“Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions”
I just blew my own mind. (I’m quite mentally flexible.)
The “White Bear” episode of Black Mirror is a reference to that Dostoevsky quote. Did you already realize that? Am I being dense?
(Complete episode spoilers follow, but seriously if you haven’t seen the episode yet, what’s wrong with you?)
In the episode, Victoria is hunted and attacked – she is bound, beaten and shot at while people disinterestedly record her suffering on their mobile phones. In the end, it is revealed that this is all her punishment for having assisted her boyfriend in kidnapping and killing a little girl while Victoria recorded it all on her own mobile phone.
In the episode, the society wishes to punish Victoria’s passive violence and callous voyeurism. But in its attempt, they create a theme park where every single visitor is made to be just as callous and sadistically voyeuristic. And, in fact, we viewers are pulled into the cycle, for even as we condemn the brutality of the hunters and the passive observation of the watchers, we keep watching and enjoying the episode. In the end we can choose to either find Victoria’s punishment fitting or brutal, but in either case, we have already committed many of the same crimes (albeit from behind a screen of fiction.) Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror continues to reflect itself even as it reflects us, amplifying and distorting as it does so.
In trying to not think about the white bear, we end up strengthening the idea of the white bear.
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