Some films are more depressing than others. They rob you of hope for humanity and the ramification obliterate the rosy view you might have about the way people are and how they behave. We are very inexact entities, hardly well-programmed machines.
This is one of those films that punches home that message.
Dr. Philip Zimbardo's famous experiment has deep ramifications for how we incarcerate people, as well as asks us a deep question as to what we expect from incarcerating criminals. In the experiment, half the students were asked to be prisoners, and another half were asked to be their guards in a role-play of a prison for two weeks. The experiment broke down on the sixth day when the experiment was deemed to have gone too far and students were potentially going to be emotionally damaged form the experience.
The simple takeaway from the experiment is that if you give people roles of persecutors, they find no trouble living up to the roles. Equally if you give victim roles to people, they will find ways to live that experience. One way of looking at it is that the problems of incarceration and the prison system are caused by the very fact that we have human beings running and operating them, and that the same humans are living up to or down to their roles as prescribed by the environment.
Yet, not many people have had a close look at Dr. Zimbardo's experiment and the lessons he has been trying to convey to the world since. As with most things, the closer you inspect what happened, the more we find out how nuanced and delicately poised the suppositions and conclusions sit.
This then, is a Dramatised film that purports to tell us how the experiment went down.
What's Good About It
Oddly enough the best thing in the film might be the period hair styles. As production design for a period film set in 1971 goes, there's not enough to look at to enjoy the journey back to the deep past that is 1971. In that sense the film is not terrible evocative or indicative. It sits more perfunctorily as an observational piece. It's very short on the kind of fetishism that made 'Mad Men' so attractive.
Yet, the film does give us a flavour of the 1971 through the shooting style, colour grade and contrast-y lighting that resembles films shot in that era.
The performances are good except we're too familiar with some of the faces that we can't really get on with the wilful suspension of disbelief.
What's Bad About It
It is in parts somewhat monotonous. Once the students dressed as guards get into their intimidatory and sadistic demeanours and routines, the film quickly gets repetitive. The emotional stakes don't get higher, they sort of sit at an uncomfortable place with very little dynamism.
The film also tries to get some exposition into why Dr. Zimbardo wanted to do the experiment but it is in no way clear as to the thinking that led to that point. The audience can see Dr. Zimbardo's motivation to keep going is strong, but it never gets a satisfactory explanation why that is the case.
The film also has an emotionally stilted quality. We're never really sure as to what we're supposed to be empathising with, and why that is the focus.
What's Interesting About It
I happened to catch the movie in between new episodes of 'Orange Is The New Black'. It's very weird when you spend hours upon hours watching a drama about a prison, and somewhere in the middle you watch a film about the study that tells us that the roles we assign to prison guards necessarily creates the institutional sadism prevalent in the prison systems common to the anglophone world.
In Michael Moore's recent documentary, he travels to Norway to investigate how they do prisons, and it's an entirely different operation. The prisons in Norway are conceived to rehabilitate the prisoner first and foremost, and the prison shown in that documentary. The kind of 'Cool Hand Luke' milieu where prisoners are caged animals or slaves of a corporatised prison system we see in the American media appear completely backward and barbaric next to the Norwegian prisons.
There seems to be a layer in the anglophone culture whereby punishment has to be state institutional torment on a daily basis. When the prison system is 'privatised' as in 'Orange Is The New Black', then the state abrogates its responsibilities and let's some private company take over the task of tormenting prisoners. It's quite perverse how the whole thing is conceived and delivered.
Dr. Zimbardo's experiment then sheds light on at least two problems of the US prison system. Firstly, that it creates conditions of mental illness, and that it supports this ongoing condition of inflicting mental illness because culturally we perceive that's the whole point of criminal incarceration.
Sanity Is Actually Quite Fragile
If you asked Americans in 1971, you would probably get the response that the healthy psyche was quite robust and mental illness was not something that could be created by institutions. This solid belief is indeed what underlies the grand sarcasm of 'Catch-22' - that the US Army knows that anybody who wants to get out of active duty cannot be insane because they can make that judgement that active duty is dangerous to the individual. In other words, real crazy was rare and hard to come by.
What Dr. Zimbardo's experiment showed is that given the power of institutions, it only takes days to break down a healthy person's mind. This aspect was so alarming that it forced Dr. Zimbardo's to prematurely shut down the experiment. Given that we now this today, it seems incredibly morally repugnant that the US government would privatise prisons, worse still allow them to profit from the captive low cost labour these privatised prisons provide. It is an incredible reductio ad absurdum of Neo-Liberal logic that prisons should be privatised but there we have it.
If the state enforced a provision that the private corporations had to ensure the sanity of the inmates, then it would be highly unlikely these corporations would be so interested in running prisons on behalf of the state.
Here's a documentary based the real footage:
And here is a documentary on the Milgram experiment:
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