In the White Bear episode of Black
Mirror, a young woman is punished for her crime of being a bystander in the
brutal murder of a young girl. Her punishment is cruel and unusual for a
multitude of reasons but what I find most cruel of all is that her punishers
zap her memory at the end of each day so that she wakes up every morning
without a clue of where she is or what has happened. In her confused
disorientation, she struggles through the exact same terrifying day over and
over again, for God only knows how long—maybe the rest of her life?
To me, this is extremely cruel in
that it robs the woman being punished of the ability to learn from her mistakes
or feel any form of true regret or remorse. It does not seem constructive to
take away any memory of the crime she has committed and then stimulate her own
crime on herself to demonstrate why what she did (or did not do) to the little
girl was wrong. How can she feel guilty for something she does not even
remember doing? How can she be remorseful for a crime that, at the end of the
day, she is not completely sure she committed? 
I don’t see the point in it or how
it can teach her anything, especially not some “lesson” about not being a
bystander in times where you are called to act. In fact, the people who are punishing
her become the embodiment of the exact crime for which they are reprimanding her.
Which is the point, I know. But, it
still seems hypocritical and counterproductive in the scheme of things. How can
you show someone that they should not have done something to someone by doing
that exact thing to them? How can you justify hurting someone for something
that you will not even let them remember that they did? 
I think that her form punishment is
not only cruel but also backwards, senseless, not well thought-out, and
counterproductive. It does not prevent the behavior from happening again
because when she wakes up every day, she can’t even remember the event at all.
She does not have the opportunity to truly feel remorse for what she did or to
learn from the mistakes of her past. She cannot truly suffer if she does not
even understand what she is suffering is for. 
2 comments:
At the end of the episode, we hear Victoria ask the show "host" to just kill her, so she does feel remorse. She is devastated to hear the truth and to find out that she murdered the girl who she thought was her child. So I think that you're right that they don't even give her the chance to learn her lesson and feel guilty to get "better". By wiping her memory, they take away any feelings she had about the situation. It truly is for the benefit of the customers and viewers that Victoria is locked away and pit through this torture.
I do think that Victoria suffers and feels remorse, but it is not for long. She is unable to dig deeper into that sense of remorse to enact real change in her person because she does not know it long enough to do it. Her punishment is incomplete, in a way, in that it does not allow her to fully grasp the reality of her situation.
Post a Comment