In the film, White Bear, we are introduced to the main character, Victoria, who wakes up in a house that is unfamiliar to her as well as having no memory of anything about her. She continues on to find a photo of a little girl who she assumes is her daughter and soon finds out she is being watched by people staring through house windows. She makes her way outside to find that no one is responding to her. Afterwards she starts being hunted down by a person in a mask who proceeds to shoot at her and she runs away. Eventually she finds others who are willing to help her and she then makes her way through various escape attempts to get away from these "hunters." Once she makes it to the control room to destroy the technology that is making these unusual images appear on screens everywhere, she is then forced to shoot a hunter who tries to kill her. The gun instead shoots out confetti and then she is revealed to an audience who is cheering on the act. A confused Victoria is put into a chair and cuffed down and is then shown the violent acts she has actually committed in her life which involve abducting a child and then filming her significant other burn the child alive in a sleeping bag. Victoria shows signs of guilt and agony as she is wheeled off set and put into a cage in the bed of a truck as they drive her down a road to let the audience attending the event ridicule her and throw food at the cage. She is then taken to the room in the house she began her day in. Baxter, the ring leader of this performance, is then shown putting a device on her head which removes her memories of the day she lived through so she can wake up and restart again; the device also causes her enormous pain as we see her begin to scream in pain as we are left with that scene. After that shocking scene we find out that she is park of a park attraction as people can pay to see her go through the day over and over again.
The issue of justice in society is kind of a tricky subject. The view of fairness might be a decent and reasonable suggestion for how to handle criminals, but that depends on what the criminal had done. In the case of "White Bear," the case of fairness played out as the people watching her go through a tortuous day and only watched her suffer without helping her. This is fair because the child she abducted had to live each day in fear as others watched her and did not help because they thought the child was theirs. I do believe that fairness is not the way to go about this issue. The whole idea of putting Victoria on display seems too much. While she is getting what she deserves, she is also not learning her lesson and being corrected because her memory becomes erased after each day. The point of justice is to be able to punish those who do evil in a way that corrects their behavior to help them understand the wrongs they have committed.
5 comments:
Is she getting what she deserves? Leaving alone the argument of coercion, she's having her memories completely erased every day. Could you still say that the Victoria presented to us in the film is the same person that committed the crime in the first place?
As I first I was reading what you had to say about the punishment of Victoria I thought we were going to totally disagree. After, I kept reading I realized we very much agreed. Her punishment is not fair or just. You said she is getting what she deserves and I might have to agree with you there. I think they are punishing a different person than who committed the crime. So is it really what she deserves?
I agree that the punishment would have been just if they did not tamper with her memory. The prosecutors basically violated her and intefered with her humanity.
There is a deeper complexity to the justification of her punishment, but I agree that it was aimless in regards to her correction. Perhaps the public was unaware of the immense pain caused to her within the house as the scene was reset. It could be a lesson in our partial views of the administration of justice. We tend to only see justice in the courtroom, but following we become unaware of the lack of correction administered among convicts.
indeed, the punishment was no longer relative to teaching any lesson to her, and instead became a symbol of what happens when you commit a crime of this magnitude. In that, it also became a system of entertainment for others to participate in, further straying from a productive purpose.
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