The dark beauty of The Purge franchise is its personal questioning that if you were annually granted 12 hours with which to commit any crime with impunity, wouldn't you seize that opportunity? The world is replete with imbalance & unfairness, with injustice & shortcomings. There's a not-so-fine line that separates murderers from vigilantes, thieves from robin hoods, the traitor from the patriot. These constructs are overlays that shift with the tides of history and sociological contexts. You put on the hat, you believe in the ideas of that costume, you arm yourself, and if you're victorious, then those are the terms that tend to endure. You have essentially purged your obstacles, and someone once said that for your dreams to become ascendant, one has to destroy the dreams of others for its fuel. So beautifully grim, so mercilessly direct, but is that violent fulfillment true?
So I went to The Breaking Point to Purge. My father died a couple years ago, around the same time my separation & subsequent divorce occurred. And late last year a breakup unexpectedly happened to me. There's a compounding of anger from these three things inside myself that I've never experienced before, in a way that is so not who I am, yet I can't argue with the very real pain level of loss & vulnerability I feel from those experiences. And the catch is if I let that anger go, then the sadness of it wins, so anger seems to be the default coping mechanism, but that's obviously a holding pattern and not a solution. My left-brain thinking's that if I could fully unleash my anger and go somewhere to destroy things with impunity, that I could purge myself of those feelings, level out and become myself again. Or even transcend the societal limitations of civilized behaviour, become a berserker, and gain a level of superhumanity, maybe. I'd tried acupuncture over the past month, but instead of blissing out like everyone else in the room, I'd mostly felt varying levels of emotional/energetic discomfort, even being inflicted with a serious hangover headache after a session, and I felt done with it. Instead of my body passively being subjected to sharp objects, I'd decided it was time for the objects to be subjected to all the brute force my body could actively generate.
The fraternal co-owners of the local rage room were so stoked I showed up with my loadable workout hammer that they took this picture of me ready to clobber things for their social media:
Yeah, total Purge coveralls, paintball mask, and construction site gloves, all practical safety appurtenances, plus you have to sign a waiver just in case you get hurt. I'd paid $10 extra for 20 glass bottles. They gave me like 50, so there would be glass, oh yes, much glass.
Pairing my phone's Viking Metal playlist with the room's bluetooth speaker, the brother gave me a quick rundown of the implements on the table just inside the door that were available: varying lengths of pipe, a small sledge, a claw hammer. Short of hitting the walls, ceiling, or camera (yes, they keep an eye on you, and if anyone's in the lobby, your rage room antics are on an external monitor above the door), everything else was fair game. The room's major features were the corpse of a water heater, a dinged but not defeated safe, the skeleton of a smashed large screen projection TV, a martial arts practice torso, a hairdressing mannequin head, an old large server case, and a huge tire, all either at the slopes of or somewhere on three small hills of destroyed rubbish, like a mini-apocalyptic landscape.
Once the door shut, for the next fifteen minutes I could just beat anything in sight to oblivion. Amon Amarth's Versus The World ramped up and I fucking went to town, whirlwinding my hammer into the tire as hard as I could, beating the water heater like a dying elephant that dared to charge me, surgically striking hinges & welds on the iron safe to challenge its surfaces, crushing the side of a PC case into a dish-like object, becoming the wrecking ball to the remaining skeleton of the TV, hitting the makeup head right in its stupid face across the room into its upper corners like I'd just decapitated a battlefield opponent.
Cresting the wreckage heaps, I turned and quested for more things to hit. The slopes of these proved somewhat unstable, my feet sometimes sinking into layers of jagged plastics and some sharp-edged ruined objects, which made me realize if I did this again boots would be more sensible protective option, so I had to mind my balance and ankles as I sought out new targets in the room.
And it was the bottles that were the most satisfying. I made them explode in mid-air with deadly accuracy, set them on top of the tire to tee-ball it into glittering snowflakes, threw the fragile containers at the walls and ground to comet tail into traceries of bright fireworks, smashed their shining curves with my hammer neck down into the floor until they shone no more. This was recycling at its finest, the noise of shattering a wonderful symphony of finality, the high bell glissando of instrumental vessels which would never hold anything again, their completeness irreversibly converted into an unexpectedly delightful schadenfreude.
There were only two moments, maybe less than ten actual seconds of that whole quarter-hour where I connected with my feelings, screaming & weeping & raging with anger, but the focus of the rest of the session turned out to be purely physical, instead my mind calculating the hows & methods of strikes & blows to greatest efficiency & degrees of effect, maximizing the experience to do as much evidenced damage as I could to the microcosm around me. It was more like a good workout than anything, and seemed more like I'd been at it for 45 minutes as opposed to just fifteen. I did leave with the endorphins from the exercise of it, the praise of the brother owners, and the achievement of getting to sign the wall as a participant in the shared commercial ritual of contained brutality, which was something, but not what I came for.
My father is still dead. I am still divorced. And, in a weird way that outweighs the other two, there isn't a day that has gone by where my heart does not mourn, uselessly re-negotiate, or miss so very deeply my last relationship.
I wish I could've beat those things out of my head & heart, used the experience as a modality for healing and self-care, but the purge didn't work for me. I find my feelings are more concrete than other people's, and far more substantial than all that glass or metal, which makes their quality resilient & stronger. My sadness is more profound, and my love more real. This presents a difficulty and a blessing which cannot be purged.
# # #
While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.
