Night Watch Themes

In the film Night Watch there are themes such as othering and scapegoating present within the story. To make itclear, othering is the act of categorizing a person or group as not “one of us” or different than oneself.

In the beginning of the film they introduce the Others. The Others are beings that have supernatural powers. They are already othered from human beings for they have special abilities, but they take it one step further in the film and “other” them even more. The Others  are divided into two groups: Light vs Dark . The Others are the same up until they choose which side they want to be allied, and through this there is the theme of othering. Even though Others are all the same each side sees one another as different or “other”.This divide, even with the alliance, pits the members of Light vs Dark against one another and they automatically view each other as different. In the film, we see this time and time again. The very fact that there was the creation of the Day Watch and the Night Watch to make sure that both sides are keeping up with the truce agreements shows that they see each other very differently. One scene that stands out in particular is when Antons son chooses to be allied with the Dark, when he finds out that his father tried to have him killed when he was still in the womb. This is a great example of how othering affects those involved, Antons son chose to go with the Dark side in defiance of his father and so he wouldn't be anything close to him.

Theme of othering isn’t the only one present, scapegoating is present within the film as well. Scapegoating is when a person or group is being blamed for the society's problems such as their hardships, mistakes, or wrongdoings. In this case, the members of the Light and the members of the Dark are in their own societies in terms of rather being in the Lights society or the Darks society. In the film there is one specific scene where we see how the members of the Dark are scapegoating onto Anton. To explain, Anton went into the field to apprehend a vampire couple that was trying to feed on a boy which would break the truce. Well during his fight with the vampire, the vampire tried to kill him and in the moment of trying to catch the vampire and protect himself Anton ends up killing him. Later we see his neighbor tell Anton that he killed a “good guy” and when one of their own is killed they are killed forever and all of the members feel it. He then continues to angrily say how the Light gives them licenses and that maybe the dark should be giving them license too.

Instead of accepting that the vampire had died because of his own actions and the members of the Dark are licensed due to their behavior and actions, they scapegoat instead and blame Anton and the Light for what has happened to them. In all, the film Night Watch is an extremely interesting movie that does display themes of othering and scapegoating.

Sources

Caffee, N. (2017, March 22). Slavic Folklore in Our Culture: Vampires and Werewolves. Lecture presented in Arizona, Tucson. Retrieved from

https://arizona.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=61b9b2be-de14-4c0c-9a44-6553fdc2a01d

Konstantin, E & Bekmambetov, T (2004). Night Watch. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://arizona.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=a31e2609-ed49-4e0c-86ae-c0142cc1625c ​