Years ago as I watched my way through Black Mirror for the firs time I remember being struck by the second episode of the first season called “White Bear.” Before writing this I considered rewatching it, but what stuck with me about the show had less to do with the aesthetic minutiae and more to do with the plot twist, which many viewers thought brilliant, but which bothers me more than other similar types of speculative narratives that make us question our empathy, our tendency to make suffering a spectacle, and so on.

For those who don’t remember, the episode is a paranoid romp by a woman, who has lost her memory, through an uncanny and threatening place where people are acting weirdly towards her and some are trying to kill her. The episode builds a narrative of persecution and intrigue only to reveal at the end that these dangers were all a sort of act, that she was, in fact, a vicious murderer, and that she was in the midst of her ongoing punishment/torture: each day she awakes without her memories only to be pursued and attacked for reasons that she cannot understand. People watch this torture as a form of entertainment, and then at day’s end all is revealed to her and her memory is wiped. Harsh to be sure. Or is it? Or rather, how is it?

See, without her memories each day is a fresh terror for the victim/criminal. But without these memories, neither of the crime itself nor the ongoing punishment, there is no cumulative existential horror in play here. She doesn’t wake up with a knowing dread for what’s to come, there is no chance for her to ruminate or lament or rue her past mistakes. The suffering itself is in this way somewhat attenuated, isn’t it? Her torture, brutal as it is, is not punitive, in that it isn’t connected for the offender with her crimes and serves no rehabilitative purpose.

The only purpose her punishment can serve is perverse retribution, and through this possibly as a deterrent to others who may be considering torturing someone to death. In other words, everything that she is deprived of or shielded from because of these daily memory wipes is transmuted into the very prurient thrill that her audience enjoys at her expense. It offers an endless and fresh spectacular suffering in place of dramaturgy or tragedy. The sadism and cruelty is perfect and banal, unremarkable in its purity.

I think about this so-so episode of this hit-or-miss series from time to time, usually when Foucault comes up in my reading or research for obvious reasons. I’ve really been thinking about it lately, though, ever since Luigi Mangione was collared in that remote McDonald’s dining room and later charged with terrorism for the shooting death of a single man.

There is already some analysis kicking around out there about how this charge is precedent for the incoming administration to detain anyone it wants to indefinitely under Patriot Act provisions that make terror charges a class of their own, so to speak. And Ken Klippenstein has done some excellent reporting on the case, demonstrating the bizarre nature of the case, its pomp, its circumstance, from the insane perp walk to the conflict of interest of the judge. There is also the specter that haunts the digital wasteland that spooks are just around the corner of every post someone makes that seems sympathetic to young Luigi, or even that concedes that, if you deprive everyone but the ultra-wealthy any way to exercise political power and saddle them with increasing debt while making services as fundamental as healthcare more and more expensive… well, what did you think would happen? Everyone’s personal online FBI agent may well be adding to their already hefty file, logging their support for terrorism to bring up when you apply for TSA Global Entry or whatever. This is probably also, except in select cases, not a realistic fear. At least, I hope not.

What I am interested in is this: if no one had cared when Luigi allegedly ended that healthcare CEO, would he have been charged with terrorism, or was it the enthusiasm for the act that made his personal vendetta feel salient enough to get the wealthy to consider this shooting an act of terror? Because this is one time that I was in the relative proximity (NYC) of an alleged terrorist attack and I don’t feel at all terrorized. This charge has nothing to do with the crime that was committed and everything to do with what others think of it, and the spectacle has equally little to do with Luigi’s guilt or innocence and instead is an indictment against regular people, against us, presumed guilty or complicit. Ken Kilppenstein says that, for the feds, the enemy is us, and I agree in that when staring into the face of terrorism, we are now to see reflected back not the foreign religious fanatic nor the mentally disturbed lone wolf (read: right wing/white supremacist), either opaque or pathetic, but to see ourselves in our fallen state, too resentful of our masters to muster sympathy for a man who was gunned down just trying to make a few million dollars for his family by sacrificing the very old and the very sick to his insurance company.