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And perhaps our awareness is the first step in our liberation
I have a coat! It is a green corduroy coat, essentially of the style of my late lamented green corduroy jacket; it came slightly too large in key directions and was tailored beautifully for me by Jack Papazian, whom David the projectionist introduced me to. It is warm and well-fitting and it has nearly enough pockets. I wore it when I went out to see a movie with my parents tonight. I will try not to say too much about it; it's not that there are any great twists to the story, at least not if you know anything about the history of social psychology or atrocity, but I do have to sleep. I didn't last night.
It is true that Experimenter: The Stanley Milgram Story (2015) is not a conventional biopic. It is also true that when one of your benchmarks for biography on film is Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993), a movie is going to need more than an elephant and some rear projection to impress you. Fortunately, that's where the intelligent script, the solid acting, and the playful structure come in. For about five minutes, Experimenter looks like the usual mimetic kind of biography. It's 1961, Yale University, and two middle-aged men are being ushered into a neutrally toned room with some chairs and a small table with some electrical apparatus set up in front of a pane of one-way glass. The brisk-voiced experimenter in the grey lab coat explains the rules: one participant will be randomly selected as the teacher, the other will be assigned the role of the learner, a list of word pairs has been provided to both; the learner will hear the list once and then be tested on it, multiple-choice style. Right answers will be rewarded with the next question. Wrong answers will be rewarded by electric shocks of increasing voltage. The cheery, blustery learner is shown his seat on the other side of the partition, the electrode paste and the contacts that will deliver the jolts—which will cause "no permanent tissue damage," the experimenter reassures the apprehensive teacher. And a light, blunt male voice says conversationally out of nowhere, like a commentary track: "The lab coat. I decided to make it grey. White would seem too medical." The experimenter goes on explaining the procedure; the narrator quotes Kierkegaard. The teacher is requested to experience a small shock himself, just to give an idea of the discomfort he may be obliged to inflict. Gingerly, he extends his arm and the narrator's voice quickens: "This part . . ." It belongs to Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), a dark-haired man sitting behind the mirror with a notebook and a pen and a Styrofoam cup of coffee; he turns away from the glass wall and looks right through the fourth one. "This part's where the experiment really begins."
From here on, all bets on realism and even linearity are off. It's not that the film is wildly impressionistic so much as it insists on its own artificiality, never allowing the audience to buy into the reassuring worldbuilding of period clothing and well-researched technology, historical names dropped at the right moments, an accurately dreadful beard or a Bronx accent brushed up with Ivy League. Some sets are real interiors and exteriors, others are done with rear projection and still photography, supplying a theatrical air to a dinner party or a conversation while driving. The elephant, conversely, is quite real. Her name's Minnie. She enters the room first to underline Milgram's Jewishness and the question of Nazi Germany, the mysterious ease with which ordinary "civilized" people become participants in genocide. Later she seems to stand for the obedience experiment itself, whose controversial reputation follows Milgram so faithfully that when he attempts to break the news of Kennedy's assassination to his class at Harvard, they laugh at what they perceive as a particularly clumsy manipulation—"It's Milgram. It's just another one of his experiments." The same T-junction hallway serves for Yale, Harvard, and CUNY, just dressed a little differently each time. "Some Enchanted Evening" recurs diegetically as both a love theme and rueful self-mockery: "Fools give you reasons, wise men never try . . ." Milgram talks to the camera throughout, like Rod Serling playing Vergil through the Twilight Zone or a magician deconstructing a trick in hopes that his audience won't be fooled a second time. Scenes wrap around others like fragmentary frame-stories, while Milgram enacts his life and comments on it, always keeping the audience in a loop of information to which even his family and colleagues are not entirely privy. He alludes to events that haven't happened yet, even ones he will not survive to see. (The timeline of the movie runs from 1961 through 1984, the year of Milgram's death, and into the present day when the crew of Experimenter reenacted the crowd crystal experiment on a New York City street.) The effect is correctly distancing, reminding the viewer of the permeable distinction Milgram draws between deception and illusion when defending his theatrical methods: "Illusion can set the stage for revelation, to reveal certain difficult-to-get-at truths." We're being shown behind the curtain, the use of Milgram-as-narrator implies. But we're not watching a documentary; we're not watching a real person tell us about their life. Didn't we see that black-and-white blow-up of a dining room with real chairs placed in front of it, real people sitting in them with drinks in hand like actors on a stage? What's being revealed? What aren't we seeing? What stories don't we even realize we're being told, accepting them as automatically as we assume a person in a lab coat with a clipboard has a good reason for asking one test subject to deliver an ostensibly fatal shock to another? By the end of the film, the audience has become so sensitized to mentions of obedience to authority and social pressure and conformity that when one character says casually, "Everybody's doing it," it flashes out at us like a neon sign. If we leave that awareness in the theater, however, and go back to the unquestioned conditioning of our lives, I suspect Michael Almereyda's own experiment will have failed. Then again, Milgram was told he'd find one person in a thousand who complied up to the final 450 volts. 65% of his subjects went all the way. A re-run of the experiment in 2006 yielded nearly identical results. We're really slow at this deprogramming thing.
The internet informs me that I have seen Peter Sarsgaard before in Shattered Glass (2003) and Kinsey (2004); I didn't recognize him and I will watch for him now. His Milgram is an ambiguous, sympathetic, oddly comic figure—relentlessly inquisitive, a dead serious prankster nonplussed at the firestorm his research provokes. He has a director's eye and a showman's instincts, but his body language is all very closed off and his most common expression is a kind of quizzically exasperated deadpan. He makes more eye contact with the camera than with anyone else in the film, unless it's his wife Sasha (Winona Ryder, very good in a role that mostly works by implication) and his children. He cannot be read easily by either the audience or the other characters, most of whom treat his straight face as an opportunity to project their own accusations or apologetics onto him; the film gives very little instruction if any of their interpretations are correct. He's surprised and distressed by the obedience results, but even more so to find himself accused personally and professionally of unethical behavior—torture, petty power games—forced to re-explain his famous experiment to everyone from review boards to strangers in the street. (He's asked almost as often about his last name; he answers first that it means "pomegranate—one of the seven fruits of the Bible" and then that it means that he's Jewish, which is what people really want to know. Sarsgaard himself is not Jewish, a fact which seems wryly lampshaded by the subplot dealing with The Tenth Level, the 1976 CBS TV movie which used Milgram's experiments as a "springboard" for the highly colored story of Professor Stephen Turner—"a bachelor," the married Milgram notes dryly, "and a WASP," played in real life by the Jewish William Shatner, because that is the kind of rabbit hole metafiction falls down into.) He watches Candid Camera with Sasha and admits to the audience that it was an inspiration. He's not resigned to it, but accepts that all of his other work, whether on conformity or connection, will always exist in the shadow of that first, sensational study. I hope it's true that his last words were the ones the film gives him. His widow and children and at least one grandchild participated in the making of Experimenter, which gives me hope.
I think I have honestly lost the ability to write briefly about anything. I recommend this movie; I especially recommend seeing it with and/or while being a psychologist, as my mother the second-generation clinical psychologist who did her graduate work at CUNY enjoyed it greatly and found all references to Solomon Asch hilarious. I have no idea if Almereyda ever saw Wittgenstein, but it's my only other point of comparison for fourth-wall-breaking biographies that mine unexpected absurd humor out of downer subject material and unconventionally endearing protagonists. This revelation brought to you by my intelligent backers at Patreon.
It is true that Experimenter: The Stanley Milgram Story (2015) is not a conventional biopic. It is also true that when one of your benchmarks for biography on film is Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993), a movie is going to need more than an elephant and some rear projection to impress you. Fortunately, that's where the intelligent script, the solid acting, and the playful structure come in. For about five minutes, Experimenter looks like the usual mimetic kind of biography. It's 1961, Yale University, and two middle-aged men are being ushered into a neutrally toned room with some chairs and a small table with some electrical apparatus set up in front of a pane of one-way glass. The brisk-voiced experimenter in the grey lab coat explains the rules: one participant will be randomly selected as the teacher, the other will be assigned the role of the learner, a list of word pairs has been provided to both; the learner will hear the list once and then be tested on it, multiple-choice style. Right answers will be rewarded with the next question. Wrong answers will be rewarded by electric shocks of increasing voltage. The cheery, blustery learner is shown his seat on the other side of the partition, the electrode paste and the contacts that will deliver the jolts—which will cause "no permanent tissue damage," the experimenter reassures the apprehensive teacher. And a light, blunt male voice says conversationally out of nowhere, like a commentary track: "The lab coat. I decided to make it grey. White would seem too medical." The experimenter goes on explaining the procedure; the narrator quotes Kierkegaard. The teacher is requested to experience a small shock himself, just to give an idea of the discomfort he may be obliged to inflict. Gingerly, he extends his arm and the narrator's voice quickens: "This part . . ." It belongs to Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), a dark-haired man sitting behind the mirror with a notebook and a pen and a Styrofoam cup of coffee; he turns away from the glass wall and looks right through the fourth one. "This part's where the experiment really begins."
From here on, all bets on realism and even linearity are off. It's not that the film is wildly impressionistic so much as it insists on its own artificiality, never allowing the audience to buy into the reassuring worldbuilding of period clothing and well-researched technology, historical names dropped at the right moments, an accurately dreadful beard or a Bronx accent brushed up with Ivy League. Some sets are real interiors and exteriors, others are done with rear projection and still photography, supplying a theatrical air to a dinner party or a conversation while driving. The elephant, conversely, is quite real. Her name's Minnie. She enters the room first to underline Milgram's Jewishness and the question of Nazi Germany, the mysterious ease with which ordinary "civilized" people become participants in genocide. Later she seems to stand for the obedience experiment itself, whose controversial reputation follows Milgram so faithfully that when he attempts to break the news of Kennedy's assassination to his class at Harvard, they laugh at what they perceive as a particularly clumsy manipulation—"It's Milgram. It's just another one of his experiments." The same T-junction hallway serves for Yale, Harvard, and CUNY, just dressed a little differently each time. "Some Enchanted Evening" recurs diegetically as both a love theme and rueful self-mockery: "Fools give you reasons, wise men never try . . ." Milgram talks to the camera throughout, like Rod Serling playing Vergil through the Twilight Zone or a magician deconstructing a trick in hopes that his audience won't be fooled a second time. Scenes wrap around others like fragmentary frame-stories, while Milgram enacts his life and comments on it, always keeping the audience in a loop of information to which even his family and colleagues are not entirely privy. He alludes to events that haven't happened yet, even ones he will not survive to see. (The timeline of the movie runs from 1961 through 1984, the year of Milgram's death, and into the present day when the crew of Experimenter reenacted the crowd crystal experiment on a New York City street.) The effect is correctly distancing, reminding the viewer of the permeable distinction Milgram draws between deception and illusion when defending his theatrical methods: "Illusion can set the stage for revelation, to reveal certain difficult-to-get-at truths." We're being shown behind the curtain, the use of Milgram-as-narrator implies. But we're not watching a documentary; we're not watching a real person tell us about their life. Didn't we see that black-and-white blow-up of a dining room with real chairs placed in front of it, real people sitting in them with drinks in hand like actors on a stage? What's being revealed? What aren't we seeing? What stories don't we even realize we're being told, accepting them as automatically as we assume a person in a lab coat with a clipboard has a good reason for asking one test subject to deliver an ostensibly fatal shock to another? By the end of the film, the audience has become so sensitized to mentions of obedience to authority and social pressure and conformity that when one character says casually, "Everybody's doing it," it flashes out at us like a neon sign. If we leave that awareness in the theater, however, and go back to the unquestioned conditioning of our lives, I suspect Michael Almereyda's own experiment will have failed. Then again, Milgram was told he'd find one person in a thousand who complied up to the final 450 volts. 65% of his subjects went all the way. A re-run of the experiment in 2006 yielded nearly identical results. We're really slow at this deprogramming thing.
The internet informs me that I have seen Peter Sarsgaard before in Shattered Glass (2003) and Kinsey (2004); I didn't recognize him and I will watch for him now. His Milgram is an ambiguous, sympathetic, oddly comic figure—relentlessly inquisitive, a dead serious prankster nonplussed at the firestorm his research provokes. He has a director's eye and a showman's instincts, but his body language is all very closed off and his most common expression is a kind of quizzically exasperated deadpan. He makes more eye contact with the camera than with anyone else in the film, unless it's his wife Sasha (Winona Ryder, very good in a role that mostly works by implication) and his children. He cannot be read easily by either the audience or the other characters, most of whom treat his straight face as an opportunity to project their own accusations or apologetics onto him; the film gives very little instruction if any of their interpretations are correct. He's surprised and distressed by the obedience results, but even more so to find himself accused personally and professionally of unethical behavior—torture, petty power games—forced to re-explain his famous experiment to everyone from review boards to strangers in the street. (He's asked almost as often about his last name; he answers first that it means "pomegranate—one of the seven fruits of the Bible" and then that it means that he's Jewish, which is what people really want to know. Sarsgaard himself is not Jewish, a fact which seems wryly lampshaded by the subplot dealing with The Tenth Level, the 1976 CBS TV movie which used Milgram's experiments as a "springboard" for the highly colored story of Professor Stephen Turner—"a bachelor," the married Milgram notes dryly, "and a WASP," played in real life by the Jewish William Shatner, because that is the kind of rabbit hole metafiction falls down into.) He watches Candid Camera with Sasha and admits to the audience that it was an inspiration. He's not resigned to it, but accepts that all of his other work, whether on conformity or connection, will always exist in the shadow of that first, sensational study. I hope it's true that his last words were the ones the film gives him. His widow and children and at least one grandchild participated in the making of Experimenter, which gives me hope.
I think I have honestly lost the ability to write briefly about anything. I recommend this movie; I especially recommend seeing it with and/or while being a psychologist, as my mother the second-generation clinical psychologist who did her graduate work at CUNY enjoyed it greatly and found all references to Solomon Asch hilarious. I have no idea if Almereyda ever saw Wittgenstein, but it's my only other point of comparison for fourth-wall-breaking biographies that mine unexpected absurd humor out of downer subject material and unconventionally endearing protagonists. This revelation brought to you by my intelligent backers at Patreon.
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(Also I love reading your lengthy film essays.)
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I haven't seen any of the films you name! Talk to me about them?
(Also I love reading your lengthy film essays.)
Thank you.
[edit] I had to come back to this post for reasons and was reminded that I would still like to hear you tell me about An Education.
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Yes! This one makes me feel like myself.
Thank you!
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Wear it in good health.
Nine
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Thank you! You will see it often.
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Thank you. I wore it to the marathon today, so it's got a good start in life.
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I hope I can find that film in a local theater.
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Thank you!
I hope I can find that film in a local theater.
There's a list of participating theaters and dates here, if that helps!
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(nee Naomi Achs) is Jewish. Maggie Gyllenhaal (Peter's wife, Naomi's daughter) said in an interview that her upbringing was culturally Jewish, not religious, so I don't suppose the Sargaard-Gyllenhaal household is religious either.
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I think it is irrelevant to the question of a Jewish character played by a non-Jewish actor, common as the practice is, but it's neat to know!
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It sounds like it does interesting things, cinematographically, but the topic makes it not for me. I'm very glad to have read your review of it, though.
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You're very welcome. If it makes a difference to your interest in the movie, my parents were prepared to find it upsetting because of the subject matter and instead both of them walked away talking animatedly about Milgram, his life, his research (the film includes several other projects of his, some famous—six degrees of separation—some not at all), and various structural and directorial choices on the part of the film. We really enjoyed it.
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That makes the movie seem a little more possible, but my abhorrence of psychological experiments is pretty huge.
That's fair. In case it was the particulars of the Milgram experiment, I thought I would make sure.
(While its conclusions continue to be unsettling, Milgram's obedience experiment bothers me less as a piece of research than the Stanford prison experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo, partly because I find Milgram a more ethical researcher than Zimbardo, who participated in the same abusive power dynamics he had designed the experiment to study. Its results are irreproducible by any ethical standards, in great part because of Zimbardo's non-neutrality in running the simulated prison. There is a scene in Experimenter in which Milgram describes a few of the modifications he made to the original experiment, all designed to make it harder for the teacher to continue to obey—allowing the learner to bang on the wall in apparent desperation, requiring the teacher to hold the learner's hand to a copper plate—physical contact, not just impersonal button-pressing—in order to deliver the shock, even moving the experiment out of the prestigious orbit of Yale entirely. It doesn't seem to matter. People remain willing to crank up the voltage just because an authority figure in a lab coat instructs them to. Milgram is flabbergasted, depressed, and fascinated. It isn't what he thought would happen. He knows how to hack basic human social conditioning to create compliance with atrocity; he has no idea how to make it go the other way. To be fair, everyone after him is still trying to figure that one out.)
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He is trapped in the microcosm horror he's created. "The only way to win is not to play." I don't mean this as a criticism of him in particular; it's the notion of creating little mini instantiations of evil/cruelty/whatever we want to call it in order to study that phenomenon. I just think it's too dangerous. Harm is done not only to the participants (both groups), but to him as a researcher, to everyone who normalizes this, to society at large. We have plenty of forensic evidence for anything we need to investigate in this regard--Hannah Arendt learned plenty about people following orders without ever inducing a person to harm another.
I have tried to work out for myself whether it's just psychological experiments into nasty behavior that I find abhorrent or psychological experiments more generally, and I think it's more general. I think I just don't feel it's a good (in both utilitarian and ethical senses) way to learn about the human mind. Harm comes from even inane experiments, the assumptions behind them can be hurtful, and the extrapolations drawn from them can be hurtful.
Maybe the film raises, at least tacitly, this as an issue. I guess by giving me a reason to try to articulate my feelings, it's been valuable to me.
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I disagree, but I do not want you to feel further argued with. I have deleted the remainder of my comment.
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It's not self-indulgent to have a conversation! You don't need to apologize! I just realized that I had written four hundred words of disagreement and I did not want to make you feel I was just shouting at you.
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I didn't send it to you; I deleted it halfway through. I can get very easily caught up in arguments which I find intellectually interesting and as a result I have had few, but memorable instances of arguing past the emotional tolerance of the person on the other side. Given that you had earlier expressed discomfort with the subject of the film, I did not want this to be the case here.
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. . . I suppose I could reconstruct those four hundred words if you wanted.
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