Who Watches the Watchmen?

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Who Watches the Watchmen? Society's Deviance and Control in Watchmen Despite traditional portrayals of deviance and violence as unacceptable and anathema to the good of society, recent modern media does much to glorify these behaviors. Often times this deviant behavior is portrayed as being a ‘necessary evil’ to overcome deviance of a greater and more pressing type, as is the case in portrayals of vigilante justice. The 2009 film Watchmen is an excellent example of this, depicting the struggles of a group of vigilante masked heroes who take it upon themselves to accomplish what traditional justice cannot. Despite the fact that the film – and the graphic novel upon which it is based – challenge the traditional view of superhero fantasy with a more cold and nihilistic outlook, specifically within the characters of Rorschach and The Comedian, it also glorifies the deviant vigilante modus operandi to a certain degree. Deviance, from a sociological perspective, is defined as any behavior that violates cultural norms and evokes negative reactions and social sanctions from others, regardless of whether the deviant behavior is illegal or not. As such, there is a considerable amount of variance in the severity of any deviance as seen by society. The deviance portrayed in Watchmen is most often of the illegal variety, encompassing violence and murder, various types of property crime, and rape amongst others. As such it was often quite easy to determine when an act was deviant and an extremely selective definition of deviance was not necessary. As previously mentioned, the types of deviance featured in Watchmen varied widely, though most fell under the umbrella of criminal deviance. Easily the most recognizable and prominent type of deviance is violence: in order to combat the rampant crime in New York, the titular Watchmen resort to extralegal vigilantism, almost

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