Is it Punishment or is it Torture?

Was it a rightful punishment or a cruel form of torture?  This is one of the questions that was raised after watching the short film "White Bear."  In the film, a woman named Victoria awakens with no memory of her identity and sees a mysterious white symbol appearing on the television scene.  After walking outside, Victoria quickly notices that bystanders are filming her via cellphone for no apparent reason.  To make matters worse, a man wearing a black mask with the same white symbol confronts and chases her with shotgun in hand while people continue to film the situation taking place.  She runs into to two drifters and barricades herself with them in an old gas station.  One of the drifters is shoot while Victoria and the other girl escape.  The girl tells Victoria that some sort of outbreak has happened in which people have started filming things due to the appearance of the white symbol seen earlier in the film.  Because of this, individuals called "hunters" wreak havoc upon society, knowing that everyone around them is only fixated upon filming the mayhem.  The two resolve to destroy the signal after being betrayed by a man who was the one shooting at Victoria earlier.  At the radio station, Victoria and the drifter confront two hunters that have been pursuing them since the beginning of the film.  The fight comes to an abrupt stop, revealing that the whole thing was an elaborate act.  Victoria is restrained to a chair and watches a clip about her and her fiancée Ian torturing and killing a six-year-old girl.  Although Ian was the one who initially harmed the girl, Victoria was guilty of recording the girl's death, instead of stopping the violence.  As a result, she is doomed to relive the previous events without any memory of what has happened before. 


The events in the film are an example of torture.  Although it was wrong for Victoria to have participated in the death of six-year-old Jemima, it was even more wrong for the individuals of The White Bear Justice Park to torture her and use it for public entertainment.  When someone is punished for his or her crimes, that person is supposed to have retain the knowledge of what he or she did, and it should stick with that person for the rest of his or her life.  In "White Bear," Victoria's punishment ends with her losing the memory of her crime.  Even though she is reminded of what she did by the host of the show, she will forget about it the next day.  The point I want to make is that Victoria is not learning a lesson from her mistake or being rehabilitated.  The whole purpose of a punishment is to be reprimanded for the offense and to be deterred from ever doing it again.