White Bear

The black mirror episode "White Bear" presents a really twisted view on justice. The episode is about a park that punishes a criminal whose crime was sitting back and doing nothing while her boyfriend kidnapped and tortured a child. How do they punish this person? They establish a park that routinely tortures her and makes a show about it. I see that they were going for a sort of poetic justice by making the criminal feel the same as her victim, but in the end, they are being infinitely worse.

At first, it seems kind of fair; punish a person who tortured a child with torture. But, the park takes it a lot further. Rather than just punishing the criminal once, they do it every single day. The episode shows that they have been torturing her for at least a few weeks, but that they also plan to do it every day for the foreseeable future. What makes this worse is that she isn’t even the one who tortured the child. She just filmed the kid a few times and didn’t do anything to stop her boyfriend. While this may be just as bad, it doesn’t justify the routine torture that she has to go through. The punishment is completely disproportionate to the crime that she committed.

Another thing that is messed up is that she doesn’t even know who she is or what she did. At the end of every day, they painfully erase all of her memories so that she cannot remember what happened. What makes this terrible is that she cannot even repent for what she did. She is just lost and confused while all of the people of the park go around and punish her for something she doesn’t even know happened. It kind of defeats the purpose of the punishment. The whole point of punishing criminals is to get them to repent for their crimes. She doesn’t even know what she did, how can she repent for it.

While those things are bad, probably the worst thing about the park is that this torture is all done for the entertainment of the park visitors and for profit. At the end of the episode, they explain how all the park goers are supposed to have a fun time while they watch the criminal. That makes every person who goes to the park worse than the criminal who is kept there. Rather than just videotaping the torture, they are supposed to make a show of it. They laugh and make fun of this person who is lost and confused as she is chased and hunted around the park. Each of them don’t realize that they are just as bad as the criminal that they are there to prosecute. That’s the worst part about the park: in the quest to punish a criminal, they have become much, much worse.