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Friday, November 25, 2016

Justice or Just"ice" cold hearts?

This whole film was extremely disturbing to me and I could not watch it again. On this week’s episode of Black Mirror, a woman woke up with a splitting headache and pills all around her. She did not know where she was or even who she was. She found a picture of a little girl that she assumed was her daughter and the tv on with a weird symbol. She went outside to ask for help and the people just watched her and recorded her with their cameras. She was then chased by “hunters”, who wore the weird symbol, that were armed and the bystanders still watched. No one said and word, just recorded on their phones. After a few near death experiences the woman and her new acquaintance/accomplice were going to destroy the “White Bear,” which was the last cell phone tower still standing. They hoped if they burned the circuits, the phones would go out and the hunters would stop since there was no audience. While in White Bear, the woman is caught and we find out her true identity. We find out she is a woman named Victoria Skillane. Her and her husband kidnapped the girl in the picture Victoria found and they tortured, murdered, and burned her body. Skillane’s husband did the killing meanwhile Victoria stood back and recorded it all on her phone. She goes through something similar to what the girl, Jemima, had to go through every day as her punishment. They are in the “White Bear Justice Park”, and they do this “show” every day. People from all over the nation come to watch Victoria be tortured just like she watched Jemima. So in this film, this is her punishment and it is considered okay. The whole country is behind it, people pay daily to watch and perform in the show. Dr. J made us think about this. Is this ethical? Would this be okay? Victoria gets her memory whipped clean every night. Is she even the same person now? Though these are some very good and maybe even hard questions to answer, in the end I do not think this is ethical. Her memory is whipped, she does not even remember who she is, and she is being tortured every single day for no one knows how long. The film never gave an end date of her punishment. I guess until the human brain cannot handle it anymore and she dies. No doubt what this woman did was absolutely horrendous. It would be a stretch, but I might be able to justify this happening to her as long as Jemima was tortured so she could know how it felt, but it cannot last forever. It is just cruel and unusual punishment.

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