Susan Granger’s review of “Experimenter” (Magnolia Pictures)
Michael Almereyda’s cinematic portrait of social scientist Stanley Milgram recalls the methodology of his notorious psychology experiment.
As an assistant professor at Yale in 1961, Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) decided to explore the concept of “blind obedience to malevolent authority.”
Colleagues and volunteers were recruited and divided into two groups: the teacher – a.k.a. Experimenter – and the learner. The teacher was given a list of questions to ask, and when the learner’s answer was incorrect, the teacher was to deliver a series of painful electric shocks.
What the teacher didn’t know was that the learner was an integral part of the experiment, that the levers they pushed were phony, the screams faked. While some participants objected, refused and left, a majority of the teachers continued the experiment despite the learners’ agony.
Milgram explains how this turns ordinary people into compliant instruments of the state, as in Nazi Germany, asking: “Could it be that SS official (Adolf) Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?”
That question might also apply to the barbaric prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. As Milgram notes, “Human nature can be studied but not escaped, especially your own.”
In the detached way he delineates Milgram’s character, writer/director Michael Almereyda (“Nadja,” “Hamlet,” “Cymbeline”) demonstrates the ethical dilemma between humanism and clinical objectivity. But the metaphoric scenes in which an elephant literally follows Milgram down a corridor carry the concept to the extreme.
There’s strong support from Winona Ryder, as Milgram’s wife, along with John Leguizamo, Anthony Edwards, Jim Gaffigan, Dennis Haysbert, Kellan Lutz, Josh Hamilton and Anton Yelchin.
FYI: Stanley Milgram went from Yale to Harvard to City College of New York, enjoying some celebrity in the 1970s when his book was published; he died of a heart attack in 1984.
Unfortunately, another similar film “The Stanford Prison Experiment” came out earlier this year and it’s even more disturbing than Stanley Milgram’s Obedience study.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Experimenter” is a provocative, stylized 6, concluding that, while people can be turned into puppets, we still have free will.
