Does This Unit Have A Soul?

Black Mirror's "Be Right Back" raises interesting questions about the validity of personhood and what exactly makes a person who they are. Despite absorbing all of Ash's public (and some private) memories, he is able to mimic him. He is never able to fully become the man Ash was, but is instead more like a photograph of Ash when he died-- never aging, caught in time, and unable to offer the spectrum of human emotion and interaction to his bereaved wife.

The most interesting point is when Ash's replacement begs for his life. When first asked to jump, he refuses, quoting that Ash had no suicidal tendencies. However, it also brings into question if the unit has any coding for self preservation. Of course, he begs for his life when instructed to, mimicking the emotions that Ash would possibly have, but one does wonder if some truth lies underneath.

Issac Asimov wrote the Three Laws of Robotics in I, Robot and they have been exceptionally influential in the further exploration of robots. They are as follows:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In this short, Ash does explicitly follow these rules, even if they are not quoted. He will not injure another human, even when prompted (perhaps even not if she insisted that Ash hit her in their private life) and he will not destroy himself by jumping off the cliff (perhaps even not if she said Ash had been suicidal in his private life). 

So where does the coding of the unit end and the memories of Ash begin? Is the desire for self-preservation genuine or simulated based upon the memories of the man he's trying to be? 

I believe there's some validity to his claims that he's acting on Ash's previous behavior. His entire purpose is to mimic the man he was in life. It is an act, but not one performed with any malicious intentions. The path laid out for him has hurdles and expectations that he could never possibly achieve, which sets him up for failure. 

Ash's replacement will never question his existence because it's hard coded into him. He will not doubt, but only act upon the parameters (being Ash's life, in this situation) set before him. His personhood is only a snapshot of Ash and while he can be convincing, it is ultimately artificial.

Man minus Person = ?

In John Locke's Of Identity and Diversity, it is explained that the Man is the physical substance, while the Person is explained as the personality that is self-aware within the Man. In Black Mirror's episode, Be Right Back, the Cyber Ash that is present after the actual physical death of Ash is a pure example of a Man without a Person, who therefore is existing (only as a representation), but doesn't have an actual identity. Upon first speaking with him via the initial IMing on the computer, all of his information is known through social media. This information-grab picks up on his personality, but only through certain forums on which he allowed his witty/rude manner of conversation to come through. It then extends further when in order to speak with him on the phone, Margaret must first send hundreds of videos to Cyber Ash, that way he can know how his voice is supposed to sound.

All information that is used to generated this Cyber Ash is available, public knowledge, other than the personal videos that Margaret sent, but either way, this is a completely falsified man built off of information that prior to being exposed to it, he had no knowledge of. According to Locke, being a person is firmly rooted in having a Person - a functioning personality that is based off of a person's experiences and life-events, and if this Ash is only a functioning personality based off of information given to him through social media and Margaret's own personal records of him, then there is no way he can have his own Person.

Locke also says that this person is self-aware, and the Cyber Ash completely disrupts that notion when he is constantly having to be told how to feel by Margaret in order to respond to any situation. Upon trying to be intimate with Ash, Margaret shows him her breasts and proceeds to reach out for his hand so that she can place it on her. Ash's immediate response is to put his hand back down and when Margaret asks why he won't do anything, he responds by saying that there is no public knowledge of his sex life, therefore he can't act upon it the way Ash would. When the sex is finally initiated, he becomes a robot based off of knowledge of porn via porn sites and Margaret is finally allowed to finish first, a harsh comparison to the real Ash's way of pleasuring, where it is shown earlier in the episode that Ash climaxes very early on and then does nothing to help his wife climax afterwards.

Though this Ash may be able to do things that the old Ash couldn't such as having Margaret climax first, in no way do these things make and manifest a Person. Without a Person, a Man is not an actual being, because he has no rational way of thinking, and is completely unaware of his actual self.

Android Ardor?

At this time, I could go to the shadiest side of the internet and download the crappiest glittery mouse mods. I could install Windows 98 onto my mac. I could download the nastiest fake porn virus from some dank forum, upload both and play a 46 hour clip of the Hamster Dance song. These things could damage my computer, could ruin the hard drive forever. 

My computer doesn't care. My computer wouldn't feel it. My computer would not remember, would not retaliate. My computer doesn't feel. 

An argument might be made that my computer, lacking in facial features and a voice with the cords to produce inflection, is not capable of communicating emotion to me, but that failure of independent communication is the key feature of defining and understanding emotion. Human emotion is a combination of three key features--a subjective experience, a physical response (the release of impulses by the amygdala into the autonomic nervous system fostering the increase of blood flow to the brain, eyes, legs, and other necessary organs to facilitate the flight or fight response), and a behavioral response to the aforementioned stimuli. 

The first two are purely objective, but the last is the tricky one. Our bodies cannot disguise the physical response, but we can mask these internal feelings to some extent by drawing on societal conditioning. It is not evolutionarily advantageous to display emotion recklessly. We have learned by survival how to act appropriately, but we cannot force away physiological responses. The pale sheen of sweat produced by fear. The dilation of the pupils and reddening of the cheeks of arousal, the slack, flattened muscles of depression, the trembling of rage. These things can be observed in animals, in feral children, in babies. We can scan the brain and watch the amygdala release impulses into the autonomic nervous system, send electrical impulses to the heart and muscles, to increase blood flow and produce movements that can be recorded and repeated with reapplication of the stimuli. 

A machine cannot do this. A machine does not possess the organs and chemicals to react to stimuli.  A machine will play the Hamster Dance song for hours and hours on end and do nothing. At the moment of this writing, the only way a machine understands proper response to stimuli is if some particularly clever programmers slips in a piece of code that waits for a 45 hour barrage of dancing hamsters and sends out a snippy message.  

In the end, it is this aspect of human interference and the actions of humans upon the programming of a machine that keeps me from believing that Ash is a person.  His responses to Margaret are purely responsive to her input. She puts in a command, a request for comfort, a desire for sex, a wish to leave, and he responds. She demands the performance of emotions and he replies with the generic understanding gleaned from the internet. In these ways, and in three important others, he fails the tests of personhood. 

First, he fails in the human instinct of selfishness. We meet Ash, and while we do not doubt his love for his wife, we are shown that he is a self-centered and careless person. Inthralled by his phone, he fails to notice his wife standing in the rain. He fails to notice that she is inconvenienced by the coffee she has gotten for the both of them. He is prompted in a way that suggests an old argument to put his phone away. He's shown to be a poor lover, finishing well ahead of his wife and not helping her after failing to preform. It's a carelessness we are all guilty of at some point in long term relationships, but from a filmmaker's point of view, these things are important aspects of his flawed human character. The android is servile. He is omnipresent, a perfect servant. He's considerate of her, polite, witty. He doesn't need to eat, sleep, or bathe. He preforms sex using Ash's porn searches for queues-- her surprise at his expertise is clear, and his boners are literally available at the flip of a switch. We see at the end of the film that he has been stationed in the attic with the forgotten possessions of his predecessor's mother. He displays no desire for anything at all.

Next, he fails in a simple test of intuition. I maligned Ash's character above, but we are shown his consideration--he fakes an interest in cheesy disco music, even going so far as to learn the lyrics to his wife's favorite song so he can sing along with her. The android immediately disparages the music, ignorant of Ash's silent considerations and the social more that discourages commenting on other's musical tastes. Margaret takes him to the lover's cliffs, waiting for that expression of intuition. He fails to discern her motives, despite knowing where they were. He cannot comprehend her misery, he can't find the correct act to play until she reveals it to him.  Although we are not shown this, given the calm stationed way he stands in the attic, we can assume he shut the act off as soon as she demanded it of him. 

Speaking of that attic, what is the one defining characteristic of humanity that comes up as a repeating motif across centuries of culture, literature, song, stories? The desire for freedom, for understanding, to believe there is more, to be curious, to adapt and change--to fight the "man" and rebel and live on one's own terms.  That android has been sitting in an attic for about 10 years. Margaret clearly feels no fear in letting her daughter visit him. She's never tried to return him, or destroy him. He's not confined in any way he couldn't escape with a minimal amount of effort. And yet, he stays, unquestioning, a timeline and photobook given voice and form, a shell of the past brought back in the most unnatural fashion.

Media Representation

White Bear smartly opens with a scene of a young woman waking up in an empty house, with multiple televisions, all of which are broadcasting the same eerie symbol with the same creepy static. This is the very first thing the audience experiences in this new world, and it’s indicative of a government surveillance state, a theme closely connected to technology and the abuse of its power. The young woman goes downstairs and finds a room with a single framed photo, a glass of water, a jacket, and a pair of shoes, placed in its spot just so, too precise to be done casually; even the shoes are pointed towards the open back door. This placement of items has been designed to push her out of the house where, as we all know, she will be put through an endless punishment for her involvement in the murder of a young child.

The following scene features crowds of people watching the young woman begging for help, wondering who she is, where she is, and even asking what she’s supposed to do. The end of the film shows us that these crowds are all actors, instructed to use their phones to record her and take pictures of her. They only ever see her through their phone and television screens, where she is watched, recorded, laughed at, and made a fool of. She’s being interacted with on every level except for a human one, and she’s being forced to fit inside the public’s view of her, placed in a world where people who feel like they can get away with anything immediately turn to violence and murder, a world that she’d surely understand.
The most interesting aspect of this film, though, is the fact that she’s the character the audience is meant to sympathize with. We’re seeing this world through her eyes, being watched and recorded and mocked by a silent crowd while she suffers, and at the end of it all we see that this society is set up so that those who mock and record her are the good guys. Their punishment is righteous and justified. The ending of the film really drives the whole point of this film home: through the use of technology and media representation, this woman has been dehumanized. The public sees her as dangerous and vile criminal, the actors in the White Bear Camp view her as a joke, and the people in charge see her as a monster. The only people who ever ask the question if she’s really guilty, if she’s the same person at this point who committed those crimes, if this punishment really fits the crime, if this is truly a just system, is the audience, and that is purely because she has been presented to us as a victim first.
-Lauren Wamble

Who is the true enemy?

At the end of watching “White Bear” many questions came to mind. One being, who is the real enemy in the scenario? We are led to believe that the main character is the victim of some sort of surreal disturbed reality in which the masses have turned into technological zombies who follow scandal and drama around in order to capture it on their cell phones. A reality that obviously is mocking our own, except not as severe. She becomes an unknowing victim of the digital age, of predatory voyeurism, televised torture, which immediately references this cultural addiction and dependency to the satisfaction of technology. Shows like Survivor, Fear Factor, Naked and Afraid, Cops, or even America’s Funniest Home Videos come to mind. Viewers are fixated on the humiliation, pain, or suffering of others. The hunt is entertainment for the masses, in particular, the wealthy and privileged—those who can afford to watch. It seems like an absurd question, of asking in what world would people stand by and watch while others are suffering? And find entertainment in the suffering? This is something that goes back in history. Spectators cannot look away from violence, especially if it doesn’t touch them. It’s human nature to be curious. Those watching on their televisions and smart phones are the same as those who sat in coliseums cheering for the wild animals to devour the gladiator. At the end of the big charade, when we see that the chase is truly a farce; a game that punishes criminals for their crimes in a karmic sort of way; because our “hero” had apparently filmed the murder of an abducted child by her fiancé, she was condemned a life sentence of this perpetual delirium. To refer back to my initial question of who is the real enemy, we discover that the only true innocent character in this story is the murdered little girl. Maybe the question to be asked is does the punishment fit the crime? We discussed in class that because she is not aware of her crime until the end of the miserable torture, and is forced to forget it all and begin again the next day, that she cannot fully understand that she is being punished. This I agree with. This was a very complicated plotline. The fact that the actual murderer, her fiancé, died in custody further complicates the issue. Perhaps he was the true enemy of the story, it being possible that he abused her to the point of her agreeing to be an accomplice to the murder. But he isn’t around to receive punishment, making hers twice as intense.  

An Eye For An Eye

In the disorienting scenes of White Bear, an episode of Black Mirror; a British anthology series created by Charlie Brooker, the audience is led through the storyline in the perspective of a woman with a deficit in memory who has survived an apocalyptic technology overload and must find her own identity as well as escape "The Hunters." As the viewer is swiftly dragged through shocking events of  this new mind dead society the last scenes create an unexpected twist in which the main character, Victoria, is actually suffering a never ending torture constructed by present society to pay for her crimes as the influenced accomplice in a child's murder. 

Victoria is representative of those cast away by society due to her crimes against the innocence and forced to relive a brutal constructed reality, in comparison to the prison systems and social exclusion that occurs in present society. The seemingly mind dead individuals in the constructed society are actually consumers who come to the “White Bear Theme Park” to witness and be apart of Victoria’s downfall and torture. This representation in film is meant to ignite the viewer’s thoughts on how our own society we thrive on the downfall and hatred of others. The news was a large part in the telling of Victoria’s crime in the revealing scenes to show how media influences the society to solicit anger, creating a never ending cycle of disgust towards those who have done wrong. It is human nature to rally together and share emotions rather than rationalize our actions. Although Victoria is guilty of such crimes, the society in the White Bear world should not feel justified in their own crimes against Victoria because with this tortuous form of punishment society becomes worse than Victoria is and ever will be. Charlie Brooker has been known to say “each episode has a different cast, a different setting, even a different reality. But they're all about the way we live now – and the way we might be living in 10 minutes' time if we're clumsy.” With this statement in mind, Charlie Brooker is revealing to us that our own morals and justifications may not always be what is just because it is perpetually and culturally believed to be what is right. An “eye for an eye” punishment has the possibility to be more damaging to those who enforce those rules than those who must live through it. 

Moralities of Punishment

I thought Black Mirror's episode "White Bear" brought several interesting points and things to think about in our day to day lives. After re-watching it to digest a few things, I have a few key points that I'd like to touch on. 

When they put the main character back in her room at the end of the day, my first question was "In this society or place, are there other prisoners who go through this?" Because you have to wonder if this kind of punishment is being implemented with other criminals. Do they each have a punishment related to the crime that they commit? Economically, it does make sense. Instead of costing the taxpayers money, they're making money off of her by charging admission to this "park". Does it morally make sense? It definitely makes the viewer question it. 

Like we discussed in class, I don't think the film would be the same if they hadn't shown her to be a criminal. For me personally, it makes me feel uncomfortable as a viewer to be unsure if I am sympathetic with her or not. I think that feeling that the film gives is really important and really makes you reconsider what you view to be justice versus torture. It definitely reminds me of Hammurabi's code; an eye for an eye. If you steal something, you get your hand cut off. It's an idea that has been in society for hundreds of years. You should get the punishment you deserve, right? I'm still not sure how I feel about it all. It's treated as a fun game to the rest of society. But it runs a similar parallel to how the United States treats their criminals. There's plenty of punishment, but no rehabilitation. Her screams as she watches the movie she filmed while she gets her mind erased are the hardest part for me to watch. The viewer can definitely tell that she's being tortured. But there is literally no way for her to get better. And so she's constantly being subjected to the same torture over and over again. 

Overall I thought it was a really good film though, and makes the viewer reconsider their morals a little bit. Unfortunately, I still have a lot of questions that I know can't be answered, but it's certainly interesting to chew on.

White Bear

White Bear starts off with a woman named Victoria who is very scared, confused and lost. She cannot remember her past or why she just woke up in a room by herself with bandages around her wrists and pills on the floor. The next thing Victoria notices is the symbol on the television screen. While I was watching this scene I automatically thought that Victoria's world is now ran by the government. I began to sympathize with her and feel scared for this character.

When they showed the first person “filming” her with their cell phone, I wondered if maybe she just escaped from prison... The rest of the people in the windows was eerie and started to get interesting. Especially when asking for help and shouting at the people to stop recording her, a man wearing a shirt with the symbol (same symbol she saw on the TV) pulls up in a car, takes out a shotgun, and fires at Victoria. And then the questions started flowing. What did this person do to deserve this type of punishment? How long has this poor girl been cooped up in this place?

Victoria then meets two new people who were not filming her with their phones. Unlike the other people she has run into, these people also talked to her. Then two people called hunters start chasing them. One included a woman in a yellow dress with a rabbit mask and a carving knife. A man showed up and told them to get into the van all while the hunters were chasing them. Once Victoria realized the man in the van was bad news, he pointed the shot gun to her back... told her to walk. Then they showed up at a weird place in the middle of a forest with dead people hanging from trees. All the sudden the weird group of people show up with their phones and start filming her again.. shes screaming and yelling. Long story short, Victoria is in a compound where she is basically tortured mentally and physically, brainwashed to wake up and not remember a single thing.

Aside from the emotionally disturbing, entertaining and interesting story, this episode made me think of the future of technology and how it could potentially run humanity into the ground. Today, we are constantly around our phones. I love my phone. It keeps me connected and in touch with people who are important to me. However, I often think of when the breaking point will be for our society. How bad will it have to get for people to realize that we now live in a day in age where technology is a huge part of our lives. With all of the recent hacking we see on the news these days with Sony and the government it can get overwhelming to think about how big of a disaster technology could bring upon us.

It Wasn't Me

Picture it; Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of a highly detailed illustration of police brutality and corruption. A breakout in storm by the 24/7 news cycle and pundit savvy journalism leaves us all clinging to the point of sensory overload. But even with every major network in the eye of the storm the most realistic view comes from the local lens and social media commentary. Their agenda was not silenced by advertisement dollars or producers; it was real.

No matter which way your opinion leans on the matter a similar view can come from this  episode of Black Mirror. While White Bear may tout the demons of an illusive criminal it also degrades a medium that serves as a burden and a resource. Technology and the internet have created a more connected world in ways that stretch far beyond social media and documentation; we have, literally, brought the corners of our realities together with the click of a button. 

It is the dependence on this that has brought surveillance and ulterior motive under scrutiny. Given the political climate for individual freedom and anonymity White Bear is a visual illustration of the why in an extreme instance. But what would be the case if this wasn’t a sentence of punishment? Is surveillance and study acceptable if it’s not preventative or criminal? And if this isn’t the case what would be an acceptable alternative?

The motive of this opinion isn’t to connect technology and direct surveillance but to try and remove hypocrisy. The technology illustrated in this episode is the result of an advancing society; it is the fringe that misuses it for Orwellian purposes. Cases such as White Bear will continue to happen but that does not mean that is it’s sole purpose. We need this for accountability, especially if truth wants to continue to be part of our realities.

White Bear | Satire

I'm going to continue to insist that White Bear is a satire of contemporary humanity - our state of being and our prison industrial complex. After learning the intention behind naming the show Black Mirror, it's especially clear that Charlie Booker means to create an exaggerated look at what already is. The first thing I noticed to that effect was the crowd of people who we are lead to believe are brainwashed because of a transition in media. These people are active consumers of pain and suffering in their own world. Their callousness is made abundantly clear, which is really a very small difference between this fictional world and our own. 

After it's revealed to the viewer that the entirety of what we've watched has been a reality television show, chronicling the suffering of a woman who was an accessory to a brutal murder, the rest of Booker's metaphor becomes clear. It's unabashedly a prison system designed to create revenue through television and tourism. It could do this as a private company and at no cost to tax payers. This is similar to prisons which already exist in the western world. Turner, the company behind milk and Cartoon Networl, owns some prisons in the USA. 

In White Bear there is a civilization obsessed with pain under the condition that they find someone deserving of suffering. It's not worth arguing that it could be speaking specifically to any European country because it's accurately playing with structural issues that exist in nearly all western countries. It's careful to have a woman of color as the victim of this system, which is also statistically a very real problem. 

To me, it's clear what booker intends the viewer to think and feel from this episode. The problem I think I'm finding is that people are seeing it as too extreme to be relevant today and are therefore writing off the issues it means to discuss. By making entertainment of the cruelty we need to be dealing with in our own lives right now, it seems to actually be nullifying our senses further, as the "machine" would have it.

To believe what we are told

        I sit here scrambling to write a post before five pm, trying desperately not to simply regurgitate another writers perspective of the short White Bear.  I struggle in situations like this to produce an original opinion void of heavy influence from the ideas of others in the conversation. After reading so many opinions of those in our class it became difficult for me to separate my own thoughts from those I agreed with after reading. Rather than restating another's words or writing an opinion I don't fully agree with, I am going to attempt to elaborate upon a point mentioned towards the end of Robert's post.

        In White Bear we are introduced to Victoria, a woman stripped of her memory and identity. Throughout the story this woman is truly unable to form her own thoughts due to the constant onslaught of information both from her surroundings and her slowly recovering broken memory. This could be a statement for the lack of originality we see in our culture today.   In our society we are bombarded with stimulation and ideas  from around the world as soon as we are introduced to mass media.  Even those quick to dismiss the "popular belief" will often fall into another group of ideas that they only half believe.  Although we can generally all probably agree that the mental and physical torture of Victoria was incredibly harsh even if she was indeed guilty of kidnapping and helping  kill a little girl, White Bear shows us what we could be if we continue to allow media to dictate so much of our lives. From massive wartime propaganda campaigns to completely government controlled media, there are plenty of examples of how a large group can be influenced incredibly by a small group with a large voice (or deep pockets). The employees and actors of the White Bear Justice Park are part of the deep pocketed media and and jail system, who have made the twisted amusement of torturing criminals a mundane part of life. The guests of the park and voyeurs of the torture are those willing to accept the ideas and actions of the media and form the "popular opinion". Victoria then, plays the part of the population that questions the information but is forced to believe what she is told by the terrifying world created around her.

Questions I ask

As an audience, we may not truly ever really understand the motif behind the creators’ decisions. “White Bear” has so many different possibilities that even in class; we couldn’t even conclude the many concepts that went into this short film. There seemed to be a ton of questionable scenes and actions that from the beginning of the episode, I felt like something wasn’t right; with the major plot twists, it was kind of improbable to figure out what was going on.

Firstly, I was questioning why the tattoo was used as a symbol. The fiancé’s tattoo, maybe it was conditioning the female to something negative and scary, because the man used it as a mask as well. Then I questioned the motif of the female who helps the protagonist. She was so readily willing to help the girl, but later on in the film, she wasn’t trying to save her, such as the scene in the woods, she was so apathetic and supposedly only came back for her bag.

 As they were escaping, the female with the rabbit mask and the man with the bat started to chase their van and attack it. It was obvious that they weren’t actually trying because the female with the rabbit mask had an electric knife and tried to use it on the metal van. Honestly, it would’ve been smarter to just throw it at a window than try to cut the door. Then the man with the bat was hitting the side of the van, when he could’ve hit the window and breaks it. 

This then leads onto my questioning the White Bear location. If it was such an important place, that held the signals for turning everyone into mindless viewers. Why was there absolutely no one there? The girls just cut the chain and drove right in, and they had a poor sketch of the place, yet knew where the signals were. Why did they place her in the back of a vehicle that had clear sides and people paid to throw wet sponges with red at her? 

These are just questions that I ask, because the creators of the episode could have taken any route that would’ve made us cringe a little. Maybe they did all this purposely to make us feel like something wasn’t right, but because there were so many loopholes; we were confused by it all and that was the point entirely.

White Bear

White bear is a film was basically a metaphor of todays life. It really showed how we all are today. We record every moment of our lives daily on social media and do not even realize it. We record good & bad things. Technology is rapidly taking overWhite bear is a film that was basically a metaphor of todays life. It really showed how we all are today. We record every moment of our daily lives on social media unconsciously . We record good & bad things. Technology is rapidly taking over society. For example; WordStarHipHop.com is a website thats main purpose is for viewing recordings of reckless people. Everyday people  record other people fighting and babies using bad language. Then upload the videos to this site. These videos get millions of views every day. We record every moment because we feel that if we don't, it didn't happen. We have to make sure everyone sees what we are doing every second. But, the fact that everyone is doing it, is making us blind that we are too. We take pictures of every meal we eat, every place we go, and everything else. White bear was really direct with this message and very successful. I do not feel that social media is a bad thing, but i feel that we majority of the time capture and show more attention to the negative things. Technology is also handicapping us from knowing how to communicate with each other in person. Social Media allows you to be perceived as another person that might not be true to who you really are. Overall social media is becoming an addiction. The fact that people are unaware of their surroundings when engaging in social media should show how addictive it is.

Manipulation

One tool I saw being used in the society portrayed in “White Bear” was manipulation, on several levels. On a personal level, Victoria, the main character and woman who was subjected to the harsh punishment, was manipulated by her punishers. Victoria had no recollection of her crime and was tricked throughout the entire journey by people pretending to care about her and help her. By the time she makes it onto the stage, she still is unsure why she’s going through this. A news story detailing her crime begins to play on screen and she see what she has done; however, we know the news is not always truthful and often manipulates peoples’ opinions by skewing reality. Therefore, it is difficult to know how “evil” Victoria really is. How can we as viewers be certain of what happened if the one who took part the crime can not even give her side of the story?

On the other hand there is manipulation happening on a larger scale in their society. For everyone to agree to work together to punish Victoria, there was probably some type of persuasion by higher authority. Just thinking about it, what kind of society is able to get everyone to agree and work together like that? In our society today, we see lots of groups trying to persuade outsiders to follow them. Whether it is a religious group, social group, etc., the facts are rarely presented in total honesty. Sometimes people are pressured into “jumping on the bandwagon” when it comes to their opinions on social issues, just because they believe it will help avoid conflict with others

The episode itself also persuades viewers to think deeper about their own feelings for Victoria. After hearing about the crime she took part in, we wonder how we could still feel sorry for her. For me personally, the savage way she was treated and the way that the audience responded (or didn’t) made me pity her in a way. The makers of the episode probably used these elements to intentionally manipulate viewers into feeling a way that confuses them, by feeling sorry for someone like Victoria, and to make a commentary on the ways that our society is able to manipulate us today.

So many questions.

White Bear seemed to end with quite a few unanswered questions.

In the beginning we are in fear for the main character as she runs for her life and tries to figure out who she is so you feel bad for her because you do not think that she has done anything to deserve this. But at the end, you find out that she has done wrong and that this is her form of punishment. This makes the viewers question what they believe to be right and wrong and if this is truly justice.

Towards the very end of the movie you see the person that is in charge of this whole scheme, in the house that the movie starts out in and he is marking a day off of the calendar with an x. Almost all of the days on the calendar are marked off meaning that the month is almost over. Seeing this, of course, brings about some questions like, why have they continued to do this for so long? They wipe her memory after every time so she can not even remember doing it or going through any of the torture. She realizes at the end of her experience that she has committed a horrible crime and it is obvious she feels remorseful… until they erase her memory again.

The amount of times they do this does not affect her because she has no memory of anything happening. So why are they constantly doing it? She does not realize how many times she has gone through this. Brutally punishing her everyday for however long they plan to, serves no purpose to her anymore and it all becomes solely for the satisfaction of the people. But why would this whole community want to partake in such a crazy thing? It did not directly affect them. The society that she lives in believes that they have reason to do this to her because she did one bad thing, yet they believe it must be inflicted over and over. How much is enough? When will the people that and agree that it is a good idea and are partaking in this, get bored with constantly torturing someone? One would think that if this is happening to this individual that there would be reasons to torment and “punish” other people that have done wrong. Unless this type of “justice” has gone on for so long that this was the last crime committed and people don’t commit crimes in this society anymore. It makes me wonder if anyone could ever do anything so bad that our society today would ever think of doing something like this.

Justice as opposed to...

Torture. When watching Whitebear this particular word came to mind several times, which made me re-examine my personal line between justice and torture.

According to the above definitions, justice refers to reasonable quality treatment and fairness. While torture is a heinous act of inflicting severe pain, force, and mental suffering often for pleasure. They are not related words and one would never lead to another simply because the practices differ so exponentially.
Knowing this, I am see a huge amount of familiar irony watching the community of Whitebear casually call their system a "Justice park" when indeed, it's nothing more than simple sadistic torture. They forced her to repeat each wretched day without cause. They said nothing in the vein of reformation, and quite frankly I'm not even completely sure it was to "pay for her crimes." At the end of each day it was for their own entertainment and they built a fantasyland for both her and themselves. However it affected a much larger audience, the viewers.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Whitebear is how helpless it made me feel. It confused me, left me with many questions and a sense of paranoia. Was I really feeling sorry for an alleged criminal, child killer? Well yes, especially considering the ridiculous circumstances under which she was convicted. Such a large margin of error with the non belief that the boyfriend could've influenced her life so much, when the town itself had the power to brainwash her and take her memories!

In the end,  Whitebear  felt like watching an animal cruelty commercial on eternal repeat. I would not have watched it on my own. I would have avoided it like most of society does with the homeless, weak, and convicted. Initially, I assumed Whitebear would be a comment on social media, with the volunteers who only watched and recorded- not unlike today's society- but at least they were paying attention.

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.

White Bear

So I wrote this on Thursday, but for some reason I thought the deadline was on Sunday, instead of Friday, so I hesitated before posting, to let others go first, making sure I understood the format. Obviously I won't get credit for posting this, but since it was already written, it's no extra work to post it.

White Bear is a film meant to mess with the viewer’s preconceived notions of morality by making an accessory to  a child murder the protagonist. It is easy to sympathize with her because we are introduced to the world through her eyes. She is hurled into the middle of a horror movie plot as a victim. She begins the movie waking up with bandages on her wrists and pills scattered on the ground, so we immediately pity her for attempting suicide. For most of the movie, we assume that this no more than a straight-forward horror story, not meant to do much more than entertain the viewer with spectacle, when in reality, White Bear  flipped this idea on its head, deliberately turning the tables on the viewer and then demanding an answer to the question “How do you feel now?” The truth for me, and likely most other viewers is that by the time the reveal came around we still had overwhelming residual feelings of pity for her, to the point that initially I was even doubting whether or not she was actually responsible for the crime. The following response was that even if she did what they said she did, this was still far too cruel and unusual to be considered “Jusitice.”

    Another important facet of the movie was the complacent nature of all of the spectators, who according to the story in the story fell victim to a kind of zombifying, mind controlling technology related disease. The ironic bit is that the roles they were playing mimicked their willingness to buy into the news program that provided them with self-justification. In the fictional world, the protagonist along with a select few people were immune to this disease, which easily represents people who in our world realize that the media is not always trustworthy. Yet even these people shouted commands in her face while she was trying to think for herself, which ultimately led to her being taken down the wrong path. This can also be compared to the fact that in the real world, people who realize in the real world that not everything is what it appears to be are still vulnerable to modeling their beliefs to others with whom they may share similar opinions. Yet this still constitutes a lack of critical thinking, and can ultimately lead you into thoughts and actions that might not reflect who you really are, also leading you down the “wrong path.”

I'll Just Watch

In White Bear, we follow around a confused and scared woman as she wanders through a brain washed society. People follow her around with their phones and record her every move but do not try to help her when she calls out. Later, we learn the society we have been lead to believe is actually a Justice Park that has turned this woman's punishment into a type of game show. This brings up some interesting points to be made about society. One, the obsession of consuming spectacles and two, assuming someone else will take responsibility of the situation.

Our phones are in our pockets nearly every second of every day. We sleep next to them, we eat with them. It's hard to find a young person who does not have a Facebook, Tumblr, or Instagram now a days. How many times a day do you walk past a group of people huddled around a device watching the newest internet sensation video? Or somethings happens and your first inclination is to snap a picture?

How many of you watched the Kroger video from a few months back? A mob of high schoolers attacking innocent Kroger employees in the parking lot. I did, it was all over Facebook. People still call the big Kroger down Poplar 'Mob Kroger'. But even though a man is bleeding from his head on the ground in the video, it became a kind of joke. People came running from the parking lot with their phones up and ready. They surrounded the man on the ground, no different that the people in the White Bear Justice Park. You hear the girl taking the video say "Someone should call 911."

Someone else. Not me. I'll just watch.

People don't want to have to be the one to take responsibility, they don't want to get involved. It's easier to simply watch and talk about it later, to just be a spectator. In White Bear, during the credits we see the public getting trained to 'play' in the park. They laugh when they are told she believes the park to be the real world. They play the game and enjoy themselves, taking pictures to remember and then they go home and think nothing of it. Similar to how we can watch videos of people being beaten, or even pull out our phones at the first sign of the something to post online. I'm not saying everyone does this, but its hard to deny it's a trend in our society.

Jumping the gun

Can our society be too quick to condemn those who have been pressured into doing malicious activities? In the episode White Bear, the woman who is being held prisoner claimed to be pressured into abducting the little girl and the filming of her murder. Assuming she was actually forced into doing these things, would we still put the blame on her?

It has been known that individuals in the past have been seduced and brainwashed into doing criminal activities. For instance the case of Patty Hearst, the granddaughter William Hearst. She was kidnapped and held prisoner and kept in a closet for weeks by the Symbionese Liberation Army. After all this torture, she was brainwashed into joining them on their crime spree. Eventually she was caught and sent to prison, but later after a lengthy battle with the law, Jimmy Carter himself had her 7 year sentence reduced to 22 months. Later, in 2001, Bill Clinton even gave her a full pardon. This was a very controversial case in the point of who is actually guilty in these crimes. 

This issue that I believe is presented in White Bear, can be held as an example to show how naive the penal system can be sometimes when it comes to discerning criminal intent with mental illness. It also reflects our societies eagerness to condemn others without knowing all the facts first. It is the need for a sense of justice in all of us, whether we know it or not, it will always be there. It is our duty to restrain our feelings from interfering with cases that require reason and remain understanding to each situation, no matter how horrible they might be.