Recently, I have watched an episode from The Black Mirror TV series called White Bear, which is about a woman by the name of Victoria Skillane waking up in a neighborhood, having no memory of who she is and why she is there, but discovers that there are hunters out there trying to kill her. Due to her memory loss, she does not realize that she is actually being punished for assisting her fiance, Iain Rannoch, to abduct and kill a little girl by the name of Jemima. Judging by the actions committed in this episode, I believe that Skillane’s punishment was more of an entertainment proposition rather than a cruel punishment. Everything that happened was a complete setup; everything was not real. The people of the neighborhood that were posing as hypnotized hosts to film and watch Skillane suffer were faking the whole time. Even the hunters were not real. They were part of an organization called the White Bear Justice Society whom set up the punishment for Skillane. At the end of the punishment where Skillane is reminded of her past, her memory is then erased so that the punishment can repeat the next day.
The punishment to me was rare and unusual. Normally, if someone were to commit a crime, they would be sentenced to jail, prison, community service, death, etc., but to have your memory erased and experience the same moment over and over again just to have your memory erased at the end is definitely strange. I really do not see how that serves justice. It pretty much reminded me of WorldStar, a video blog that allows us to film and expose whatever is going on in the world today. Nowadays, you see people with their smart phone devices out always trying to record a moment in life even at the wrong time. In resemblance to the people who just had their phones out to film instead of helping Skillane escape from the hunters is a prime example of the WorldStar phenomenon; we are so amused by seeing others in pain that we get a sense of urgency to make it into a propaganda of entertainment instead of being a good Samaritan. Even though the whole scene was fake, it had me questioning ourselves as to why we think it is okay to do that when we would not want that to happen to us.
Memory does play an important role in our lives, but it can also lead to drastic measures when not used correctly. It is not our fault for that we use a small percentage of our brain to carry out our everyday routine. When Skillmane was in trial for her crime, she told the judge that she was “under her fiance’s spell” when they wrapped the girl in a sleeping blanket and burned her alive, but was she really? Was she just using her memory of what happened to lie to herself in order to make her feel less guilty of her actions? Either way, memory is such an overestimated skill. We tend to believe that our memory helps us become self aware of our surroundings, but can we truly trust our memories?
Here is a TED talk about how reliable our memory can be:
No comments:
Post a Comment