Victoria, a woman with no memory, wakes up in an unfamiliar bedroom. She does not know who she is or how she arrived to this place. Around her, on the floor, there is a bunch of pills and a TV on with a strange logo on the screen. She goes down to the living room. She does not recognize the objects or the people in the picture frames. She goes out to the backyard, she’s in a suburb, from the windows people record her with their cell phones. She shouts at them that she doesn’t know who she is and asks for help. No one reacts or attempts engage her. The only people who seem to want to interact with her, called hunters, wear masks and try to kill her with all kinds of weaponry. This is the beginning of White Bear, the second episode of the second season of British TV series Black Mirror.

As the episode progresses we learn that the symbol that appeared on the TV is a signal that transforms people into passive voyeurs who only want to witness the world through their cell phones (a gimmick that the episode shares with John Carpenter’s They Live, 9.18). However, Victoria seems to be immune to it. As she flees from her assailants she runs into another woman who is also unaffected and together they decide to go to the White Bear television station, from where the signal is supposedly transmitted, to destroy it. Just as they are about to deactivate the transmitter, it is revealed that everything has happened in a studio called White Bear Justice Park, where a sadistic reality show is filmed to torture criminals. Victoria was tried and found guilty of recording with her cell phone while her boyfriend murdered a girl. Every person she encounters in her misadventure is an actor trained to terrorize her; the people who record her with their cell phones are actually park visitors. Every night after the transmission ends, they erase her memory to start the show anew the next day.

All the traits of the paradeisos converted into a terrible place appear here; the White Bear Justice Park is reality show, hunting park and underworld in a single setting. To begin with we have an enclosed park not unlike Westworld (6.17), in which an act of hunting takes place, however this hunt is not only carried out by means of conventional weapons, a good deal of the harassment comes from the park visitors who assail the victim with their cell phone cameras. We find here a perfect representation of the new type of media hunt that we already addressed with The Truman Show (9.16). On the other hand, aside from the conventional and mediatic hunt, there is the hidden level that only appears at the end of the episode, the park is also a spectacle between a reality show and a zoo (6.7, 6.8, 6.18, 7.17) that exhibits the victim as an animal, an “other” that must be hunted (6.17, 7.20, 7.23). As in many other terrible places we have examined, this situation brings forth an underworld of sorts within the park, which becomes a veritable inferno of persecution and guilt (0.7, 1.2, 3.3.3, 6.4, 6.11, 6.15, 6.17).

Here it is worth noting that the relationship between the voyeur and his victim is firmly grounded in the dynamics of alterity (0.24, 0.26) I have elaborated thus far. The most recent developments in this dynamics reveal the presence of a new type of hunter/voyeur that encompasses both the public as consumers of images as well as the technological and media establishment that enables the capture of these images. The playing field of this new hunter/voyeur is not limited by the physical barriers of a paradeisos (0.3, n. 2)), the borders of the terrible place emerged from the media have become blurred and it is the technological and legal sphere (as in the case of the maquilas and EPZs) that determines its limits.