Something that I found interesting about White Bear is its parallels with the Nightmare on Elm Street mythology. Nightmare on Elm Street, for anybody unfamiliar with the franchise, is centered around the residents of a sleepy little town, who mostly live at the eponymous Elm Street. Years before there was a child murderer named Freddy Kreuger who kidnapped, tortured, and is implied to have sexually abused dozens of children. Because of a bureaucratic mistake made during the trial Freddy was able to escape justice. The people of the community decided to take the law into his own hands, and burned down the building Freddy was in, and killed him. After that Freddy goes to hell, but manifests himself in the dreams of the children of the parents that killed him. There, the teens are now older and are attacked at their most vulnerable state, when they're asleep, never really getting a moment of peace or tranquility.
In both films, the inciting incident is the grisly murder and torture of children. In our society whilthere are a lot of taboos that we've been trying to work past, but violence against children is especially transgressive and is seen as the most horrible thing an individual can do. So anyone involved in this is suddenly not due the the civility and justice of the law, and are deserving of the justice of the mob. We didn't see Victoria's crime, we just saw her punishment, similarly, we don't actually see Freddy's crimes, we just hear his story as a kind of ghost story, meant to scare children. If Freddy had been more sympathetic would we have seen him the same way we saw Victoria? A victim of a society's need for a scapegoat? Would Victoria become a scary story to tell the children, "Be good or the White Bear Killer is gonna Get You?".
White Bear and Nightmare on Elm Street parallel each other in many ways , and in some ways complete each other. While White Bear a lot more on the gruesome punishment of the transgressor by the hands of the society, Nightmare on Elm Street focuses on the psychological punishment that the next generation inflict on themselves. Dreams, Movies, and Mythologies are made of the same material, born from the womb of the Human Mind and Imagination. All of these stories that we tell each other, have effects on the mind, and on a larger scale, effects on the society. The teens from Nightmare on Elm Street are dealing with the psychological baggage of what their parents had done years before. Their nightmares are made of the same things as their mythology. So while White Bear is essentially the punishment and cruelty of a society, Nightmare is the aftermath.
What I think is the most valuable lesson or moral of both of these stories combined, is that the people have a responsibility to their society, to get justice out of an unjust world. But when one generation decides to neglect that responsibility or goes to far in their duty, the next generation pays for it, one way or another. Either in their society, or in their minds.
This is an interesting comparison, that at first seemed like a bit of a stretch, but I think you did a good job of drawing the connections with your explanation of "mob justice." It is pretty interesting how the standard of what is okay and what isn't can be established based on the contagious emotion of just a few people. However, It is worth mentioning that unlike Freddy, Victoria obviously did not escape the "justice of the law," nor was she necessarily subject to mob mentality. The mob didn't come up with the idea of shooting pictures, and jeering Victoria, they were directed to do so by the host. This authority figure (as well as the larger authority of the judge who assigned her punishment) is where the difference between Elm street justice and White Bear justice lies.
ReplyDeleteYour observation of the time frame difference between the two stories is pretty astute. I can definitely see how the parts of the story that are shown to us have a huge influence on where are sympathy is directed and who the "bad guy" is. surely if we were only shown Freddy burning and sobbing in Nightmare on Elm Street, we would have a different idea of good and evil, but then again I'm not so sure, taking into account Freddy's direct role in the murder of several children, and Victoria's somewhat indirect involvement of a single child.
Hypothesizing about what future generations of this fictitious society might think about this system of justice is interesting. Would they think it barbaric, or fitting? For all we know they might think that Victoria deserves even worse. I believe the point of this episode is more about what our current society thinks about this form of justice. Either way, you did do a good job of finding previously unexplored aspects of the film.