan does talk about the US going through a political reshuffling right now that will take 10-20 years. I guess on that timeframe we will find out what happens.
Out of curiosity, can movies and shows use them? Do they censor it out if the movie is ever shown on broadcast TV?
Naturally the example that came up when I searched is The Purge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns8t4Y9G4wU
> the people like your professor tend to have a lot of experience defending their ideas
Eh, I'm not so sure about that. One class (it was a sociology and media course) he had us watch a movie that was basically a bad indie prior art for The Purge.
Rather appearing like finely honed his ideas, it looked more like a very superficial understanding of capitalism (specifically American capitalism, since it was topically focused on American media).
Calling that the "correct conclusion" is absurd. Whether or not a critic "wanted" to see a movie shouldn't really factor into the review at all. At the end of the day, the typical movie-goer is probably judging a film based off of an entirely different set of criteria (excitement / satisfaction) than a typical movie critic (overall artistic merit). Which isn't an exciting conclusion, but probably more correct.
I would personally rate many movies I've seen lower if you told me to judge it from the perspective of a movie critic as opposed to a general audience member (The Purge for example).
“We can’t guarantee your safety. It is really, really out of control. I said it to people before, it’s like that movie ‘Purge,’ you know, instead of 24 hours to commit your crime, these people have 365 days days to commit whatever they want,” McBride said.
If true, that's worse than I remember LA. That said I've never imagined for a moment that law enforcement can guarantee my safety. At the best of times they might make a best effort try to help. In my youth, I was going in that career direction and LAPD specifically told me "We have positions opening every day" which is what turned me off that career path. I knew they didn't have the budget for that which meant they had a high churn rate. I figured if I was going to start in a war zone it may as well be a real one so I joined the military instead. This was long ago. It sounds like things have gotten much worse.
Anyone from HN still in LA?
> …flashy new generation of young outlaws…
I know i’m fighting a loosing battle but outlaw is not just an interestring sounding synonym for criminal. Being an outlaw means that the state has declared you to be outside of the protection of the law. Have you seen the movie The Purge? Like that, but only affecting you. Anyone, the police, your grandma, other criminals, that guy on the street can just knock your head in and they won’t even get a scolding. Being declared an outlaw is a terrible fate, and naturally no modern state practices it.
You could almost rework this to be a promotion for "The Purge" movies
About 3k un-natural deaths in total for the year, in a country of 3mill. Which is a lot, but considering the country has about 30 mini-regions/towns, it is about 100 deaths per region. (in contrast, Oakland, CA has about 60-110 murders a year, (depending on the year).
Currently the whole country has about 50-60 murders per year, which is close to the E.U. average,
When I saw the movie 'The Purge', I was like: that's like Albania in 97....
Albanian here, and it wasn't a civil war.... more of general unrest against the government, which was forced to resign and be replaced by a transitory one...
A civil war requires several factions, while this was more of a un -coordinated massive unrest....
Most of the deaths happened during the unrests between bands, people settling scores, etc...
This is similar to the June unrests and looting in the US, but squared, with weapons and more... (from army depots, as most of the army refused to try to squash the demonstrations, and just went home)
Also, the money problem was just the spark, as there was some major unhappiness with the government then, that started with election frauds in 1996 committed by the government.
The whole thing lasted about a month or so in March, and it honestly felt something like the movie "The Purge". The government failed, there was no police in the streets, the army went home, people had weapons, looting and robbing were common, by 'masked people', it was not a good month...
Eventually things calmed down. Italy sent some monitoring troops, to help with the transition of the new Goverment... All the weapons that got out of the army depots, ended up furnishing the Kosovo Liberation Army, and eventually the Kosova war in 1998-99, that ended up with Kosova's independence... (Kosovo, is 90% Albanian, and they were trying to get independence peacefully, after to the Yugoslavian break-up to no avail. The Albanian unrest and some US help helped them out in the end).
So, I guess there was one good thing that came out of the whole mess.
Ps. We just learned this year, from released documents, that Greece was planing at some point to send a invading force to the South, so it could 'pacify' the place (and potentially anex it). It would not have ended up well. Albania at that time had so many weapons left from the Communnist era, and it wouldn't had gone well for them.
Sounds like an interesting formula. Ready Player One is popular too, but I guess since there is a movie that's already been done... but I guess you can have a series and also movies... The Purge has a TV series now even though originally it was a movie.
I'd be happy to! Lots of strategic, logistical, and legal stuff. The obvious thing is that I can't release a movie if it's gonna get banned. So you may need to make tweaks or campaign for a different rating / classification. It helps to be proactive and get ahead of these things. Cultures are different and you need to account for that.
Then there's marketing. You need only look at examples like Blair Witch, or "Blumhouse Films" (eg. Paranormal Activity, The Purge), to see what marketing and word of mouth can do for a movie. Of course you'd like to see a bit of that magic (this explains why so many movies are marketed as "reality" / found footage), but in any case, you want to optimize the hype and buzz around a movie. This is a whole skillset, that may differ by culture, and can make or break a film. We're talking about millions of dollars here.
Now none of those things interest me personally. I don't "like them". I definitely don't like restrictions by region. However saying: "they have it in their country, why don't I have it yet?" is a bit like saying "they've made a final cut of the film, why can't I watch it yet?". They have this incredibly expensive asset that they're trying to maximize revenue on.
There's such little etiquette in airports and airplanes that it's a good opportunity to vent a little rage at everyone else. I think it's healthy. Like Purge Day in that movie "The Purge".
For example, how everyone stands up immediately as soon as the plane lands. Someone 5 rows back managing to depart before you because you remained seated until it's your row's turn, but they have one of those oversized carry-ons and can't even get it down. So they essentially cut in front of you just to make you wait on them.
Don't want anyone to be any less miserable than I am while traveling. It would unfairly deprive them of a great character-building experience.
I love how it is all about having 'enough' or the 'right' education, this idea of herding the unbelievers onto the straight and narrow is quite Christian of them. At least he has not been cast out as a heretic. There is hope for Luckey yet.
Just the other day somebody was offering money to find something to blackmail Peter Thiel with. 2000 dollars for a bounty.
A few minutes ago I saw a declaration that all bigots must be removed from society/earth.
Imagine if this continues for a few more weeks. I will watch the new Purge movie in anticipation.
I thought the same. Just a few weekends ago that silly Purge movie came out. Little did I know reality would follow.
Just like that movie 'The Purge'.
Yup, government by its very nature is about opposites and double standards. Government is pretty much an exclusive place to carry out the worst parts of humanity legally. Steal, murder, lie, kidnap, coerce--it's all good under the State. It's like the movie 'The Purge' in a sense.