If an authority figure ordered you to inflict pain on another person, to what extent would you comply? That is the subject of Experimenter, which focuses on Stanley Milgram's controversial obedience experiment. Unable to secure a theatrical run in the UK, writer-director Michael Almereyda’s urgent biographical drama, which had its premiere at Sundance last year, is now available on DVD and for digital download. The movie’s unsettling depiction of our capacity for cruelty makes it essential viewing.
Yale social psychologist Milgram devised the experiment following the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s logistics organiser of the Holocaust. Milgram deceived his volunteer subjects into believing they were administering electric shocks of up to 450 volts to another participant, really an actor, each time the latter answered a question incorrectly. He found that 65 per cent of subjects would continue to deliver the shocks when requested by the controller of the experiment, despite the victim hollering, for example, that he had a heart condition. Like James Marsh's 2011 documentary Project Nim, the film dissects a real experiment that raised a serious debate at the time and is deemed unethical today.
It touches on Milgram's other work, notably his small-world experiment that informed the six degrees of separation concept, but centres on his study of compliance in administering pain. Damningly concluding that ordinary people are merely “puppets with awareness” in his 1974 book on obedience to authority, Milgram asked, “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?” This question, and the terrifying possibilities of what humans would do today under similar circumstances is what fascinated Almereyda.
The softly-spoken Peter Sarsgaard captures Milgram’s charismatic solemnity. In depicting Milgram's brisk courtship of Alexandra “Sasha” Menkin and their subsequent marriage, Almereyda emphasises her awe-inspired support for her husband. Thanks to Winona Ryder’s classy turn, however, Sasha is never diminished as an individual. (Pictured above: Winona Ryder as Sasha.)
In contrast to Almeredya’s modern take on Hamlet (2000), say, Experimenter replicates the ambience of early 1960s TV by periodically setting the action in front of washed-out black-and-white backdrops. Milgram often breaks the fourth wall by telling his story directly to Ryan Samul's camera. He informs us with poignant, beyond-the-grave omniscience: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."
Almereyda doesn't dodge the negative reception to the obedience experiment that led to allegations Milgram was a coercer and torturer. Instead, he turns the one-way mirror back onto the experimenter, skilfully inviting us to consider the motives of a visionary whose work continues to inspire psychologists today.
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