This isn’t exactly a recap, but it contains spoilers.
There are two kinds of episodes of Black Mirror. There are those that are genuinely predictive, whose premises reflect technologies and societal arrangements that might actually exist ten or twenty or fifty years hence. And then there are episodes whose speculative premises aren’t predictive but symbolic, not showing us what might happen but rather presenting us, through the vehicles of dystopian science fiction, a scenario that metaphorically reflects what’s happening right now. In the former category are episodes like “The Entire History of You” and “Be Right Back.” In the latter category are episodes like “Fifteen Million Merits.”
“White Bear”—to date the series’ most terrifying and horrific episode (which is really saying something!)—belongs in that latter category as well. We open on a woman named Victoria waking up in an empty apartment, only to discover that everyone in the world outside has gone completely insane. Everyone she encounters is either hell-bent on killing her, or simply pointing a smartphone at her and watching the madness take place. In a third-act reveal (seriously, spoilers) we learn that the whole thing is a put-on: Victoria is an accomplice in the horrific torture and murder of a little girl, and this is her punishment: to be chased everyday by masked psychos with guns and drills and electric carving knives, while the public is invited to watch and record her torment with their phones in a sort of crime-and-punishment amusement park. Then, each night, her memory is painfully wiped, and the process starts all over again the next day.
This is wickedly effective as horror, but impossible to take seriously as an honest prediction for how the punishment of crimes might take place in the future. The details of Victoria’s crime are horrific—she simply watched and recorded as her boyfriend tortured and murdered a little girl—and it’s not hard to imagine the public working themselves into a lather of hatred for Victoria as a result. But to imagine the judicial process and commitment of state resources that might lead to the construction of an entire self-contained town, and the staging of an elaborate pageant of horror and degradation for the torment of a single condemned criminal and the entertainment of a daily crop of tourists, is a bridge too far. I simply don’t see that something like this could ever happen.
Still, the episode retains a certain metaphorical power. The repetition of certain signs and symbols, for instance—the icon that appears on the TV Victoria wakes up next to, the found picture of a little girl, and the repetition of the words “White Bear,” which both seem to jog something in Victoria’s hazy memory—all invite a semiotic reading of the episode. The symbol on the TV shows up again on the mask of the first man who tries to kill Victoria, and is eventually revealed to be a tattoo that Victoria’s boyfriend had on the back of his neck. Presumably, that tattoo was a constant presence in Victoria’s eyes and in her camera as she recorded the man tormenting their young victim. What the repeated use of these symbols points to is the way that society’s punishment of Victoria’s crime mirrors the crime itself. Victoria and her boyfriend were a torturer and a bystander; in crafting such a cruel and unusual punishment for Victoria, the state has adopted the role of torturer, and put the public in the place of bystander.
But the episode’s core visual metaphor is the one that’s toughest to categorize: the mobs of people running toward Victoria with their phones, staring at her voyeuristically through their individual screens. Where do they fit? The crowds illuminate what I take to be the true topic of “White Bear”: not jurisprudence, but mob anger and violence, and the way that our new technologies enable both.
Charlie Brooker fills the episode with visual callbacks to methods of mob violence past: the tableau of horrors Victoria discovers in the woods recalls both crucifixion and lynching, and at the end the way she’s chained to a chair and paraded through an angry mob hurling rocks and vegetables evoked, for me, a scene of a medieval heretic or witch being brought to the stake for burning. Combine these historical examples of mob “justice” with the crowds of people documenting Victoria’s torment with their smartphones, and you come up with what I believe to be the core insight of the episode: that in a supposedly “civilized” age in which we’ve left performative mob violence behind us, communal Twitter rage (for example) has become the new gallows, the new crucifixion, the new lynch mob.
That’s perhaps putting it a bit strongly, and it’s a tough needle for “White Bear” to thread, but it works because it’s at least partially true: there’s something a little sadistic about our technologies of connection and communication. Teens are cyberbullied to the point of self-harm; women and people of color who dare to speak against injustice are mercilessly trolled and doxxed by those who seek to silence them; and sometimes, even someone who may deserve the mob’s ire suffers out of proportion to their crime. Among the many things Twitter is—some of them good, some bad—one of those is without question a means by which groups large and small can focus their fury on a single unlucky scapegoat.
Though nasty tweets don’t literally inflict physical harm to their intended victim, they still constitute a form of violence. Historical examples of mob violence—witch burning, crucifixion, lynching—enacted the rage and fear of the crowd on the body of the victim; social media mobs enact the mob’s anger on the victim’s mind. To the unlucky souls who become the focus of any online group’s hatred, be it a group of peers at school or the entire #gamergate movement, I imagine that Victoria’s experience is a lot what it feels like: people mercilessly hunting you wherever you are, while hosts of others look on with cruel, voyeuristic delight. For the many, online rage feels great and costs nothing: get angry, lash out, move on. But for an unlucky few, the ubiquity of our technologies becomes a ubiquitous, inescapable torment.
There are three types of people in “White Bear”: tormentors, victims, and bystanders. What’s missing is a fourth type of person: the person who stands between the mob and the victim and says “enough.” As usual Black Mirror is accurate in its diagnosis of a problem, but overly pessimistic in its hope for a solution. In real life, these people exist. In real life, people stand against online harassment and call it for what it is: a great, perhaps the great, moral crisis of the digital age. We need more people like that.
