No Real Answers

“I guess we were always like that, underneath.”

Our existence is transient.  We are constantly moving, constantly changing, constantly adapting.  How can we, in this ever changing state, really put a finger on what it is that makes us human?  How can we distinguish individuals in our lives for who they are?  When we commit crimes, how do we punish people for crimes they committed- even crimes they don’t remember?  How does our recollection of a crime contribute to our own guilt in committing it?  How is the intent of our actions related?  Can our actions themselves make us lose any of our basic human rights?  

All of these are questions I pondered while watching “White Bear” and many of them rose again during following discussions.  I suppose there is no easy answer to any of them, but we can find some wisdom in the way they’re raised in “White Bear”.  

In the film, a woman is punished for her participation (or lack of action) in the kidnapping and torture of a child.  In the crime, she stood by and filmed the suffering.  For retribution, there has been an amusement park erected around her punishment.  Each night her memory is wiped with a painful device and each day begins when she wakes up with no recollection of who she is or what she has done in her life.  She is chased and tortured, all while being filmed by bystanders who have paid simply to enjoy her pain and play a part in the charade.  The performance of her torture concludes with a sort of “parade of shame”.  She rides through a crowd of hecklers’ screamed insults and sits retrained in a glass case, targeted by various projectiles.  

Each day of her punishment allows a new group of formerly innocent and unrelated citizens to participate in her dehumanization and, by default, their own.  In this park, technology has a trance-like control of everyone.  Everyone who visits the park revels in the opportunity to do the very thing being punished.  The participants are slaves to the documentation of others’ horror and it’s sickening to think about how plausible their fixation is in our everyday society.  We live to document pieces of ourselves in the moment we feel things.  In a world ruled by social media, we trample each other to get a better angle on two teens’ fight.  Isn’t that ironic?

I suppose it’s wildly unsatisfying to have no real answers to the questions posed in this blog post, but we can be motivated that stooping to the level of criminals lessens dehumanizes us.  We have to do more to encourage a justice system that is focused more on healing than harm.  Justice can’t be based on methods that sacrifice our own humanity.