In the wake of last weekend’s
terrorist attacks in Paris, I was mulling over the events with a friend when
they mentioned the by now ubiquitous Facebook feature which allows users to apply
a flag filter to their profile picture. The feature first came to prominence
earlier this year when, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark marriage
equality decision, users were given the option to superimpose the gay pride
flag over said pictures. Less than 24 hours after the Paris attacks, both my
friend and I saw our feeds become inundated with displays of Francophile
solidarity via the new French flag filter, and while both of us are fairly
agnostic when it comes to such a practice, we’ve also never felt the need to
participate. But just as we reiterated these feelings, my friend decided to
drape their profile picture in the now standard blue, white, and red. They
still didn’t really believe in the practice, but since almost all of their
friends were doing it…
It was a perfect segue into that
night’s screening of Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter,
a wry and incisive examination of the life of controversial social psychologist
Stanley Milgram. Experimenter is a
film that most of you probably won’t see during its theatrical run. It belongs
to that increasingly endangered species of the low to mid-range indie film that
doesn’t traffic in nostalgia or the sentimental narrative. So its commercial chances
outside of major cities are likely to be limited. And that’s a shame, because
it’s quite possibly one of the finest American features of the year, and a work
of art with a strong sense of relevance.
Experimenter belongs, of
course, to that hoariest of filmic genres: the biopic. Even the great films in
this field tend to suffer from the same rote expositional pattern: the
formative experiences that help to shape the protagonist, the rise to glory,
the inevitable conflict and fall from grace, the moment of redemption or
arrival at manageable stasis. That redemptive moment has been especially key in
the modern biopic, which seems to strive for the catharsis that comes with the
sentimental narrative. The death of the commercially viable low budget indie
certainly hasn’t helped; throw any substantial money or star power behind a
biopic and the prospects of a challenging narrative or dark conclusion become a
gamble that most studios shy away from.
It’s these popular strictures
that make what the artistically peripatetic Almereyda does with the form so
interesting. Take the casting of Peter Sarsgaard as the prickly Milgram. Though
he’s dabbled in mainstream fare like Jarhead
and Flightplan, Sarsgaard’s career
path has wound mainly through less commercial films and theater work. There’s a
certain flatness of affect that pervades much of his acting that can be
off-putting at first. It’s what made him so good as the skeptical sourpuss
editor in Shatttered Glass and as the
war-ravaged Troy in Jarhead, but it
also denies the audience the standard frisson that a classic leading man brings
to most biopics, the Seduce and Destroy method as Tom Cruise’s Frank T.J.
Mackey might put it (fellow theater vet Edward Norton also fits into this
category.) In Experimenter, that
flatness gives him a dark, wickedly compelling charisma, his permanent slouch
lending him the air of an observant vulture, his prominent brow and penetrating
eyes creating an almost hypnotic effect as he breaks the fourth wall throughout
the film. He and Almereyda aren’t really concerned with making Milgram that
likeable (at least in a modern sense…more on that later), but the sum total of
the patter he shares with the audience is deeply seductive. You’re being let in
on his secrets, and from the safety of your cushioned seat you can agree that of
course not, you’d never be as easily influenced as the subjects of his
experiments.
But subject you are, like it or
not, because of the shrewd manner in which Almereyda further subverts the
formal aspects of the genre. Once an elephant appears behind Milgram as he lays
out his methods to the audience, you know that this isn’t a narrative overly concerned
with straight definitions of reality. Almereyda has said that he aimed to give
the impression of a film that Milgram might make about his own life, an
approach borne out by the stylistic devices employed as the story progresses.
One of the most formally daring gambits occurs when Milgram and his wife Sasha
(Winona Ryder, in a compelling, subdued turn) visit his mentor Solomon Asch
(Ned Eisenberg). The initial shot of their car ride to his home, with black and
white rear projection of the background, seems to be a sly nod to the film
language of yore (much as Quentin Tarantino did so in the Butch/Esmerelda cab ride
in Pulp Fiction.) But the rest of the
scene plays out in the same manner, with the bulk of the Asch home presented in
similarly flat black and white projected relief. This Brechtian method is
applied in several other scenes; it’s a fitting psychological representation of
a man whose life was dominated by the observational imperative, and whose
emotional life could often seem stunted by an analytical drive.
Though Milgram’s most famous, and
controversial, experiments tested obedience to authority through a staged
series of escalating electrical shocks, his further work expanded out into
other corners of social norms and the herd mentality. One of his later studies
involved the analysis of how a camera could transform from being a passive
observer and recorder of images to an influence on behavior (a thread which
continues to be parsed in the documentary field.) This section of his career is
given relatively brief notice late in the film, but it ultimately serves as the
guiding principle behind Almereyda’s approach, which combines a cool, Kubrickian
formalism with a dry, humorous, playfulness that leavens even some of the
darker moments. When Milgram interviews three female test subjects almost a
year after their participation (in order to determine any long-term trauma they
might have suffered), each professes that she would never consciously perform
the acts she executed during the tests. When they’re offered coffee, the latter
two women follow the first one’s lead when she asks for two sugars, and framed
in staggered close-up, they all sip from their Styrofoam cups at the same time.
For most of the film, DP Ryan
Samul’s camera views Milgram with the same sense of cool rigor that he views
his subject, even as his fourth wall breaking feigns at a sense of intimacy
with the audience (of course, it’s the controlled intimacy of a man speaking to
an audience that isn’t even present.) The psychologist spends much of the
narrative observing others through two-way mirrors or through the psychological
barriers which he erects in his head. When he meets with a CBS executive to
discuss adapting Obedience to Authority
into a Playhouse 90 episode, he’s
finally forced to be the man in the glass box when the exec surreptitiously
abandons him for the day. The suddenly powerless psychologist’s only recourse is
to observe those in the waiting room outside of the clear-walled office, but as
the camera frames him in long shot, the setting that has usually provided him
with security now encloses him in a trap that shuts him off from the rest of
the world.
The appearance of John Leguizamo,
Anton Yelchin, Anthony Edwards, and Dennis Haysbert (among others) in small supporting
roles also enhances the film’s meta-narrative sense of distancing, all while
maintaining a twinge of humor. The scenes of Haysbert (as Ossie Davis) and
Kellan Lutz (as William Shatner) in the melodramatic Playhouse 90 episode, in particular, send the proceedings deep into
the narrative rabbit hole, as Milgram is forced to defend his experimental
methods and philosophy to the vain actor portraying a stylized version of
himself. And, of course, we’re always aware that we’re watching a recreation of
a recreation. Just as we realize that this is a film that, in part, deals with
the camera’s power to influence reality while also subverting reality in its
representation of it, so too does Milgram ultimately end up trapped deep within
a narrative construct in which the boundaries of reality and his self-made fictions
begin to blur. Even the real life dramatic high point of the story (the
mid-class announcement of the Kennedy assassination in Milgram’s Harvard class)
is exploded when the first reaction of two students is that this is just
another one of the doctor’s experiments.
George Orwell’s name is invoked
several times in Experimenter, most
notably in twin commuter rail scenes in which a statuesque blonde is seen first
reading a copy of Animal Farm and
then 1984. Those two classic works on
behavioralism are natural touchstones for a film of this subject matter, but
Almereyda might also have been feinting toward another lesser known Orwell work
with his invocation of the elephant imagery at the beginning and climax of the
film. In his short story/essay “Shooting an Elephant”, Orwell reflects on his
time serving as a police officer in Burma, and how when a rampaging elephant is
finally subdued, he refuses to kill it. But the will of the village’s populace
is too strong, and against his own better instincts he carries out the act. It’s
one of the great critiques of the failures of the British empire, but it also
serves as a timeless reminder of the power of the crowd.
Which, in turn, is why even
though it depicts psychological experiments from over 50 years ago, Experimenter remains a cautionary tale
for our time. Almereyda makes this point explicit in Milgram’s closing
narration from beyond the grave when he notes the repeated efficacy of his
obedience to authority methodology and tests decades later. And in this culture
of the like, in which building and maintaining a personal brand in all matters
and venues often trumps individuality, and where the social media philosophy
emphasizes a common collective response or a harsh collective ostracization,
the film is a reminder that considering the herd mentality to be a stock cliché
is a dangerous underestimation. In 1984,
George Orwell understood that the true malignant power of the surveillance
state wasn’t in the camera eye, but in the self-censorship that formed within
when one knew that they were always being observed. It’s not that far of a jump
from Oceania to the Panopticon to Milgram’s studies to the Stanford Prison
Experiment. We live in a culture explicitly tailored to individual experiences,
tastes, and needs, but too often we’re still looking over our shoulder. Or
pushing that next electroshock button, even though we know that no, we’d never
do that, not us.
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