The Monsters That Lurk Beneath

*WARNING* This article briefly describes and discusses mutilating/gory torture methods. If you are squeamish at the thought of such things, I suggest you read another article.

“White Bear”, another episode in the Black Mirror series, follows a young woman named Victoria who has lost her memory and her female accomplice named Jem who wants to burn down a radio station to stop some sort of zombifying cellphone transmission. The episode begins by infecting the viewer with Victoria’s immediate confusion: the strange noises, the odd rectangular symbol on the t.v. screens, and the peculiar behaviour of most everyone she encounters (for example, the passivity of the “onlookers” and the murderous aggression of the “hunters”) The episode then sells the idea of a strange disease that is spread by said symbol that causes people to become these weird zombies called “Onlookers” that are obsessed with recording everything. Apparently because of this, some unaffected people seized the opportunity to act out their desires without consequence causing them to become “Hunters” who hunt down and terrorize other unaffected people. Seduced by this idea, perhaps one could assume that Victoria was some sort of ex-rebel who, assisted by the man in her fleeting memories, somehow managed to do something important against the hunters and the disease— the price of which was the loss of her memory. However, it is revealed in the end that the whole ordeal is actually a live-action show that is intended to punish Victoria for her crime— recording her boyfriend torturing and murdering a little girl. Perhaps one would initially be relieved by the fact that the Onlooker-disease was not real: these “Onlookers” were just civilians instructed to record the show and Victoria. However, this relief is short-lived when one considers the psychological torment Victoria is subjected to and the eagerness of people to revel in it.

The key to coercing a group of people into harming someone is to, in some fashion, get the group to stop seeing that person as a human. The oldest and most common way to dehumanize someone is to make them out to be a criminal— publicly issuing capital punishment was once commonplace in medieval Europe. These punishments could get quite gruesome: sentences could vary from hanging a conscious woman upside down and literally sawing her in half to tying a man’s arms and legs separately to four horses and setting the horses to run so that they rip the man limb from limb. Preceding these horrendous deaths, the convicted were often beaten, stripped naked, and paraded around the town for all to see the public indecency and scorn the criminal. During these executions, “onlookers” were often encouraged in order to increase the humiliation that the condemned felt. In a sense, these brutal deaths were made into a spectacle that was justified by the notion that the accused wasn’t a regular citizen. They were a criminal. They were less than human. They deserved the punishment.

Although there is a limit to the amount of damage a person can receive before they die, certain punishments (such as the aforementioned) seem designed specifically to cause and prolong suffering as long as possible. In the example of the woman being sawed in half, it has been noted that the victim could still retain consciousness by the time the saw reached her chest. In the example of the man being torn apart, many times he would have to suffer other atrocities (such as being beaten, and having bones broken, or being castrated) before he even reached the horses. These kinds of punishments have no intention of rehabilitating or “teaching a lesson”, because the victim always dies at the end of it. That being said, it is fair to say that these punishments are inflicted solely to cause the condemned to suffer. In Victoria’s case, she is wiped of her memory daily by a device that, in the process of wiping memory, causes intense pain. On top of that, since she doesn’t have her memory, she is in a constant state of confusion that causes her to buy into the story of the Hunters and Onlookers. Essentially, she has to go through the terror and stress of believing she is about to die every single day. Even though Victoria doesn’t go through such an extreme level of physical pain and mutilation, she goes through what many deem to be worse— psychological pain.

The frightening thing about psychological torture is that there is no need to cause physical damage: a person’s entire mental stability can become unhinged without a single scratch to the body. In “White Bear”, the facility is designed to emulate the fear and terror the child experienced when she was in the captivity of Victoria and her boyfriend. This is why they continually wipe her memory; she can never become used to the punishment so, consequently, she will experience it with the exact same clarity. Not only that, but they also make sure that, at the end of the day, they inform her of the reality of her situation in front of an audience of jeering people. This sudden realization causes her to feel great shame and humiliation: not only for what she had done to the child but also for her sorry and helpless situation. This is proven when she begins weeping uncontrollably after they reveal that the whole scenario was actually a never-ending punishment. Being forced to undergo such a stressful ordeal day after day (with no end in sight) can quickly induce suicide— this is evidenced when, after the revelation, she begs them to kill her. Not only that, but there is practically no hope for Victoria to ever recover after she completes her sentence: she would have to endure intense PTSD for the rest of her life which would most likely end in suicide.

To put it simply, although Victoria’s crime was despicable, there is no reason to put someone through that level of psychological damage. By creating this situation in which people are allowed to watch and relish someone who is undergoing intense pain (be it physical or psychological), they are essentially perpetrating the same crime Victoria committed— standing by and watching someone torture another human being while making no move to intervene.