White Bear Justice Park

So far, every episode of Black Mirror has some sort of "underlying meaning" that goes along with the episode. While watching White Bear, I came up with several possible messages but I couldn't narrow it down. In the episode, a woman named Victoria wakes up in a house and cannot remember anything. The only thing she seems to have any remembrance of is a picture of a little girl who she assumes is her daughter. Next to the picture of the little girl, is a picture of Victoria and a man. Throughout the episode, Victoria goes through several traumatic experiences with strange, masked people obviously trying to kill her, and several bystanders. I use "bystanders" because these people follow her constantly throughout the episode while filming her on their phones. 

We learn at the end of the episode that this scenario was just a regular day at White Bear Justice Park. This "Justice" Park serves as an eye-for-an-eye punishment for Victoria. Victoria and her Fiance abducted the little girl from her home, killed her, and burned her body. Victoria was accused of not doing anything to stop him and claims she was "under her fiance's spell". This is where the bystanders come in. They were there as her eye-for-an-eye punishment by sitting by during her traumatic experiences. 

As I was watching White Bear, the bystanders really stuck out to me. At first, I thought that the episode was pointing out the issue of people's first reaction being to take out their phone and start sharing it. This reminded me of a meme that I saw one day of a man who was in a car wreck. The man came very close to being smashed by another car and the first thing the first responder did was take out is phone to take a picture. (Sadly, I cannot find the meme, but if you do, please feel free to comment it). I figured this was going along with the fact that as time goes on, we are becoming more and more attached to our phones and sharing our personal lives on social media. I came up with several theories and ended with these two. I agree that social media has taken a big toll on the psychological growth of our generation. While I am guilty of being on my phone quite often throughout the day, this blog post made me look more into the detrimental aspects of us being attached to our phone and obsessed with our social media presence.