The Disappearance of Willie Bingham
The Body Becomes a Sentence Called Justice.
A body horror short film that explores a controversial topic from the death penalty to a punishment called Progressive Amputation. What is really mind-fucked up is how a terrible act turns revenge into a procedure of justice.
Willie Bingham is a convicted murderer and instead of serving a life sentence, he becomes the patient zero for a new form of punishment that involves removing parts of his body, one piece at a time.
What makes this even more disturbing and morally questionable is that the victim’s family gets to decide how far the procedure goes and whether it should continue.
The question isn't only whether they have the right to decide. It's whether a justice system should place that decision in their hands in the first place.
“The Disappearance of Willie Bingham” takes something totally horrific and creates a dark tale of bureaucracy.
The procedures, decisions, and consultations are at the heart of a body horror tale about crime and justice. Its brutality isn’t in the surgeries but in the idea behind them. If the death penalty is at the centre of many moral discussions, like in an episode of “Black Mirror,” here we have to face a different way to dehumanise someone and question the justice system’s right to make such decisions.
Because if someone else gets to decide what happens to your body… then someone else gets to decide whether you should continue living in that condition…. and then someone else gets to ask your family if they want to keep going. Is it really a solution?
“The Disappearance of Willie Bingham” wants to show that punishment doesn't undo the original crime or the victim's loss, and the system seems more interested in finding a socially acceptable form of cruelty than in rehabilitation.
The system wants to use what remains of Willie to show society what happens to people who commit certain crimes. His suffering becomes a public execution that aims to teach a lesson. His body becomes a warning, a spectacle presented as a socially acceptable form of justice.
While watching this short film, I couldn’t stop thinking about “Johnny Got His Gun.” Not because the two films are really talking about the same things—their causes, circumstances and acts couldn’t be more different. One is a war victim kept alive as an experiment… the other one becomes the experiment.
What they have in common is a very uncomfortable question: what happens when someone else gets to decide that a human being should remain alive, even when that person has been stripped of almost everything that makes them a human being?
In “Johnny Got His Gun,” war does this to Joe. In “The Disappearance of Willie Bingham,” the system does it deliberately. And in both cases, the horror isn’t only what has happened to the body. It’s the fact that someone else gets to decide what happens next.
This makes that slowly disappearance even more questionable, without asking you to feel sympathy for him.
Willie’s loss of control over his own body, his life, or even his continued existence might bring relief to the victim’s relatives, but is it really a solution to crime?
The answer is not as easy as it might seem, and this short film does an excellent job of portraying both sides of a crime story. Even when you want to turn your head at times, you can’t stop watching and thinking.
Watch it here:
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