This is 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!
[Note from Dr. J: What follows is Part 2 of a two-part guest post from Jeffrey Gower. You can read Part One here.]
Near the end of “White Bear,” as Victoria sits bound to a chair facing an audience consisting of the reassembled onlookers who, throughout the day, had refused her any help or human solidarity, a video recording of televised news reports the following about her verdict:
“The trial of Victoria Skillane finally concluded today. The verdict: guilty. Together with her fiancé Iain Rannoch, whose death in custody had delayed the trial, Skillane abducted Jemima Sykes just miles from her home. Prompting a nation-wide search amidst emotional pleas from her parents. For months the youngster’s disappearance had been a mystery, the sole clue being her distinctive white teddy bear discovered in a lay-by two miles from the family home. The white bear became an enduring symbol in the hunt for Jemima, a hunt that ended in a local forest. Jemima’s body was found here. It had been wrapped in a sleeping bag and burnt. The couple were caught after harrowing footage of Jemima’s torture and murder was discovered on a mobile phone in Skillane’s possession. Iain Rannoch, identified by his distinctive tattoo, killed the youngster as Victoria Skillane held the camera. Breaking down in tears, Skillane admitted to filming Jemima’s final moments, claiming her fiancé had pressured her into helping him, maintaining she was under his spell. The jury was not convinced by Skillane’s story, and neither was the judge, who labelled her a uniquely wicked and poisonous individual. “You were an enthusiastic spectator to Jemima’s suffering. You actively reveled in her anguish,” he said. Adding that her punishment would be proportionate and considered. By hanging himself in his cell, many believe Iain Rannoch evaded justice. The public mood is now focused on ensuring his accomplice can’t do the same.”
There are a few things to note about this news report recounting the rationale justifying Victoria Skillane’s punishment.
First, note the emphasis on the juridical production of the truth of Victoria Skillane’s subjectivity: “who you are” is identified with what you did to Jemima Sykes, and especially with the judge’s evaluation of her criminal nature, rooted in a rejection of her own account of being under Iain’s spell. For the judge, Skillane is “a uniquely wicked and poisonous individual.”
Second, note the explicit invocation of the principle of retribution. After the screening of the news report is concluded, the dramaturge, “Baxter,” excoriates Skillane with the words, “A poor little girl, helpless and terrified. And you just watched. …How do you like it?” Skillane’s punishment consists of being subjected to the gaze of the onlookers because her contribution to the torture and murder of Jemima Sykes was to look, to passively look on as Iain Rannoch committed his atrocious crimes. Following a general table equating crimes with punishments, Skillane’s crimes might warrant a certain amount of time in prison. But when this table of general equivalencies is adapted to the particular case by being uniquely fitted to the circumstances of the crime and the character traits of the convicted criminal, a generally applicable equation like X crime = Y punishment is no longer tenable. According to a strictly and consistently applied principle of retribution, Skillane must be made to suffer precisely, singularly, what she made her victim Jemima suffer. And according to the judge’s assessment, her crime does not merely consist of remaining passive by refraining to intervene as Iain committed his crime. Rather, she was “an enthusiastic spectator to Jemima’s suffering,” who “actively reveled in her anguish.” Given how the governing logic of the world of “White Bear” is doled out to the viewer, at first blush we can’t help but assume that the violence that threatens her belongs to a dystopian, post-apocalyptic social order in which the strong are given license to prey on the weak. As we learn at the end of the episode, however, what we actually witness is a carefully crafted, rational, principled, and most importantly restrained logic of punishment. Skillane is forced to confront a general refusal of human solidarity because it reflects the same refusal she showed Jemima, for sure. But her punishment also asks her to confront her active participation in the crime through enthusiastic spectatorship and revelry. We might be skeptical of the judge’s dismissal of Skillane’s own story, that she was under Iain’s spell, but we can’t ignore the logic of a sentence that individualizes punishment by soliciting the active participation of the onlookers, those who are meant to play the role of actively and enthusiastically consuming the spectacle of Skillane’s suffering.
In this justice park, then, applying the principle of retribution limits the extent of violence permitted in punishment. From the second observation it follows that, third, the measured restraint of punishment is prescribed by rational principles. In the judge’s language, Victoria Skillane’s sentence is “proportionate and considered.” That is, a rational principle of retribution sets an upper and a lower limit on the severity of punishment, restricting the degree and kind of violence can be used; but also and more precisely, the principle forbids the specific logic of substitution mentioned above. As we have seen, in his theater of cruelty in the woods, Baxter stages the scene as if Skillane will serve as Jem’s substitute in torture. While this substitution is interrupted by the merely apparent contingency of Jem’s return, the news report makes it clear that the refusal of substitution is an explicit and intentional – “considered” – dimension of Skillane’s punishment. Even though Iain Rannoch “evaded justice” by hanging himself in his cell, there is no attempt to punish Skillane for his part in the crime. The punishments that would count as equivalent to Iain’s crimes according to the cited principle of proportionality are refused. With the exception of the physical pain she seems to suffer when her memory is wiped – the preamble and conclusion to each day of her punishment – she is not subject to physical torture and there is no mention of the possibility of capital punishment. She cannot substitute for Iain just as she could not substitute for Jem. Rather, there is a strict adherence to the principle of proportionality invoked by the judge. The punishment fits this crime.
None of this implies that Victoria Skillane’s punishment is light. She is not punished to the degree that Iain would have been, because the principle of retribution demands that she be treated as she treated her victim. In the world of “White Bear,” as we have seen, general equivalents are insufficient for fulfilling the logic of this principle, and an entire justice park must be established to treat Victoria as she treated Jemima down to the last details. (Nothing signifies the singularity of the punishment more precisely than the white bear itself, Jemima’s doll transformed into the name of the place within the theatrical fiction that might provide salvation, and transformed once more into the name of the episode.) The principle of retribution seems to provide a rational justification for the fitting punishment, and yet “fit” here is meant so literally and is realized with such exactitude that the minute details of the crime are taken as the precise measure of the appropriate punishment. Despite the intelligible principle that provides this punishment with its rationale, this attempt to map a general rule onto a singular case with such exactitude and without remainder produces a kind of irrational hypertrophy of punishment. The rational principle is meant to restrict the violence of punishment, but its most “accurate” application results in a new kind of irrational and violent excess. Only now, the excess consists not of sovereign violence applied to the body but of a punishment crafted to fit the minutiae of the crime. And Victoria Skillane’s crime consists of just looking, observing, watching. The theatrical gaze has become the instrument of violence.
This door to the law, this justice park, has been built for Victoria Skillane alone. Under what conditions could a society invest so many resources into punishing one crime? We might imagine the hypertrophy of punishment just mentioned spiraling out of control as the obsessively detailed application of the principle of retribution demands the establishment of justice parks that reproduce in their punishments the singular details of every crime. In such a society, the dividing lines between punishment, theater, and theme park would blur utterly as entertainment increasingly takes place in “hundreds of tiny theaters of punishment.” The logic of the episode points in this direction. Yet it is also likely that Victoria Skillane is a special sort of criminal who has her own justice park because the society is making an example of her. Why? Before spectatorship becomes relevant to this case due to Victoria’s specific crimes, Jemima’s disappearance had already become a media spectacle. The public is captivated by Jemima’s white bear, the sole clue and, as the news report tells us, an “enduring symbol” of the investigation. The public viewership has been watching from the beginning.
Toward the end of the episode, in one of the scenes presented after the credits begin to role that gives us more insight into the justice park itself, the dramaturge, who we’ve known as Baxter, welcomes the day’s group of participating audience members and offers a few “Rules for Onlookers.” 1) No Talking: Victoria Skillane must be convinced that the onlookers are mesmerized just as she was under Iain’s “spell.” 2) Keep Your Distance: Victoria Skillane is dangerous, and the onlookers should imagine that “she is an escaped lion.” 3) Enjoy Yourselves: this is the “most important rule of all.” Are these rules necessary? Or have these people always been onlookers in the sense required by Victoria’s punishment? From the beginning, haven’t they been silently mesmerized by a spectacle from which they keep their distance, consuming the spectacle of Jemima’s disappearance as “true crime” before changing the channel, as it were, to watch a new reality television show, a new genre located somewhere between court TV and the hunger games? In spellbound silence before the spectacle, they enjoy themselves. They keep their distance and refuse to intervene, but they are still enthusiastic spectators and active revelers. And spectatorship is not incidental to the punishment at the heart of this piece of theater. Rather, the gaze is the punishment.
In exploring the proximity between theater and punishment, “White Bear” certainly highlights the theatrical techniques employed in administering punishments. Staging and framing punishment as a public spectacle lies at the center of its concerns. And yet the episode pushes the proximity of theater and punishment to its limit by exploring what happens when the difference between the two is effaced, when theater wholly becomes punishment and punishment wholly becomes theater. While staging punishments as public spectacles may have once made sense as a vehicle for displaying the power of the state and deterring crime by instilling fear in the spectators, “White Bear” suggests that when theater and punishment become indistinguishable, the theatrical gaze itself becomes an instrument of punishment. When executions and other punishments took place in the public square, watching the condemned criminal suffer was meant to convince the spectator to avoid acting in a way that might cause them to suffer the same fate. In “White Bear,” by contrast, the spectator’s gaze is turned into the instrument of punishment. The onlookers are passive insofar as they refuse to help. And the refusal of human solidarity constitutes an integral part of Victoria Skillane’s suffering. But this suffering is heightened by the fact that the onlookers are not merely passive; rather, they are enthusiastic spectators, active revelers. This fact might prompt us to turn the critical gaze on ourselves as viewers and consumers of spectacle. White Bear is, after all, a justice park, a theater, a reality TV show. And we love it.