A nation reborn: right to law and right to life in The Purge franchise

Megan A. Armstrong

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Popular culture matters for helping make sense of our political lives. This article addresses the value of dystopian horror films in challenging narratives about the state. It is situated within broader understandings of popular culture and politics, and specifically within narrative understandings of the state as a performative body. It presents The Purge film franchise as an example of such a challenge to state narratives, and argues that through its distortion of dominant state narratives, the franchise reveals and challenges the intersections of economic and racial inequality in the neoliberal United States. It examines in particular the emergency broadcast featured in all four films, which positions citizens in a relationship with law and life where the right to law conflates the right to life, and argues that the films present an understanding of vulnerability and abandonment that are in some ways already present in the state. It concludes by questioning what, if any, the capacities are for resistance.

Keywords: Horror film; neoliberalism; popular culture; state of exception; state narrative (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2019-05-27
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 27, May, 2019, 13(3), pp. 377-392. ISSN: 1750-2977

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/100384/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:100384

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().