Is Victoria's treatment truly justice?

In White Bear we see a young woman named Victoria who has amnesia running for her life from a handful of individuals who wish to murder her, while being filmed by the unsympathetic “onlookers”. Just when it seems all hope is lost and that Victoria and her companion will soon face their deaths, it is revealed that Victoria is a criminal. She and her fiancé kidnapped a young girl, and when her fiancé murdered the girl, Victoria filmed it, apparently enjoying the spectacle. She is put through this ordeal every single day, and has her memory wiped every night so that she can experience it over again. This “show” is something like a zoo, with guests (who participate as the Onlookers) likely paying to watch this woman be tortured. But is this truly justice?

A large number of people likely wish to watch her suffer because they wish to punish her for the crimes she and her fiancé committed. The intense quality of the punishment may partly be due to her fiancé, who committed the murder, is deceased, and so she must bear all of the weight of the people’s hatred and revulsion toward the couple and their actions. Another reason might be that filming the act, and seeming to find glee at seeing the child be murdered, almost seems worse than the murder itself. A person might be driven to murder by anger: this is something somewhat easily understood by most people. But what kind of person would enjoy watching another person murder a little girl? Another factor could potentially be Vitoria’s gender. A strange man kidnapping and murdering someone else’s little girl isn’t very surprising, as we expect this to happen on occasion. But for a woman to take a child, and then act so incredibly cruelly toward her, may be harder to understand. “Where are her motherly instincts?” people might wonder. What could be so very wrong with her?

It is obvious that the purpose of her treatment is more for the amusement of other people, and perhaps even profit for those who run the “show”, than carrying out true justice. There is something to be said for punishment equaling the crime committed, but by erasing Victoria’s memory every day, she cannot learn from her experience and so empathize with the little girl whose murder she filmed. The treatment of Victoria in White Bear is cruel and unusual punishment.