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 a guest post from Jeffrey Gower, a brilliant philosopher, dear friend, and VAP in Philosophy at Wabash College. Like me, Jeff also teaches the “White Bear” episode of Black Mirror in his courses, so I invited him to share his thoughts about it in this series. This is a two-parter, so stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow!]
The Black Mirror episode “White Bear” (S2E2) imagines a penal justice system in which punishment and theater converge. As retribution for her crime, Victoria Skillane (Lenora Crichlow) is subjected to the gaze of an enthusiastic throng of onlookers. The public spectacle does not serve a purpose external to the punishment; it is not something added on to the “real” purpose of punishment, and so it differs from an execution whose publicity is meant to deter crime. Instead, for essential reasons that I’ll explore here, Skillane is punished through her subjection to the gaze of others who refuse to intervene as she is rendered helpless and terrorized. In this sense, the justifying rationale for her ordeal bears some resemblance to the use of stocks, a corporeal punishment meant to expose the criminal to public humiliation. After all, toward the end of the episode, spectators throw rotten tomatoes at the transparent carriage transporting her. We might be tempted by this comparison to interpret “White Bear” as anticipating a return to the barbarity of corporeal punishment, and hence as a reversal of the historical transformation analyzed in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish whereby modern punishments recede from the public view and focus increasingly on the soul rather than the body. But it seems to me that the episode does not imagine a high-tech return to pre-Enlightenment barbarity. Rather, it envisions a world in which a technology of the spectacle allows us to apply Enlightenment principles more rigorously and consistently than ever before.
On Foucault’s analysis of pre-Enlightenment systems of punishment, the public execution provided a theatrical stage where the excess that defines sovereign power was put on display through the excessive suffering of the condemned. But the theater of cruelty in “White Bear” does not provide a stage for transforming sovereign power into spectacle. By contrast, it reveals a violence unique to restrained, “humane” systems of punishment – the violence of the spectacle itself. But how does being-seen – being turned into a theatrical spectacle – constitute punishment? Foucault helps us understand how the cruel and inhumane treatment that Skillane is forced to endure might arise from the consistent and rigorous application of rational principles meant to undergird a less severe and more humane system of punishments. Being subjected to the gaze of the onlookers is thus the only punishment that fits her crime.
On Foucault’s account, Enlightenment reformers advocated rational systems of punishment that would maximize the effect of deterring future crime while minimizing costs. The theater of punishment would no longer showcase gratuitous acts of sovereign expenditure unleashed on the body of the condemned, yet theatrical spectacle would not be abandoned. Foucault writes: “what is required is to establish, in the theatre of punishments, a relation that is immediately intelligible to the senses and on which a simple calculation may be based: a sort of reasonable aesthetics of punishment. …The punishment must proceed from the crime” (106). On the one hand, the need for maximal intelligibility requires that this use of the notion that the punishment must fit the crime, that the crime serves as the ultimate measure of the severity and character of the punishment be articulated in universal terms. Tables of general equivalencies could align certain punishments with corresponding types of crime, even though the uniqueness of each crime and each criminal always exceeds the intelligible generality of the law. On the other hand, then, sentences will have to be individualized to more precisely fit the unique circumstances of each crime and the unique subjectivity of each criminal: “Individualization appears as the ultimate aim of a precisely adapted code” (99), which calls for an investment in discovering the “truth” of the criminal – of investigating who the criminal has shown herself to be in committing the crime.
Foucault again: “Let us conceive of places of punishment as a Garden of the Laws that families would visit on Sundays” (111). The “punitive city” of the Enlightenment reformers will consist of “hundreds of tiny theaters of punishment. Each crime will have its law; each criminal his punishment” (113). Toward the end of “White Bear” – indeed, this setting is fully disclosed only after the credits begin to role – we learn that the events we have just witnessed take place in White Bear Justice Park. This institution combines elements of the theme park, the theater, reality television, and a court of law. There is a high value placed on audience participation: the onlookers have a role to play. The name of the justice park indicates that this massive institution has be erected for the sole purpose of applying this particular punishment to this particular criminal. This door to the law has been opened for Victoria Skillane alone.
The structure of the narrative crucially shows why because it reproduces in us, the viewers, the utter disorientation that Skillane experiences upon waking up in a strange apartment with no memory of how she got there or who she is (her name will be withheld until about thirty minutes into the episode). A jarring noise emanates from a television flashing a strange symbol. The only traces of her identity and personal history are two photographs, one picturing Victoria arm in arm with a man, another of a little girl. She emerges, baffled, onto sparsely populated streets and cries out to anyone who might listen, “Do you know who I am? I can’t remember.” Voyeurs watch her from second story windows and, without responding to her plea, take pictures or videos with their phones. A masked hunter gets a shotgun out of the trunk of his car and begins pursuit. Hordes of smartphone wielding spectators follow the hunter as he chases Victoria. They record everything.
The action reads like dystopia. One supposes that there has been some breakdown of the social order that Skillane can’t remember. She only has access to her past through fragmented flashes of memory, and since we are introduced to this world from her perspective we remain in the dark about the nature of her ordeal. When she escapes this initial danger with the help of Jem (Tuppence Middleton), Skillane’s new companion seems to confirm our suspicions. Prompted by the ominous signal flashing on Skillane’s (and every other) television screen, most of the population has been put under some mysterious spell and reduced to “onlookers” – passive spectators of the violence unleashed by the breakdown of the social order – while some people have become “hunters” and others like Victoria and Jem, unaffected by the signal, have become the hunted.
While Victoria and Jem escape the hunters at the convenience store, they eventually need to be rescued by a guy in a van, Baxter (Michael Smiley), who whisks them away just in time. But Baxter turns out to be a hunter, too. He lures the women to the woods with the promise of offering refuge, but instead takes them hostage and forces Jem to aid in binding and hooding Victoria and leading her to an outdoor torture chamber. Baxter takes pleasure in having Jem unhood Victoria at the first moment when his outdoor torture chamber, his theater of cruelty, becomes visible, when the geography of the forest allows for a line of sight from an elevated vantage point looking down into a small valley replete with various roughly hewn devices for causing pain, including crucifixes on which previous victims still hang.
Now, we haven’t yet learned that this whole drama is an elaborately staged punishment. And yet, in retrospect, we can recognize how the visibility of this world has been controlled, for us, in a way similar to how it is meted out to Skillane. Just as she is very gradually introduced throughout the episode to the meaning of her experience as punishment, our view of what is really going on in the justice park is carefully controlled. Baxter takes pleasure in the moment of unhooding because making his theater of cruelty visible at the right moment heightens the punitive effect. Skillane is made to suffer all the more because she is made to anticipate her torture. In fact, we’ll see that her punishment consists mostly if not entirely of this terrorizing anticipation, and not of physical pain. The dynamics of visibility, of revealing and concealing, are strictly controlled both for Skillane and for us, the viewers. The fact that the meaning of Skillane’s suffering as retributive punishment is withheld from the viewer as it is withheld from the convict until late in the episode, and the fact that the name of the justice park is withheld until after the credits start to role, underscore how the episode invites us to think about how theatrical techniques and the optics of punishment reinforce one another.
Jem escapes while Baxter is distracted by a phone call, angering Baxter and prompting him to double his efforts with regard to Skillane’s torture. The onlookers encircle the fallen, desiccated tree trunk to which Baxter has bound his victim as he readies his instruments of torture and describes what he plans to do. Since his staged torture show has been deprived of one of its victims, Baxter insists that Skillane will have to suffer for two, and the description serves to heighten Victoria’s terror as she cries out to the onlookers for help. But “They’re not gonna help you,” Baxter says, “they’re gonna watch.”
Notice the logic of substitution at work here. Since Baxter has been deprived of his second victim, he promises to intensify Skillane’s suffering twofold. And this verdict, this “sentence” has nothing to do with anything she has done. It is a promise of gratuitous violence that only makes sense in a dystopian world without law, where the hunters are invited to prey upon the vulnerable for the entertainment of those who consume the spectacle. Jem has avoided the “punishment” deemed warranted by the justice of this new social order, and the logic of the spectacle, the good show, demands that the violence that would have been directed at her land on another target.
But Skillane will be spared corporeal torture. The substitution is refused. Just as Baxter is about to begin, Jem returns – not out of solidarity, but to retrieve a bag of supplies – and shoots Baxter with the shotgun he’s set aside. Taking Baxter’s van, the two drive to White Bear, a place outside of town where they might be able to interrupt, by sabotage, the signal that has put the population under a spell. Though Skillane experiences flashbacks that give her a bad premonition about White Bear, they continue, with the hunters in hot pursuit. Jem and Skillane set bombs and detonators to destroy the source of the signal, but the hunters catch up and attack. In the final battle, Jem is wounded and Skillane picks up Baxter’s shotgun. Turning it on an attacking hunter, she pulls the trigger and… confetti shoots out! She is so disoriented that she becomes completely docile as the hunters, the wounded and the dead surround her, take her body in hand, sit her down in a chair resembling an electric chair, and bind her to it with manacles. Skillane is blinded by stage lights as curtains open onto an audience assembled in their seats. We realize that this dystopian social order has all been theater, though the revelation occurs not from the point of view of the audience but from the point of view of Skillane and the players, who she has taken up to this point as real people. The meaning of her ordeal as punishment is meted out to her, just as it is meted out to us, in small increments that are strictly controlled.
“It’s time to tell you who you are,” says Baxter, who turns out to be the dramaturge of this theatrical spectacle. In adapting a general table of punishments to the singularity of particular crimes, the theater of punishment fixes the “truth” of the juridical subject through the process of a trial. Since Victoria’s memory has been wiped as an essential part of her punishment, the explicitly theatrical stage of her punishment will need to rehearse certain aspects of the trial.