White Bear and Justice

In class Monday, we watched a very interesting and quite disturbing video entitled “White Bear.” The video began with a woman waking up in a room with pills at her feet and a TV displaying a white symbol sitting before her. The woman is confused and is not sure of who she is. Eventually, she leaves the house and sees people watching her but they won’t speak to her at all. Suddenly, a man wearing a mask pulls up in a blue car, pulls a shot gun from the trunk of the car, and aims the gun at her. The most startlingly thing is that the people around the woman just stand and record the whole incident, refusing to help her in any way. Another shocking aspect of the video occurs toward the end in which it is revealed who the woman is: an accomplice to the murder of a little girl. They then display her in a truck where a crowd screams at her and throws food. Eventually she is placed in the same house she left earlier in the video and must watch a recording she took of a little girl her and her former fiancé are responsible for killing until her memory is erased again. Then she has to relive the whole experience.

            By the end, I realized that the community was basically punishing her in a similar way to what she and her fiancé did to the little girl. However, the question was made in class asking “would what those people in the video did to the woman be considered an act of justice?” I can understand why they feel what they were doing was right because they thought the woman would reap what she sowed as closely as possible without having actually killed her. By erasing her memory, wouldn’t punishing her be immoral because she does not know why she is going through the whole ordeal until the very end? Who knows how long she keeps her memory and knows of what she’s done before the cycle must begin all over again? Can it really be considered a punishment if she has no recollection of her misdeeds until the end? What about the people who are bystanders watching what is happening to her? Doesn’t that make them similar to her in some respect because they stood there and did exactly what she did to the little girl? Why spend all this time, energy, and money to do this to her? What is the purpose of this aside from trying punish her? I have so many questions about this video and would not necessarily consider the actions done to the woman a just act because of how she had to go through it over and over again, and it seems fairly similar to what she did to the little girl—which many would agree is unjust.