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On The Stanford Prison Experiment (Part One)

The trailer for the film dramatization of The Stanford Prison Experiment concludes with words from the actor Billy Crudup, who plays the psychologist Philip Zimbardo.  We first see Zimbardo hang down his head, then the film’s title appears, and then there is a shot of a desk in a darkened room where the team of psychologists sat observing their experiment; a small video monitor sits on the desk, its screen filled with a group of five or more students, assigned to the role of either prisoner or guard. A voice-over entones: “I had no idea it would turn out this way.”

So how did it turn out? Any college student who took an introductory psychology course in the last forty-four years should be able to tell you. The actual 1971 experiment at Stanford University was planned to last for a week or two; it ended after six days, when the violence created caused Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who invented the trial, to shut it down. In doing so, the researcher accepted the critique of Dr. Christina Maslach (played by Olivia Thirlby in the film). The movie portrays Maslach—Zimbardo’s then girlfriend and current wife—summing it up bluntly: “Those are not prisoners, those are not subjects. Those are boys and you are harming them.”

Reviews of the film have been largely positive, sometimes glowing:

The New York Times – “Fine ensemble acting brings a notorious psychological study to life in The Stanford Prison Experiment. The research, now forty-four years old, may today seem as if it merely confirmed the obvious, but the film, by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, certainly makes you feel the claustrophobic intensity of what went on.

The Guardian – “Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez deserves all the praise in the world for the way he cranks up this pressure cooker script [. . . .] Alvarez shoots in close-up, allowing you to see the slow shift as these characters begin to slide into their new personas. From the comfort of the audience you can say ‘this would never happen to me,’ but the shooting style sells how the claustrophobia and confusion can so easily lead to a break from reality.”

Variety – “[D]irector Kyle Patrick Alvarez potently conveys the study’s lengthy duration and claustrophobic intensity, making for a viewing experience that is by turns gripping, tedious, and deliberately discomfiting.”

Though negative, a review on RogerEbert.com is the black sheep sibling to those just cited:

“These scenes are supposed to shock the viewer, but they did not work for me, because I just didn’t care [. . . .] Despite the best efforts of the actors on both sides of the law, the film is completely clinical in its depiction, striking the same note for over two hours. It gets real dull, real fast.”

Whether they approve or not, what each of these reviews share is their sense that the movie succeeds in recreating the experiment’s clinical setting. A viewer of the film sits in Zimbardo’s seat. Much like the positive reviews, an interview with screenwriter Tim Talbott also emphasizes the setting, again attributing much of the film’s power to its director:

“I am blown away by what Kyle was able to do. We shot this film in twenty-one days, with all those actors in a confined space. It was the most relaxed film set I have ever been on [. . . .] Always in the back of my mind I was wondering how could a director make this interesting with only a hallway and three classrooms? What can someone do with that?
            Kyle and our DP [Director of Photography], Jas Shelton, made it work. One of the smart choices Kyle made was, once the experiment started, he tried to never leave it. So you get that feeling of isolation and timelessness [. . . .] Once you’re in there you’re in there and [the film] doesn’t let you out of it for most of the running time.”

Perhaps most surprising in this quote is Talbott’s observation about the mood during production. A video interview with Alvarez makes clear that the imaginations of most viewers have tended to run in the other direction:

“The story everyone wants from me is who got really mad at each other, who became like the experiment. You know, I worked really hard with those guys to never let it get to that place [. . . .] I told everyone, This isn’t going to be that set [. . . .] There’s no time [for] that kind of methodology. 
          You know, I kind of forgot how heavy it was while I was making the film until we premiered it. When the movie premiered at Sundance people said,
Wow, that movie was. . . it was like, really hard to sit through. And I was, like, It was? [He laughs.]

As Alvarez himself watched the screening, he tells us, it reminded him of much fun a certain actor was, about how they joked after a particularly emotional scene, or about how, after those brutal push-ups, they fed him food because his arms hurt so much. “Anyway,” he concludes, “you think of the more fun stuff around it.”

            About his own goals in making the film, Alvarez is crystal clear. After all, the experiment had been videotaped; he’s seen the footage. For a film version, however, such recordings will not be enough; Alvarez wants to capture the experience itself:

“If you can make a documentary, why are you going to make a movie? So I went and started watching all the stuff on Stanford, and I felt that there hadn’t been anything yet that had captured [. . .] the emotional fragility of what these kids went through. The intensity of it is something that—until hopefully this film—we’d only been able to imagine, as opposed to actually [. . .] mak[ing] it more experiential.”

Talbott notes that, after the experiment, Dr. Zimbardo followed up repeatedly, bringing his human subjects back in for observation:

“In the aftermath, [he] reconvened them, first every month, then every six months, then every five years, to make sure there was no lasting damage. Everyone turned out to be fine.”

Talbott also tells us that

“For me the most gratifying day of this entire endeavor was the day we finally showed the film to Zimbardo and his wife. They both loved it. They had only a couple of tiny things they wanted to change, but other than that, they were thrilled someone finally got it right. For me, they were the only audience I was worried about. It’s their life and legacy.”

And the psychologists are apparently very happy indeed. Zimbardo himself attended the New York premier, participating in a long and contentious Q&A with the audience, and he has given several interviews where he discusses working closely with Talbott. To Newsweek, he commented:

“I’m very impressed with everything about the movie—the quality of the acting, the writing, the directing especially. And the movie is 99 percent right-on accurate. . . . One of the reasons that the movie is so accurate is I worked with the screenwriter, Tim Talbott [. . .] All of the interactions between prisoners and guards are exactly, word for word, what happened.”

To NoFilmSchool.com, Zimbardo described what he sees as the downside of the IRB procedures required today at all US colleges and universities, whenever research with so-called “human subjects” is done.  

“The problem now is that all human subject committees at universities and other institutions have gotten extremely concerned with [the human rights of test subjects] and don't allow any of this kind of research. When what they could do is give a provisional acceptance — ‘We'll let you do it for an hour, a day, we'll look at the videos and then decide to let you go on.’ But it's all shut down [. . . and] there are so many questions now that will never be answered. What would happen if somebody trained different groups of guards to be more compassionate? What would happen if you had all women? All minorities?”

*          *          *

Let me sum it up. A new film recreates one of the most notorious and influential psychological experiments of the last century. It does so by keeping viewers “in there” for over two hours, with “claustrophobic intensity,” in order to make it “more experiential.” Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who designed the original experiment, is thrilled with this reenactment of his life’s work—in part, no doubt because he wishes that all sorts of variations on his experiments could still be done in laboratories everywhere. A film might just be the next best thing. And the screenwriter—who, by the way, worked on this script for years—describes Zimbardo and his wife as “the only audience [he] was worried about.” After all, “It’s their life and legacy.”

So. At this point, I have a number of questions. It will take another blog post to unpack them further, but I’ll end here by asking them now.

First, as we have known for over forty years, experiments where students play prisoners and guards are apt to turn violent with great speed, and therefore have been judged unethical because of the harm, both physical and psychological, that they inflict on those students. So why should a film where actors play prisoners and guards be any different? (Because the director tells us, “This isn’t going to be that set?”)

Second, given that every Intro to Psych class teaches this stuff, how are we supposed to interpret the last line of that trailer? How many times can we say, I had no idea it would turn out this way, and still expect to be believed?

And, finally, there are those comments by Zimbardo. About the experiments he’d still like to see. All women? All minorities? Compassionate guards? Really? Really? Has the former president of the American Psychological Association somehow been sleeping through the last half-century? During all the cases of gang-rape on our campuses? During all the black lives made into snuff films? During Abu Ghraib? Been there, done that.

I know what you’re saying. And yet no one will seriously deny that the film The Stanford Prison Experiment succeeds in putting its viewer in the seat of Philip Zimbardo, inventor of the Stanford Prison Experiment. And Zimbardo himself agrees that his experiment should have been stopped earlier, probably by day two. So why shouldn’t we stop the film?

(Link to Part Two)

 


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