Movie Review of the Summer of Sam Using the Sociological Perspective

For this assignment I chose to watch the movie �summer of Sam’. As I watched the movie I specifically tried to analyze the serial killer using a sociological perspective. The plot of the movie is as follows; the major focus of this movie was a serial killer known as the �son of Sam’ who had already killed 6 times. Every one of his victims were young women with brown hair who were murdered at night in the streets of a quiet Italian neighborhood. The setting of this movie takes place in an Italian neighborhood in New York in 1977. Then there was Joey and his friends who are all a bunch of thugs who worked for the local mob boss Don. The mob is positive that the suspect lives near them so they try to come up with a list of possible suspects. At the top of the list appears one of Joey’s former friends named Ritchie. Richie is now a so called �punk’ who’s in a band and secretly works in a gay bar as a male stripper and prostitute. Joey’s friends Vinny and Dionna have married for 2 years, and Vinny who works as a hairdresser has been cheating on his wife with many women including her cousin. Then Vinny finally decides to be faithful to Dionna after he found him self seducing Dionna’s cousin in the same place that Sam murdered 2 victims the next day. Unluckily his wife finds out about his infidelities and leaves him and he therefore turns to drugs and alcohol and guides Joey and his friends to Ritchie who denies being the son of Sam. The sociological perspective that I sought out in this movie was that of deviance seen through the serial killer. Deviance as we learned is the recognized violation of cultural norms. The strain theory proposes that the primary source of his motivation to commit a crime lies in society and not in the criminal. The Strain theory also suggests that individuals may take illegitimate means in order to means in order to achieve a legitimate goal. In this movie an example of the strain theory would lie in the serial killer �son of Sam’. The scary truth about this movie is that it was based on actual events, thus meaning that this serial killer truly did exist so this theory can be sought out by real serial killers in real life.

Works cited

1. Orcutt, James D. Analyzing Deviance. Illinois: The Dorsey P, 1983