Fear your neighbor

Rating: 7/10 (3 December 2013)

The film tackles the interesting idea of ritualistic violence as a mean for social catharsis, retrieving the ancient notion of the world being like a theater ("Theatrum mundi") with an obvious actualization of the Elizabethan taste for blood and gore in picturing man's innate impulses. The necessary evil of authorizing a certain fringe of mankind to lash out on their kind during one night in the year is backed up by a tacit social consensus in the film, providing that it allows people to drain their natural aggression and keeps unemployment in check amongst other issues. But as it turns out, this "purge" aiming at social equanimity is only a revised, with politically correct and bourgeois façade, of social Darwinism, where the whole deck seems stacked as the access to means of defense and survival is unfair,sorely depend on a discrepancy of socio-economic factors and background.
The film is based on demonstrating the perverse effects of the system: the most privileged, the family whose welfare, wellbeing and safety has been wagered on the business of selling security systems to its gated community (the "objective" violence (see Slavoj ZIZEK) in the idea of cashing in on the survival necessity begotten by the system), is taken aback by the intrusion and unwitting sheltering of the most downgraded "specimen" of society (that is more or less the subhuman status ("pig", "parasite") to which the homeless black man is being verbally reduced) and attacked by the product of the highest form of arriviste self-promoting system (the implicit premise here being that we are in a society pervaded by the oligarchic/plutocratic structure, sustaining itself on nepotism and cronyism), an idle youth who has turned psychopath and cruel. The latter are dressed up as convenient people on a regular mundane outing (smoking, long white dresses), but exhibit the moral ambiguity of this anticipatory society through mocking mimicry of persona extroversion: their rictus-masks are sacrificial masks, inverting the hiding function of the social mask (see Gustav JUNG) by enacting the second face in its traditional and ritualistic function, that is a vector of transformation into the inhuman (see DELEUZE, GUATTARI: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia - in particular, "Becoming-Animal"). By posturing anthropomorphic likeness (or, in a more restrictive sense, bourgeois likeness) as an alienation, this "sarcastically" empty youth is shape-shifting itself, through pantomime, into the subconscious and auto reflexive monster of the present state of mankind.
The hell-bent bunch which besieges the villa - a house of almost Roman ostentation and opulence, an image of decadence rooted in material abundance - plays out as some sort of updated Manson Family; remember the use of the word "pig" by their polite leader. The latter is a blond, blued-eyed loony who condenses several archetypes of evil within modern symbolism and imagination: the golden boy in a suit, the shark businessman who's job tends to foster a frame of mind in which humans are reduced to numbers (data of an equation calculating social profit: how many deaths to hold back unemployment, to purge the id so to go on living in the "dream" liberal and egalitarian - empty words - society ?), holding in that sense a critical mirror to the family father's face himself; the Aryan stereotype favored in action movies (or, that used to be) working as an auto reflexive motif in the broader context of the entertainment industry ("Die Hard", etc. ; allusion to these kind of movies is brought up by the use of heavy duty material to rip the gate of the house open) but younger and endowed with a brain which reveals itself equipped with a deviant sense of craftiness, the "creature" having in some sense turned against its creators; etc.
The besiegement is temporarily resolved by an unlikely savior, the reassuring presence of the benevolent neighbors if not slightly hypocritical. It turns out the helping hand was only a way of taking matters of revenge into their own hands: the blond woman - the slightly maniac-depressive "desperate housewife" type character - wants the mother to embrace the purging of her children as means for the rest of the neighborhood to relieve themselves from negative feelings of anger, bearing one central and unique motive: prejudice of misuse of their savings, of their capital, by the Sandin family*. The demonstration here goes full (vicious) circle in the idea that private property, in the words of Marx, "is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few."
If not particularly genius because slightly one-sided, caricatured and predictable (and maybe fairly tame in its mise-en-scène and cinematographic endeavors in general), the film nonetheless demonstrates a good degree of coherence in the development of its central thesis, delivering in that sense a decent balance between entertainment and reflection. The way in which this cruel state of affairs in society is treated, like a normal thing with a kind of moral accommodation, is quite effective and gives us matter to ponder on the potential frame or societal configuration which could lead - through forces of inertia (overcrowding of prisons plays out as one of the triggering factors in the film) - to some sort of compelling to legalize "controlled" violence, either backed up or answered by moral relativism, or ambiguity, diverting the "cathartic" logic which is originally (see Aristotle) based on the feeling and identification of sentiments of pity and anger.
* Through phrasal logic, father, mother and children become an homogeneous entity of shared responsibility, an implacable reasoning analogue to another period of History exhibiting social revolution, the famous tacit saying of the French Revolution's "Terreur" (see, for example, in the novel Quatrevingt-treize by Victor HUGO, the character, Cimourdain) which considered that not even children were to be given an exception status of "innocence", as they were guilty by nature and birth, bearing the mark of infamy of their cast.