White Bear Reflection

In an episode of Black Mirror titles "White Bear," viewers watch the psychological torture of a woman who has absolutely no clue what is happening to her. Furthermore, the woman has no clue who she is, only vague flashbacks of a story that she is manipulated to believe. At the end of the episode, we discover that woman was an accomplice to the kidnapping and murder of a young girl. The whole episode and the events that occur to her are part of Justice Park for the girl who was murdered. The main characters act out the same story line everyday. The people who are mindlessly videoing her are visitors to the park who have paid to watch a girl tortured in the name of revenge.

There are so many things wrong with this episode. I find myself coming back to the old adage; "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." Yes, our main character was the accomplice to the murder of a child. She was holding a camera while her boyfriend lit a girl in a sleeping bag on fire. What she did was wrong, but we have no clue what events could have brought her to that point in her life. If her boyfriend was abusive, then she may not have been strong enough to escape his control. The whole point to White Bear Justice Park is that the general public who participated in searching for the young girl did not feel justified. They wanted our main character and her boyfriend to suffer the same pain that the young girl did. Her boyfriend committed suicide while in prison so the public sought out revenge in the woman.

While the concept of her punishment is brilliant in its own way (because it forces her to experience the wrong that she committed against the girl who was murdered), it is not justified to happen everyday. At the end of each day her memory is wiped leaving her no recollection of what she did or how she got there. So in that sense, the public is torturing her. She is not "learning a lesson" like it was originally intended. The lesson she learns is taken away from her at the end of each day. That's why the punishment she is assigned is not justified.