In the short film "White Bear" we are first introduced to a woman, Victoria, who clearly doesn't know where she is or anything about her life. The movie started with what seemed like the whole town watching her from their windows, the roadside, and the woods. In my opinion, I thought this pretty strange and really didn't understand what was going on. As the film continues, and Victoria is chased through the woods by hunters, she is constantly bombarded with flashes of what seems like her memories. After seeing how everyone acts, Victoria is desperate to find out who she is and what is wrong with everyone around her, so she attempts to shutdown the source signal. It is then discovered that Victoria is really a criminal who videoed the murder of a girl in the woods, and the community was punishing her in the same way how the little girl was.
It was asked if this was justice or not, I have to believe that on some level that it is was. At a certain point I would call it justice, but I believe that the community kind of took it too far. I believe that if they would have erased her memory one time and put here thought the process that it would have been a lit different. It would have shown her how the little girl felt and made her think about what she did. I believe that this would have been effective in making her think and regret her actions, but doing it over and over without her remembering it isn't really effective.
Overall, I believe that the punishment that the community gave Victoria was just up to a certain point and then in became cruel and unusual punishment. I think that it would have been effective for her to rehabilitate rather than punish her over and over every day. I believe that this is a big problem today in the U.S; we do not focus on rehabilitation but rather on punishment. I believe that this is why we have more incarcerated citizen per capita than any other country and why roughly 75% off prisoner are requested. If we focused more on rehabilitation I believe a lot of these issues would stop.
1 comment:
I agree with you that they should have just focused more on rehabilitating Victoria rather simply trying to "punish" her. She did exclaim that she was under her boyfriend's spell (or something along those lines) when the act was carried out to the little girl. In addition, this also highlights the issue in today's society. We are too focused on providing a "fitting punishment" rather than trying to make the criminal acknowledge/understand what they did was wrong.
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