Did you ever see any of the Dirty Harry movies? (What do you mean you’re too young to have seen them? Shit, am I that old?) Dirty Harry was a cop who “played by his own rules,” with little regard for the law. It’s fun to watch those movies, and it’s cathartic, but in real life there’s this little thing called due process: police arrest people based on the evidence they have, those people go to court, and the legal system decides if they really are guilty, and, if so, what the punishment should be. Watching Dirty Harry blow away some dude who just committed a robbery is fun in the context of a movie, but it’s a grievous miscarriage of justice for a cop to do that in real life.
Did you ever see… well... almost any romantic comedy ever written? As a man I find them extremely aggravating because simple misunderstandings get blown out of proportion so easily; instead of spending the entire movie trying to get around this misunderstanding, can’t you just talk about it? But these movies are cathartic (mostly for females, let’s be honest) because when the problems get resolved it gives us (or women) a feeling of closure, and they get to enjoy the romance of the guy getting the girl despite the odds. (Even though anyone watching the movie full well knows that the odds are 100%...)
Did you ever see Independence Day? Fun movie, we got to kick some alien butt, but in reality aliens have never visited the Earth. Some loonies people believe aliens have been here, but even if they have there has definitely never been any kind of interplanetary war. But the movie is fun to watch because we get to have mass killing without feeling guilty about it – they’re aliens, after all, and aliens who want to wipe us out at that, so we don’t need to feel guilty in the same way we would if they were people.
And then there’s The Purge: Crime has been all but eliminated, but once a year the government sets aside a day where all crime is legal and free of consequences. You can kill, rape, steal, and do whatever else you want. You can see why this makes a good plot for a movie, lots of opportunities for mayhem, but you can also see why this would be a terrible idea in reality. You don’t even need think too hard about it.
In fact, let’s take a specific example from the list I just mentioned: rape. The Wikipedia page for The Purge doesn’t mention rape, and other sites I’ve read say that rape is kind of an unexplored possibility in the movie. Why is that? Women get raped all the time in our society – the statistics are horrifying – so if crime was suddenly completely legal why wouldn’t there be rampant rapes occurring? They would be occurring, but you can’t really put that in a movie like this or it will make it way too real. The most you can do, in any movie, is introduce the threat of rape, but have the girl get saved at the last minute.
The problem with putting rape into a film like this is that you don’t get the required closure at the end of the film; if a girl got raped (or if there was mass rape, as would probably be the reality), we’d leave the film wondering how the women who got assaulted are going to get past it, what the rest of their lives will be like, if they’ll have to face the men who assaulted them once the “purge” is over and everything goes “back to normal.”
But The Purge is just a movie, it isn’t real, so these are very theoretical questions. We don’t need to lose too much sleep over whether any fictional women in the universe of The Purge may or may not have been raped because those women don’t exist.
On the other hand, some of the vilest and stupidest people on the planet decided to follow the example set by The Purge and start posting revenge porn to Twitter, under the hashtag #twitterpurge. I’ve written before about revenge porn, and the type of psychopathy required to lack any empathy for the person being “exposed,” but while the #twitterpurge was going on there were, I’m sure, many women and girls who were exposed all at once. And since this is real life, not a movie, those people will have to live with the consequences of being exposed for years – in some cases for the rest of their lives.
Is it because people are too stupid to know the difference between movies and real life, and don’t understand that real life entails consequences to our actions? The post so far would lead you to believe this is what I think, but it’s actually not. Nobody is that stupid. These psychopaths would have done it anyway; they just used this excuse to garner more attention for their posts. Which is even worse for the women involved.
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