[NOTE: This is the another installment in my series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!]
“White Bear” (S2E2) is one of only two Black Mirror episodes that I use in class. (The other is “Be Right Back,” which I reviewed here.) In my regular, face-to-face classes, the students read an excerpt from Locke’s “On Identity and Diversity,” then I give a lecture on the relationship between justice and identity in digital age, then we screen “White Bear” together in class, followed by another whole class period-long discussion of it. (I also have a PowerPoint version, with embedded narration of the semi-same lecture, for my fully-online classes. You can download that one here, if you’re interested.) I set my students up to think that the primary question we are grappling with is the question of identity– how to ensure that a person being punished for a crime is the same person who committed the crime– but, as anyone who has seen it knows, “White Bear” insists upon a much darker and much more serious grappling with the very nature of punishment itself.
What, if anything, does punishment accomplish? Can we determine “just” punishments? How do we distinguish between the sorts of violence/offense that are criminal and the sorts of violence/offense that are intended to rectify crimes? What does punishment do to the punishers?
Both the crime and the punishment depicted in “White Bear” are truly horrifying. In fact, “White Bear” is among the top three episodes that I find the most brutal to watch. (The other two are “Shut Up and Dance,” which I reviewed here, and “The National Anthem,” which I have not yet mustered the strength to review.) So, I issue a very carefully-crafted trigger warning at the end of my lecture in the class prior to screening “White Bear,” which reads:
“In the next class, we will be viewing a short film that contains material that some of you may find disturbing or offensive, including strong language, realistic depictions of psychological suffering, suggestions of violence, and suggestions of non-consensual sexual activity.”
In general, as a philosophy professor who is regularly charged with teaching “controversial” material, I admit of some ambivalence about the use and value of trigger warnings. especially when it comes to teaching film, as I have explained before on this blog (se: “Trigger Warnings, Spoiler Alerts, Philosophy and Film”). However, I have exactly zero ambivalence about the prudence of issuing a trigger warning for “White Bear,” and I encourage anyone who is considering using it in their classes to do the same. Each semester, I have a not-insignificant number of students come and speak to me after being alerted to this TW– most of whom are concerned about the “non-consensual sex” part of the warning, and many of whom volunteer stories of their own sexual assault. My response has been to inform those students that there is no explicit, on-screen violence in the episode, sexual or otherwise, but that they can be excused from viewing the film if they choose.
Now, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of “White Bear.” REMINDER: Spoilers ahead.
The episode opens with Victoria Skillane (Lenora Crichlow) being startled awake in a nondescript room, where she finds herself with bandages on her wrists and scattered pills on the floor. We are meant to believe that she has survived an attempted suicide, but we quickly learn that she has no ideas who she is and no memory of how or why she ended up in this room. What is to be unravelled in Victoria’s subsequent discovery of her identity is even more unsettling than this opening scene.
For the majority of what follows, we see Victoria confused, terrified, haunted, and hunted. She moves through a world that is not only actively hostile to her– for no discernable reason– but also deeply invested in not helping her. (The many, varied, and inexplicable terrors that she experiences are witnessed, and blithely filmed on cellphones, by disinterested “onlookers.”) Just as the danger to Victoria reaches its pitch, it is suddenly and abruptly revealed that all of her suffering was but a play. The curtain is drawn back, a fourth wall is literally dismantled, and we see that there has been, all along, a rapt audience relishing in the performance of her dramatic tragedy.
Victoria is (still) terrified and confused. We, viewers, are as well.
Everything of import is revealed in the last 15 minutes of “White Bear”– those 15 minutes include the credits to the episode, a truly ingenious authorial/directorial decision by Charlie Brooker— during which we learn (a) that Victoria was, prior to our introduction to her, an active participant in the abduction, torture, and murder of a child, (b) that Victoria and her boyfriend/co-conspirator, Ian, were caught because Victoria had cellphone-filmed the torture and murder of the child, (c) that Ian escaped punishment by hanging himself in custody, and (d) that the judge in Victoria’s trial, motivated by public outrage, determined that Victoria’s punishment should be “proportionate and considered.”
Everything that we had witnessed in the preceding half-hour of the episode was, it turns out, Victoria’s punishment.
As it plays out in the episode, Victoria’s punishment was precisely proportionate, at least on the order of lex talionis, anyway. Subsequent to her trial and conviction, a “White Bear Justice Park” had been established, with the sole purpose of revisiting upon Victoria, as punishment, the exact terror, confusion, helplessness, abandon, and psychological trauma that her child-victim (Jemima) suffered. Regular citizens of this near-future dystopia enthusiastically visit the park, voluntarily pay admission, and willingly participate as “onlookers” to Victoria’s suffering day after day. We (viewers) learn that Victoria’s memory is wiped clean at the end of each White Bear Justice Park “performance” day, and so Victoria is bring made to suffer the same punishing terror over and over again, though it is always only happening for the first time in Victoria’s experience.
The “white bear” in “White Bear Justice Park” is in reference to a teddy-bear that was a constant companion to Jemima and that became, in the episode’s backstory, the enduring public symbol of her abduction. The “justice” in “White Bear Justice Park” is in reference to… well…
There’s the rub.
The fact that “White Bear” is more or less narrated in reverse, thus encouraging viewers to empathize with Victoria first as a human being and only later as a “monster,” presents considerable challenges both for evaluating the justness of her punishment and for determining the “evilness” of Victoria herself. The first question I ask students after screening the episode is– and keep in mind that there are only about 5 minutes left in that 50-minute class period– did we see “justice” executed in White Bear Justice Park?
In my experience, most students– but not all– immediately concede that White Bear Justice Park is not just. For some, it’s “cruel and unusual” and thus, to Americans with even a high-school familiarity with the Eighth Amendment, unconstitutional. For others, the un-justness is decidedly divorced from the actual nature of the White Bear Justice Park’s punishment, but rather grounded in its, presumably indefensible, dissociation of the person-who-committed-the-crime from the person-who-is-being-punished-for-the-crime. Still others– I should say, most others– can’t quite locate or articulate their objection to the injustice of the White Bear Justice Park.
These (latter) vague and inarticulate objections come in many forms. Some object to the operations of the White Bear Justice Park because it just “feels” excessive and unfair (as shaming always does, even to those who are not the targets of it). Some object because, they admit, the episode gave them a space to empathize with the criminal and, thus, to see Victoria’s punishment as morally paralel to her crime. Some object because they see themselves in the role of the “onlookers,” which they find simultaneously implicating and revolting. Still others, far fewer (but not an insignificant number), object to the seemingly-endless repetition of Victoria’s punishment, though not to the punishment itself.
At the end of this post, I’ve included some reflections on teaching “White Bear,” but I’d like to offer a few thoughts on what I take to be the punishing lesson of the episode first.
I have no reservations whatsoever about naming the punishment enacted upon Victoria in this episode “torture.” (I’ve written about torture quite a bit on this blog before– see here, here, here— and it was a primary area of my research for many years.) Torture is, in every instance, immoral and undemocratic, in large part because the essential aim of torture is to reduce a human being to the point where they are no longer capable of acting as a rational, deliberative agent. As David Sussman has argued, torture should hold a special place in our moral and legal disapprobation—qualitatively different than other forms of violence or harm—because only torture demands that the victim be forced “into the position of colluding with himself through his own affects and emotions, so that he experiences himself as simultaneously powerless and yet actively complicit in his own violation.” Sussman calls torture the “pre-eminent instance of a kind of forced self-betrayal,” an entirely accurate characterization in my view.
Torture places both the torturer and the tortured in a uniquely dehumanizing kind of relationship. Torturers must divorce themselves from empathy, compassion, and sensitivity to others’ physical and psychological suffering. Victims of torture are reduced to a state of utter compliance and complicity; they both are and understands themselves to be completely at the mercy of their torturer. This is a relationship that requires both to compromise the most fundamental of human instincts, and those are compromises from which human beings do not recover.
To this day, it remains absolutely inconceivable to me how any person of good conscience can defend torture.
In “White Bear,” Victoria’s technologically-manufactured amnesia is the plot-twist that makes it possible for her drama to be effectively unfolded in reverse, which in turn permits viewers to see Victoria’s suffering, confusion, and terror as punishing before they learn that it is punishment. (This, I think, is the genius of “White Bear” and the reason that I ranked it in the top five episodes of the Black Mirror franchise.) Leaving aside, for the moment, the craveness and depravity of the “onlookers” in the episode– people who pay money to go to the White Bear Justice Park and relish in suffering as entertainment– the episode demands that we ask ourselves one of the most essential questions of moral and political life: what is punishment meant to accomplish?
In the contemporary United States, legal “punishment” comes mainly in the form of incarceration, a form that is neither deterrent nor rehabilitative. I think it is absolutely essential to acknowledge what is the case, but which most law-abiding citizens/students do not want to confess, namely, that most state-sanctioned punishments are not meant to accomplish any “good” at all, but rather are wholly and exclusively punitive. Especially in the U.S., state-sanctioned punishments are only meant to exact harm on those who have caused harm, to extract wealth from those who have “stolen” property, or to isolate from society persons who have been determined (most, unjustly) to be dangers to society.
If we could stop repeating the noble lie that prison makes us safer (or worse, that incarceration does some good for the incarcerated), then we would be forced to immediately reckon with this punishing lesson: punishment in the United States is not so different from what we see in “White Bear.” An increasing number of our prisons are for-profit (like the White Bear Justice Park). Many of us actively participate as “onlookers” (whole television channels almost exclusively devote programming to providing viewers opportunity to relish-at-a-distance punishment qua entertainment). An extremely common form of punishment delivered inside our prisons is “cruel and unusual” (see the ACLU report on solitary confinement).
One important difference, though: we are not told the stories of incarcerated persons in reverse, a la “White Bear.” We do not see them as human beings first before we come to know them as criminals. We are not encouraged to sympathize or empathize with prisoners, even less to extend to them compassion or mercy. We are repeatedly and relentlessly forced into judging them– first, last, and always– as “monsters,” forever frozen in the moment of their worst decision, like a bug in amber.
Now, back to the classroom.
As is true of anyone who has taught the same material many times, I can usually anticipate all of the twists and turns that the in-class symposium will take. Usually. When it comes to the “White Bear” symposium, however, it’s often been a free-for-all. In fact, don’t think there is any text, thinker, film, or issue that I teach that so regularly engenders such wide and varying responses as “White Bear” does. (And that includes all of the films I teach in my “Philosophy and Film” course!) So, if you choose to teach “White Bear,” better practice some pedagogical yoga first, because you’re gonna need to be flexible.
In the background of all the other, really important, matters to be discussed in this episode is a question that I consider a kind of litmus-test for moral and political reasoning, namely: is it possible for people to really— fundamentally– change who they are?
I tend to couch this possibility in a “bait” story about salvation. Imagine a child-murderer is tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, but is later “saved” in jail– should that person be executed? Of course, anyone who claims to believe in the traditional Christian story of salvation should concede that, in such a case, the person being punished (and possibly executed) is a substantially different person than the person who committed the crime. In my experience, though, very few people– even those who profess to be Christian– allow for the possibility that forgiveness, pardon, or commutation is not primarily about a change in the merciful, but rather a response to change in those to whom mercy is being granted.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think ii is necessary to appeal to the specific Christian story of forgiveness to make the same point, though I find that it is a story familiar to the majority of my particular student-demographic. My aim is primarily to motivate students to think seriously about (a) how extensive their allowances for “change” in other people extend and, correspondingly, (b) whether or not those allowances for other people are more restrictive than the ones they apply to their own possibility for change.
Imagine the worst act you have ever committed. Do you believe you are forever and always that person? Can you imagine your life forever and always frozen in that moment, your identity caught there, unchanging and unchangeable, like a bug in amber?
I should say that I do believe that, in a non-ideal society, punishment has (limited) utility and there are good prudential reasons for states to employ it. More importantly, I think it is important to evaluate the specific sorts of punishment that non-ideal states employ on utilitarian and/or prudential grounds. But I do not think that these are the proper “starting” grounds for evaluating the host of conditions that make states non-ideal, and thus make punishment necessary, in the first place.
What I want to avoid in the discussions with my students about “White Bear” is giving too much space for the knee-jerk reaction that presumes (to borrow a line from my favorite Ethan Coen poem) that “de jure is de facto‘s slave.” It needn’t be so.
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