IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/100384.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

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

Author

Listed:
  • Armstrong, Megan A.

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Armstrong, Megan A., 2019. "A nation reborn: right to law and right to life in The Purge franchise," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 100384, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:100384
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/100384/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Horror film; neoliberalism; popular culture; state of exception; state narrative;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • N0 - Economic History - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:100384. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.