Experimenter—Movie Review

Experimenter

by Peter J. O’Connell

Experimenter. Released: Oct. 2015. Runtime: 98 mins. Rated: PG-13 for thematic material and brief strong language.

In late 1961 and early 1962, residents of the New Haven, Connecticut, area who had answered an ad to take part in a study of memory and learning descended into the lower level of a 19^th-century building at Yale University. There they were instructed by a man in a white coat with a clipboard to teach word associations to an unseen “learner” in another room, whom, they were told, was strapped into a chair and hooked up to device that could provide electric shocks. The device was to be controlled by the volunteer “teacher.”

The teaching method was unconventional. If the strapped-in individual, who could be heard but not seen, gave a wrong answer to the “teacher,” he was to be administered an electric shock. The intensity of the shocks was to be increased, the more wrong answers that the “learner” gave. The “teacher” was told to ignore any of the “learner’s” cries of pain, demands to be set free, or pleas to stop because of damage to health. And, most surprising of all, the “teacher” was told not to be concerned about any ominous silence from the other room after a series of shocks. Results of the experiment: About two-thirds of the “teachers” continued to administer shocks up to the very highest levels despite the cries, demands, pleas from the other room. Many “teachers” expressed reluctance but yielded to that white-coated authority figure in the room with them.

This experiment, known as the “obedience to authority” experiment, or sometimes simply the “Yale experiment,“ is one of the most noted—even notorious—in the history of behavioral science. As soon as it became known, it became controversial and has remained so ever since. You see, both the “learner” and the authority figure were simply confederates of the experimenter. No one was ever actually hooked up to a machine. The cries of pain, etc., were simply acting. Yet the results obtained—the obedience of the two-thirds—were shocking, particularly as the experiment was conducted around the time of the highly publicized trial in Jerusalem of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, with his “just following orders” defense and observer Hannah Arendt’s writings on the “banality of evil.”

The experimenter in the Yale experiment was Stanley Milgram, a young professor of social psychology. The Experimenter, written and directed by Michael Almereyda, is the story of the experiment and some of its consequences for Milgram. Milgram is portrayed (by Peter Sarsgard) as a sensitive individual, but an ivory-tower type who did not foresee that his work would be considered unethical by many because of the type of deception involved and the possible psychological harm to the “teachers,” even though no “learner” was actually physically harmed

Milgram was denied a desired position at Harvard, most likely because of the controversy around the Yale experiment, and eventually ended up at City University of New York. There he conducted several other important experiments, including one that led to his postulating of the concept that everyone in the world might be connected by no more than “six degrees of separation.” Milgram died at a relatively early age but had a happy marriage to his wife, Sasha (Winona Ryder), who manifested a mixture of support and concern about what he was doing.

The performances of Sarsgard and Ryder are fine and the depiction of the obedience experiment is fascinating. Fascinating, too, is the way that director Almereyda gives an “experimental” feel to his film about an experiment by using a number of distancing techniques, what Bertolt Brecht called “alienation effects,” to make us think about such matters as how to distinguish appearance from reality. These techniques include: “breaking of the fourth wall” by having Milgram directly address the audience; use of a variety of film stocks, from full-color to black-and-white to gray to mixtures; use of obvious back projection rather than in-place filming; use of obviously painted or photographed backdrops, a la a play, rather than fully furnished sets; patently fake beards. Most striking of all, in some scenes Milgram wanders down institutional corridors addressing the audience while followed by an elephant. Why? Could it be to suggest that there is the proverbial “800-lb. elephant” in the room that people don’t acknowledge at first? That elephant might be the ethical concerns that emerged when Milgram’s experiment became known, concerns that the experimenter did not envision.

In any case, Milgram’s experiment has provoked thought for years. And Almereyda’s film about it is thought-provoking in both substance and style.

“Footnote” to the film: Earlier this year The Stanford Prison Experiment, a film about another notorious social psychology experiment, had a brief run. Directed by Michael Alvarez and starring Billy Crudup, the movie depicted Prof. Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 experiment of having some Stanford University students go into a mock jail and assume the role of prisoner, while other students assumed the role of guard. Zimbardo had to end the experiment after only six days, instead of 14, because the “guards” –and even Zimbardo himself—began to actually mistreat the “prisoners.” Milgram’s experiment dealt with “obedience to authority.” Zimbardo’s experiment ended up being about “abuse of authority.”