The Future is Desensitized

White Bear forces the audience to accept some fairly uncomfortable truths about their feelings: the nature of sympathy and the rage of righteous justice. Playing on familiar tropes, the film establishes an anonymous woman as the apparent survivor of her own suicide in the face of a new grim reality—she’s alone in the world, and missing her daughter. Convention dictates that from this point on, she accepts her new fate, finds new allies, defeats the evil phone signal, finds her daughter, and saves the day.

…right?

Wrong. So very, very wrong. This woman, this fear stricken, near helpless creature we have been signaled by the conventions of post-apocalyptic film to pity, to care for, to worry about, is a criminal. One who stood idly by and allowed the girl we believed her daughter to be cruelly murdered, or so we are told. As the world falls out from under the viewer’s nose, it collapses hers.

We’re asked if we now believe she deserves her punishment, her torture. As a class, we theorized that she may not be guilty, that she may have been abused to forced to participate and suffer the fall for the sake of her unfortunate choice in lovers. Her punishment is too cruel. Her fate so helpless, the justice the society she lives in so clearly feels is lost to us. She’s become a set piece. A doll in a cruel funhouse for patrons to spew their hated and bile upon, not unlike the lynchings of generations past. She’s a criminal, she deserves this, they think. She’s a criminal, by punishing her like this, we’re saving other children. We’re warning criminals—this could be you. In the past, executions were public. The criminal would face the humiliation of society looking down upon them for their choices before ending their life. Today, we deem this inhumane, the death penalty too cruel, that it robs someone a chance to redeem themselves (note: the death penalty has been banned in Britain, for this reason). There is no redemption for this woman. She is damned to this hell with no hope of salvation.

More importantly, she is damned behind a gate, in a park. Once the audience has their fun, watches her suffer, they go back their lives without a care in the world. I feel this aspect could be commentary on the current prison system. We shove our criminals away, hide them, wait for them to die or rejoin the lowest rungs of society. We demonize mental illness, we punish on racial biases. We ignore what is uncomfortable about our world.