Black Mirror, and the Thin Veil of Retribution

(Black Mirror episodes “White Bear” and “Black Museum”, credits: Elliot Chan, Radio Times)

(I’d like to preface this with a warning about mentions of crimes against children and discussions of racialized violence. Please proceed with caution.)

What treatment of another human being are we able to tolerate in the name of justice? How much do we need to know about a person’s crime before we unequivocally accept the punishment they receive?

As humans, we tend to enjoy the idea of retribution. We believe someone who has committed an injustice should be punished in likeness. This is a concept that can be seen in even our most basic social practices, like when we berate people of influence on social media platforms for displaying problematic behaviors. Perhaps more prominently, this can be seen in our justice systems here in the United States. In some cases, people believe that those accused of a crime should feel the same pain that their victim did. In others, it serves as a public catharsis, knowing that the populace has unanimously condemned a certain kind of behavior. For most, it is merely an accepted system for which the blame, first and foremost, falls on the individuals who enter it. 

The dystopian anthology series, Black Mirror, explores the boundaries of retribution in an episode called “White Bear”. We open on a terrified woman named Victoria who has no recollection of her past or her current situation, and we watch as masked individuals pursue her for seemingly no reason throughout the episode, and come close to viciously torturing her at multiple points. Other than a few individuals who accompany her temporarily, everyone else who bears witness to her suffering seems to do nothing but watch, and record with cell phones. 

In the latter half of the episode, it is revealed that Victoria was convicted of assisting her boyfriend in kidnapping a young girl, and recording as he tortured and killed her. The events we watched her experience were revealed to be somewhat of a theatrical production meant to simultaneously punish her and entertain an audience by continuously putting her through the same plight that her victim experienced. The spectacle ends with her being forced to watch the film she recorded of her and her late boyfriend’s crime, then having her memory erased for the next day’s production. 

While these events play out, we see how the environment around Victoria capitalizes on her prosecution. It’s never questioned by the participants in the show whether a private organization should be profiting off of someone’s torture, or who it benefits to convince the public that this punishment is justified. They simply accept this grandiose spectacle as an appropriate administration of justice.

(The actors and audience preparing for Victoria’s experience, credit: CBR)

As we watch employees drag Victoria back to her position in front of the TV, while she screams and begs them to simply kill her instead, we as an audience are forced to evaluate our own viewpoint. Do we feel the same sympathy for her knowing her crime? Do we believe what is happening to her is a justified response?

What’s interesting is that Black Mirror explores similar themes in another episode titled “Black Museum”. The episode consists of vignettes related to different artifacts in the titular museum, the last of which was troublingly familiar in concept. It tells the story of Clayton Leigh, a Black man being convicted of a woman’s murder, and how he was deceived into transferring his consciousness into a hologram prior to receiving the death penalty. The corresponding museum artifact was one where visitors could pay to electrocute his conscious hologram to recreate his execution and receive a souvenir of him experiencing the pain. Like Victoria, he was set up in a program that would ensure his eternal torment at the hands of the public as repentance for his crimes.

The only difference is, the episode reveals Clayton was falsely convicted. 

Both of these episodes grapple with the power that the institutional label of ‘criminal’ has in determining the ethical boundaries of how we as a society and a system treat a human being. Obviously, these stories from Black Mirror demonstrate extreme versions of the crime-punishment interaction, where the crimes in question are particularly heinous, and in tandem civilians enthusiastically support and participate in the brutalization of the accused. Realistically, the average American would not necessarily exult in the conditions experienced by the average offender of U.S. law. However, the pretense of retribution still serves as a protective veil that shields us from looking too closely at the way our institutions treat these individuals. 

Presumably, the people in “White Bear” and the people in “Black Museum” operate under the same rationale; the person being punished did something wrong, so what’s happening to them is okay on some level, right? The word ‘criminal’ comes with an unshakable, indiscriminate dubitability that uniquely frames any suffering a ‘criminal’ endures as, at least partially, a product of their own actions. This perceived guarantee of immorality, regardless of the degree, allows us to turn a blind eye to certain levels of cruelty administered by the state. We trust the state-issued label of ‘criminal’ to justify state-sanctioned punishment. But in “Black Museum”, we see how quickly this justification can crumble in the troublingly common instance that the state-issued label for the accused does not align with reality.

These episodes of Black Mirror underscore the danger of allowing the state and privatized institutions to monopolize not only the use of violence but also the conditions under which the use of violence is legitimized. They challenge us to confront the extent to which we are willing to accept violence in the name of upholding laws that we know very well to be historically rooted in hierarchical class structure and systemic racism. What does it mean for us if a historically prejudiced institutional label is an adequate separation between treating someone with empathy and treating someone with cruelty?

Who does it benefit to convince you that these punishments are done in the name of justice?