How to Punish

In the film "White Bear," the main character, Victoria, is punished for her crimes in a new, creative way. This short movie gave me a lot to think about and it made me change my opinions faster than anything else I have watched before. The beginning focuses on Victoria and how she is completely unaware of who she is or where she came from. From the moment she wakes up, the audience feels sympathy toward her, She is alone in a place that she doesn't know, so there is that aspect of danger toward an innocent person that people don't want someone else to experience. As she continues on her journey, we start to root for her to take down the 'White Bear' station. She finds someone else who cares enough to save her from danger and to try to remember who she is. When they get to the station and it turns out to be a play of some sort, it becomes very confusing as to what is happening. The situation is explained to her and it turns out that she and her deceased fiance murdered a six-year-old girl. She is very upset when they tell her this, but she is still trying to process what actually happened in her life before she lost her memory. The people that filmed her through their phones and didn't help her when she was in 'trouble' was what she did to the little girl. Her fiance tortured the girl and she sat idly and filmed the whole thing through her phone. The discussion behind her punishment is the question of if she really did it. Because we see her experience before we find out she was an accessory to murder, the audience has more of a dilemma with the way in which she is punished. She should be punished without a doubt; she was a witness and an accessory to this murder and she had every right to try to stop it. Just because she filmed it and didn't have a physical hand in the torture aspect of the murder doesn't mean that she should be let off any less than her fiance. The moral dilemma is surrounding the punishment itself. Her memory is wiped clean so after each 'round' of torture, she could have a moment or realization that what she did was wrong and could potentially become a better person. This is if they only did this once instead of making her suffer more and more. She also doesn't have the memory of this ever happening, so one 'round' of the punishment should be enough to teach her the lesson that what she did was wrong. The torture also shows Victoria how the little girl must have felt when they took her away from her family. The little girl was alone, just like Victoria felt, and didn't know what would happen to her next. The simple familiarity of the 6 year-old's life was take away and some would view this eye-for-an-eye justice as something that should and could be implemented in today's legal system. The question with punishment is, how far is too far?