Why THE PURGE can teach you so much about what not to do

Some of you might remember that last year I took on THE PURGE in a post talking about how certain concepts require a higher suspension of disbelief than others. As much as we'd like to think that an audience will accept our premises and go with them (and to a certain degree, I think that's reasonable.)  In general, an audience (and yes, even the dreaded readers) will be rather forgiving of certain elements if they are necessary to set up the story.

But like I said last year, when the characters or the premise act counter to basic human nature that threatens the suspension of disbelief. This is particularly dangerous when the setting is recognizable and familiar to the audience. They know human nature and they have a pretty good idea what a normal person would do in a situation that feels like their daily life. But if you have a seemingly normal person in a setting that's almost normal except for one MAJOR difference - the audience might perceive phoniness in the conceit and that often leads to an outright rejection of it.

I cited the trailer of THE PURGE as an example of where the buy-in appeared too great.  The film is set a mere ten years in the future, where all of American society has set aside one night where all laws are suspended for 12 hours.  You name it, it's legal, including murder.  The film tries to convince us that this one night of total indulgence is enough to get all the bad impulses out for the rest of the year.  As a result, crime has plummeted.

At the time, I allowed for the fact that I was only basing this off of seeing the trailer and that it was possible that the movie itself made a more convincing case for this occurrence.  Here's what I said at the time:

"The hurdle for me is that I can't wrap my brain around a society that would say, "Hey, for one night a year, anything goes! Murder, rape, robbery... and then come sun-up, we're all cool with it." I reject the idea that a functional society would even attempt such a thing.

"And then, to put forth the notion that somehow this one night of blood lust apparently gets all of this out of everyone's systems so much that the rest of the year is a utopia? It's hard to imagine human nature working that way. So I don't buy that people would be on board for this, and even if I did, I don't buy that it would work."

Well, I finally watched the movie last week and I have to say that there was nothing else in the film that nullified these issues.  I could probably spend 10,000 just tearing apart the foundation of the premise, but I don't want to waste all that time because I can't see anyone trying to mount an intelligent defense of this hook.

Part of the problem is that this world looks too much like our own world. It's not far enough removed where we accept that the mores of the time will have changed that much.  If I was writing this I'd have pushed it at least fifty years into the future, probably further.  There needs to be room for society to evolve so that basic human values could have been corrupted on such a massive level.

Amazingly, the film really screws the pooch in the attitudes of a lot of its characters towards the Purge.  Guess who the ONE character is who thinks this practice is brutal and barbaric?  The ten year-old kid.  Honestly, if ANYONE should be the most corrupted by the values of this world, it would be the kid who hasn't known anything else.  Ethan Hawke, his wife, their neighbors... they all are old enough to have come of age long before the Purge.  Hawke is about ten years older than me, which means that since this film is set ten years in the future, his character would have been in my classes all through school.  Do we really buy that someone who was in his 30s when the Purge was adopted wouldn't have ANY moral compunctions about it?  And their neighbors are even older!

But the 10 year-old kid who's probably sat through years of classroom lectures about the glory of the Purge, whose seen it held up as society's crowning achievement... HE's the one to have moral misgivings about it.  I don't buy it. At all.  The youngest generation would be the ones mostly likely to accept the progression of society for what it was.

It would also help if the people extolling the virtues of the Purge didn't all speak like some sort of brainwashed cult members.  Rhys Wakefield plays the leader of a group trying to break into Hawke's house and I'd call his performance cartoonish if it didn't make me think Daffy Duck might have made a more nuanced choice for the part.

Later, Hawke's family is saved from the home invaders by his own neighbors.  The twist is that the neighbors decided that once that family's home security was breached, they had an opportunity to "cleanse ourselves" by slaughtering the family for... well... basically just "thinking you're so perfect."  The performance of the actress called upon to sell this speech is mind-numblingly bad. You can't totally blame her, though because she's been tasked with selling a plot twist about as bad as any I've seen in a long time.

And this again makes me doubt the basic premise. If you live in a neighborhood where your neighbors butched an entire family basically out of envy, are you REALLY going to trust those people for the next 364 days until the next Purge comes?  And during the next Purge, won't you be tempted to get in a preemptive strike on them, thus perpetuating the cycle of violence?

The way the conclusion plays out, Hawke's wife, played by Lena Heady, decides there's been enough kiling this night and once she has the upper hand on her attacking neighbors, she forces them to all sit in silence and wait out the Purge.  On one hand, yay for her for not getting her hands dirty.  On the other... are you really going to continue to live next door to these people who were salivating at the free pass of taking your life?

Basically, the Purge should turn everyone into George Zimmerman, carrying a gun everywhere ready to use it on anyone who looks like they "don't belong." Honestly, if the film really confronted that head-on, it might have had some real meat to chew on.  Let's say an Archie Bunker-esque neighbor has been bothering a Middle Eastern family that moved into his neighborhood.  What if during the Purge, they decide to kill him as pre-emptive self-defense?  And how does THAT impact how their neighbors react to them even after the Purge is over?

The wide acceptance of the Purge just doesn't hold water on a macro or a micro level.  I'm sure there are some defenders who will argue the film was merely attempting to be satire, and then mutter some vague statements about how it's a commentary on classism.  First, I don't think the tone is pitched right to pass as satire.  There are certainly moments that feel like it's trying for that sort of theme.  However, they happen in isolated pockets and while some actors are playing the satire, others are playing it straight.

Many reviews lamented that this film sets up a wild premise only to waste it all on a home invasion story.  I take exception to two points of that statement, which actually makes the film sound a lot better than it is.  As we've discussed, this actually is a pretty terrible premise.  It's laughably bad.  MANOS THE HANDS OF FATE has firmer internal logic behind it than this.

The second point is that this film is really a home invasion story.  Sure, but can you still call it that if it takes until minute 58 of an 85-minute film for the invaders to actually breach the place?  That's basically the end of the second act.  Up to that point, there's a lot of time-killing, mostly involving a homeless man whom the young boy has let enter the house.

This needn't have been a fatal mistake.  The tension could have been raised had the characters been fleshed out and actually had some internal conflicts amongst each other that came out as a result of being trapped in this pressure cooker for 12 hours while Rome burns outside.  Gene Hackman supposedly once said, "The best acting takes place in confined spaces."  Vivid characters. Conflict. Tension.  Bottle that up in a room and let the characters bounce off of each other.  Build up enough real drama among the cast that it alone could have sustained the film. THEN you add the home invaders as the icing on that cake.  Because now you've got a movie that's about something.

I'll give the filmmakers one "thumbs up" - in a film where all manner of violence is on the table, I was shocked that at no point did the movie become "rapey."  This is no small feat in a feature that includes a teenage girl who spends the entirety of her screentime in a schoolgirl outfit.  I've seen many a horror thriller that played that card gratuitously and so I spent much of the film dreading the inevitable scene that would have her at the mercy of one of the invading guys.  I figure that's worth about half-a-star out of a possible four stars.

That point aside, it's easily the worst movie I saw from 2013.  If I was a film professor, I think I could conduct a multi-day lecture on everything wrong with this film.  Maybe I should start with the fact that it made $89 million worldwide, which also relates to the question "How did this shit get made?" Easy - it only cost $3 million.

The Purge: reject the premise, reject the movie

"I don't buy it."

Those are four words no writer likes to hear, and yet they are a fairly common reaction after reading a spec.  I've read plenty of scripts where one of the most significant reasons I decline to pass it on is that I simply cannot accept the conceit of the story.  This is significant because I believe most readers do enter a story with a willingness to accept much of it on its own terms.  An audience is usually willing to accept the reality with which they are presented.

What usually threatens to pop that suspension of disbelief is when the characters or the premise act counter to human nature.  This is particularly dangerous when the setting is recognizable and familiar to the audience.  They know human nature and they have a pretty good idea what a normal person would do in a situation that feels like their daily life.

But if you have a seemingly normal person in a setting that's almost normal except for one MAJOR difference - then that puts you in an "uncanny valley." The audience might perceive phoniness in the conceit and that often leads to an outright rejection of it.

And that is why I'm not likely to see the upcoming release The Purge.  Watch the trailer.


I admit it's a trifle unfair to judge a film by its marketing components.  But then again, this is the material that's designed to get me to plunk down my $14.  As I watch that trailer, all I can think is "I don't buy it."  And this is coming from someone who's a sucker for contained thrillers.

The hurdle for me is that I can't wrap my brain around a society that would say, "Hey, for one night a year, anything goes! Murder, rape, robbery... and then come sun-up, we're all cool with it."  I reject the idea that a functional society would even attempt such a thing.

And then, to put forth the notion that somehow this one night of blood lust apparently gets all of this out of everyone's systems so much that the rest of the year is a utopia?  It's hard to imagine human nature working that way.  So I don't buy that people would be on board for this, and even if I did, I don't buy that it would work.  (Interestingly, I had the exact same issue with a pilot this season that failed to get a series order - perhaps for that very reason.)

But let me point out a counter-example that I did accept.  The Hunger Games is based on the premise that once a year - 12 districts each offer up two children to compete in a battle royale to the death.  This competition is treated with all the pomp and circumstance of a Super Bowl.

On its face that seems just as absurd as the things I attacked The Purge for. So what's the difference?  The world presented in The Hunger Games does not look like our own.  The Purge seems to be set in modern suburbia (despite the note that it's about a decade in the future.)  All of society is completely upended in Hunger Games, to the point where the United States doesn't exist anymore.  The cultural and visual distinctions are enough to give the viewer the emotional distance so they're not constantly thinking "this would never happen."

If any of you DO end up seeing The Purge, let me know if the movie makes the idea more palpable than the trailer does.

Reader questions - Listing achievements in queries and suspension of disbelief

Driscol asks:

My script recently made it to the top 10% of Nicholls and the Quarterfinalist round for Zoetrope and the Final Draft Big Break contest. Is that something worth including in queries? Or are agents/managers just going to see that and say to themselves, "He couldn't make it to semi-finalist?"

 You're probably not far off with your latter assumption.  As much of an achievement it is to be a Quarterfinalist, it's probably not quite impressive enough to pry open the door on its own.  If you've got a kickass logline, though, that's a different story.  But then, if you have a kick-ass logline, it'll probably stand on its own without the Quarterfinalist note.

Being in the top 10% of Nicholl entries is kind of the same thing.  Last year there were 7,197 entries in the competition, which means that 10% of that places in you in the top 720 or so scripts.  And since you didn't make the top 5%, it's safe to assume that there are at least 359 scripts that were better than yours.

When you break it down like that, it doesn't sound quite so good.  As with everything, it's a judgement call.  If it was me, I'd probably lead with the hook of the script rather than the achievements unless you've got some serious accolades.

Samuel asks a good question about plausibility:

I'm writing a script that relates to a couple trying to adopt a child from another country. One of the key plot turns in my script is when the couple discovers they don't fulfill a little known requirement that the foreign government holds for prospective adoptive parents. My problem is that when people read my script, they feel like this regulation is too far-fetched and that I bring it in only as a convenient plot device to serve my own purposes. However, the truth is that this particular foreign regulation is actually REAL and I'm not making it up. I have no idea on how to make that evident to the reader short of just telling him/her that when I give them the script to read. Is there any way to make it clear in a script that I'm not making something up?

Honestly, there isn't.  And I advise against putting a note in the script because that still doesn't solve the problem you have of figuring out how to convince an audience that this is real.

My go-to example in these cases is usually Apollo 13.  Almost every thing in that movie is accurate and there are some twists that would be called out if they sprang from the mind of a Hollywood writer.  The two I'm thinking of in particular are when Mrs. Lovell loses her wedding ring in the shower and then later when the NASA scientists are tasked with figuring out how to essentially fit a square peg into a round hole using only the materials on the space craft.

That task in particular seems incredibly difficult and somehow the scientists pull it off within an extremely tight time limit.  (There's even some drama when the astronauts make a mistake and tear a plastic bag that's essential to the procedure.  Fortunately that problem is easily solved.)

On the other hand, I'm sure I've heard of cases where writers have taken the step of removing the most implausible details of "based-on-a-true story" adaptations because they know the audience will be pulled out of the narrative by them.  In those cases, I'm pretty sure they were side details that were mostly unimportant to the larger story, so removing them wouldn't take the teeth out of the script.

But if your script hinges on this twist, you might have to just bite the bullet and go for it.  There's also the possibility that something else in your script isn't working and your audience has one foot already out the door when this new twist arises.  If you can reinforce the rest of the story, perhaps this one element won't be catastrophic.