Blog Post #1: The Purge and Deviance

As I was reading Kai Erikson’s “Notes on the Sociology of Deviance”, particularly the last paragraph, I could not help but think about the various films and books that have been made that include the subject of deviance. I immediately thought of “The Purge”, a movie which was recently released. Although I have yet to actually see the movie, the trailers seem to be loaded with sociological material.
In the movie, individuals are granted one day out of the entire year to commit any crimes that they please; they attribute this “free-pass” to lower crime and a stable economy. This society allows deviance to take place in order to maintain the stability of the system and its norms. It seems that in this society, deviance is very much existent and that this is a means to regulating deviant traffic, as Erikson would argue. Therefore, deviance is very necessary and helps to define the society and how it functions. This too reminds me of Emile Durkheim’s “The Normal and the Pathological”. Durkheim says, “Crime is, then, necessary; it is bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life, and by that very fact it is useful, because these conditions of which it is a part are themselves indispensable to the normal evolution of morality and law.” Thus, as previously mentioned, the society depicted in “The Purge” needs crime so that it can survive.