Death Note is a popular manga series originally created by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. Since its original publication in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2003 to 2006, it has spawned multiple adaptations and spin-offs in the form of novels, an anime series, multiple films, a TV drama, a web-exclusive miniseries, a musical, and three video games.
With a RottenTomatoes.com score of 4.8/10, director Adam Wingard’s 100-minute live-action remake distributed by Netflix is not the most beloved entry in the Death Note franchise. Despite its reception, I selected this movie because the characters explicitly announce their motivations and the cat-and-mouse chain of events are easy to follow.
Following a summary of the movie’s plot, I will examine it through the lens of strain theory, differential association, control theory and shaming theory.
Death Note follows the actions of Light Turner, a teenage boy who is the son of a cop; Mia Sutton, his antisocial girlfriend; and L, a highly-regarded international detective tasked with finding and capturing an entity known as “Kira.” Light is a loner who has a strained relationship with his father and has lost faith in the procedures of justice.
On an especially gloomy-looking day, a leather-bound notebook titled “Death Note” falls out of the sky and almost literally lands in Light’s lap. Light picks it up and learns that by picturing a person’s face and writing their name in the book, he can kill anyone he chooses. Accompanying the book is a death god named Ryuk, who serves to explain various rules, but is mostly present to watch the chaos surrounding the book for his own entertainment.
Light tests the notebook by killing a school bully, and then he kills the man responsible for striking his mother in a fatal hit-and-run. He soon resolves to kill criminals whom he believes have not been adequately punished, creating a crime-free society.
Light enlists the help of his crush-turned-girlfriend Mia, and together they form the identity of “Kira” and kill hundreds of people around the world. The public takes quick notice of this; reactions range from joy to fear, and a cult worshiping “Kira” springs into existence. The FBI launches an investigation and the famous detective L is hired, who deduces that Light is “Kira.”
Light, Mia, and L continuously outsmart each other, even as friction increases between Light and Mia due to their mismatched motivations and levels of sociopathy. Mia attempts to manipulate Light into giving her custody of the “Death Note.” The “Kira” pair are swept up in a police chase, and then an accident on a Ferris wheel which leads to Mia’s death; yet, to L’s bewilderment, the “Kira” killings continue even while Light is in a coma. It is revealed that the entire accident was Light’s doing, and that he used the “Death Note” to control people to ensure his survival and continue the killings until he woke up.
Developed by sociologist Robert K. Merton, social strain theory essentially states that citizens commit crime out of need. In short, there are various cultural goals and various institutionalized means, and a person can either accept or reject either/both of these. This makes up the framework for Merton’s typology of deviance: conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion.
Different characters in Death Note represent different types of deviance. Light is an innovative deviant: he values justice, but uses deviant means achieve it. His nemesis L embraces conformity: with the FBI at his disposal, he uses entirely legal means to pursue justice. Even when he rushes to the Turners’ house to confront Light, he has somehow found the time to obtain a search warrant signed by a judge first. And Mia is a rebellious deviant: she is a vigilante who has embraced the role of “Kira,” and wants to fulfill the personal wishes of individuals who worship “Kira” instead of Light’s method of executing criminals to send a message to society at large. Mia has replaced cultural goals and means with a new goal (the replacement of current social institutions by reinforcing people’s belief in “Kira”) and new means (killing anybody that “Kira” worshipers want dead, as well as anyone who might stop “Kira”).
Control theory posits the idea that people deviate from society’s norms because their bonds with society are weak, and therefore society cannot deter them from deviant behavior. There are different types of control – decentralized/market control, centralized/bureaucratic control, and mixed control – but the key takeaway is that strong social bonds between people is what prevents deviant behavior, and weak external control may allow deviant behavior to occur.
In the opening scenes of Death Note, Light is shown to have multiple weak bonds with society. He confronts the high school principal for not doing more to address campus bullying, and the relationship between himself and his father is strained. He doesn’t seem to have any friends and is often sitting alone while at school. He has no positive influences, which emboldens him to perform deviant behavior such as doing other students’ homework for money.
Reintegrative shaming theory, proposed by John Braithwaite, states that society can deter deviant behavior through the process of shaming. Shaming is an emotional response that can be imposed on an individual in ways both small (a parent reprimanding a child) or large (legal sanctions such as time in jail).
Light’s main criticism of society is that deviants are not being punished for their behavior; he is upset that adults won’t do anything about the bullying problem at his school, and that his police deputy father couldn’t do anything when the man who murdered Light’s mother was rumored to have bought his acquittal in court. This demonstrates that shaming does not work – or is not able to work, or even refuses to work – in some cases.
Another type of shaming is called disintegrative shaming, or stigmatization. We could say that Light is employing stigmatization when he uses the “Death Note” to kill criminals. Stigmatization results in isolating people from the group, which can lead to encouraging even more deviant behavior because criminals will attempt to find other like-minded individuals who are supportive of them. Certainly fear can be used to control people, but it’s not reintegrative if the guilty individual is guaranteed to die. Yet, after Light and Mia have killed at least 400 people, it is revealed that crime rates have fallen to the point where prisons are closing. This seemingly contradicts the theory. But crimes are still happening; we know this because Mia locates an Internet forum where “Kira” worshipers post the names and pictures of people who have wronged them and beg that supernatural justice be rendered.
Differential association is a theory about how individuals turn to criminal behavior. Developed by Edwin Sutherland, differential association states that criminal behavior is learned through association with other people, and it occurs because the individual knows more about behaving in a deviant manner than following the law. This theory involves a long span of time: it emphasizes that the earlier in life an individual starts associating with people who teach them deviant behavior, the more likely that individual will start acting like them.
Meanwhile, the Death Note movie covers only a year at most, and we don’t know much about any of the characters’ lives prior to the movie events. For example, Mia is given no backstory: all we know about her is that she is a cheerleader, she smokes cigarettes, and she takes calculus. She probably doesn’t have a great home life because she never talks about her family, but this is only assumption. Applying differential association theory to Death Note doesn’t lead to much.
Death Note's most compelling scene occurs in the last moment of the movie when L investigates Mia’s room, finds a page of the “Death Note,” and is faced with the temptation to write Light’s name in it. After spending such a long time in the pursuit of justice, L seriously considers deviant behavior as he has been backed into a corner and no other option seems to be available to him. In the end, it is unclear whether he wrote down Light’s name.
With multiple motivations and available means for achieving goals, social strain theory is the most represented paradigm in Death Note. Multiple characters represent different categories in Robert K. Merton’s typology of deviance, which leads to conflict as they disagree over their values and means.
When viewed through the lens of strain theory, differential association, control theory and shaming theory, Adam Wingard’s Death Note is unrealistic and contradictory at times, but the characters largely fit into the ideas about deviancy and social control that have been posited by sociologists over the decades.
Death Note also lends itself well to further analysis in areas such as serial murders (different motivations for serial killing) and feminist and racial issues (the desire for social control, the strain between Mia and Light, and the implications of casting a white man for the originally Japanese character of Light). And, of course, Death Note’s original format as a 12-volume graphic novel series offers many more events and characters to consider through the lens of sociology.