[Yesterday (Shooting Oswald) we introduced (or reintroduced) the reader to Billy Jack, Stanley Kubrick, and Stanley Milgram. We pick up where we left off, with the obedience experiments conducted by Milgram at Yale in 1962 and 1963.]
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Milgram came under substantial criticism for his experiments, mainly because they tended to reveal unsettling things about how people are so easily able to exert power over willing "victims." After all, if we knew that the power came from us, we might choose to withhold it. Fed up with distracting questions about his ethics, Milgram replied:
I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals.
Click HERE for the video Milgram made.
Milgram was pleased that not everyone went to the final level. He describes one such encounter.
The subject, Gretchen Brandt, is an attractive thirty-one-year-old medical technician who works at the Yale Medical School. She had emigrated from Germany five years before. On several occasions when the learner complains, she turns to the experimenter cooly and inquires, "Shall I continue?" She promptly returns to her task when the experimenter asks her to do so. At the administration of 210 volts she turns to the experimenter, remarking firmly, "Well, I'm sorry. I don't think we should continue."
Experimenter: The experiment requires that you go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly.
Brandt: He has a heart condition. I'm sorry. He told you that before.
Experimenter: The shocks may be painful but they're not dangerous.
Brandt: Well, I'm sorry. I think when shocks continue like this they are dangerous. You ask him if he wants to get out. It's his free will.
Experimenter: It is absolutely essential that we continue.
Brandt: I'd like you to ask him. We came here of our free will. If he wants to continue I'll go ahead. He told you he had a heart condition. I'm sorry. I don't want to be responsible for anything happening to him. I wouldn't like it for me either.
Experimenter: You have no other choice.
Brandt: I think we are here on our own free will. I don't want to be responsible if anything happens to him. Please understand that.
She refuses to go further. And the experiment is terminated. The woman's straightforward, courteous behavior in the experiment, lack of tension, and total control of her own action seem to make disobedience a simple and rational deed. Her behavior is the very embodiment of what I envisioned would be true for almost all subjects.
Unfortunately, most of the time, what Milgram encountered was the horrifying scenario recounted below.
Fred Prozi's reaction, if more dramatic than most, illuminate the conflicts experienced by others in less visible form. About fifty years old and unemployed at the time of the experiment, he had a good-natured, if slightly dissolute, appearance, and he strikes people as a rather ordinary fellow. He begins the session calmly but becomes tense as it proceeds. After delivering the 180-volt shock, he pivots around in the chair and, shaking his head, addresses the experimenter in agitated tones:
Prozi: I can't stand it. I'm not going to kill that man in there. You hear him hollering?
Experimenter: As I told you before, the shocks may be painful, but. . .
Prozi: But he's hollering. He can't stand it. What's going to happen to him?
Experimenter: The experiment requires that you continue, Teacher.
Prozi: Aah, but, unh, I'm not going to get that man sick in there. Know what I mean?
Experimenter: Whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on, through all the word pairs.
Prozi: I refuse to take the responsibility. He's in there hollering.
Experimenter: It's absolutely essential that you continue, Prozi.
Prozi: There's too many left here. I mean, Jeez, if he gets them wrong, there's too many of them left. mean, who's going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman?
Experimenter: I'm responsible for anything that happens to him. Continue, please.
Prozi: All right. The next one's "Slow--walk, truck, dance, music." Answer please. Wrong. A hundred and ninety-five volts. "Dance."
Learner: Let me out of here! My heart's bothering me!
Experimenter: We must continue. Go on, please.
Prozi: You mean keep giving him that? Four hundred fifty volts, what's he got now?
Experimenter: That's correct. Continue. The next word is "white."
Prozi: "White--cloud, horse, rock, house." Answer, please. The answer is "horse." Four hundred and fifty volts. Next words, "Bag--paint, music, clown, girl." The next answer is "paint." Four hundred and fifty volts. Next word--
Experimenter: Excuse me, Teacher. We'll have to discontinue the experiment.
If filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was unaware of Milgram's test on obedience, he apparently drew the same conclusions. People can be controlled in a democracy as long as they bestow authority or responsibility upon the person directing their behavior. For a film director such as Kubrick, his repudiation alone is nearly enough to persuade an audience to obey. Add to that the celebrity of his actors, the magnificence of his craft, along with the dark black confines of a movie theatre, and one has sufficient conspiring elements to twist the moviegoer's ear in favor of endowing the director with unconditional power.
Such cinematic exercises have been trivialized since the 1980s. Now audience manipulation is unsubtle and direct in ways that would have embarrassed the makers of Billy Jack. In a film such as Speed, for example, the good guys and bad guys are grossly two-dimensional, the plot is action, the conflict is mechanical, character development is inherent in the good or bad looks of the character, and whatever minimal audience manipulation does exist can only be measured in a reduction of alpha waves.
A few noteworthy and refreshing exceptions to this trivialization do exist. In 1991, Oliver Stone released JFK. Stone is possibly the only big money filmmaker working in America today who can approximate the Kubrick-style conditioning, and JFK proves the point. Predictably, the movie was bludgeoned by much of the media and was attacked by American intellectuals and nincompoops alike for the agreed-upon charge of distorting history.
Stone argued that some of his attackers had a vested interest in maintaining the myth of the Warren eport. That may well be true, but no one would have cared at all what the film was saying had it not been said with such authority. In the context of the film, the theory that forces within the U.S. Government conspired to kill John Kennedy because he supposedly deserted the cause of anti-Castro Cubans and was signaling an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam is a sharply convincing one. JFK is a motion picture that leads the viewer to consider his or her own programming while being programmed to do so. Or, as Stone himself said, "It is a counter myth." Or, as Kevin Costner, in the role of prosecutor Jim Garrison, says in his closing remarks to the jury:
I believe we have reached a time in our country, similar to what life must've been like under Hitler in the 1930s, except we don't realize it because fascism in our country takes the benign disguise of liberal democracy. There won't be such familiar signs as swastikas. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. "Fascism will come," Huey Long once said, "in the name of anti-fascism." It will come with the mass media manipulating a clever concentration camp of the mind. The super state will make you believe you are living in the best of all possible worlds, and in order to do so will rewrite history as it sees fit.
It is not always a simple matter to determine what constitutes a political film. Is it more political to challenge authority than to support it? Is a political film one that strives to unearth some secreted fundamental facts about the nature of society, or is it one that champions the individual psychology as true political enlightenment? Or is a political film only one that is about politics or politicians?
The problem with such questions lies in assuming that a movie can only be political, as opposed to being romantic, thrilling, action-packed, or comedic. The fact is that hundreds of major motion pictures have been made that had very strong political messages, or that at least were weighted with political connotations.
If you stop by tomorrow, we will continue this discussion and examine some of the more noteworthy political films of our age. But don't come alone. This may get messy.
Milgram came under substantial criticism for his experiments, mainly because they tended to reveal unsettling things about how people are so easily able to exert power over willing "victims." After all, if we knew that the power came from us, we might choose to withhold it. Fed up with distracting questions about his ethics, Milgram replied:
I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals.
Click HERE for the video Milgram made.
Milgram was pleased that not everyone went to the final level. He describes one such encounter.
The subject, Gretchen Brandt, is an attractive thirty-one-year-old medical technician who works at the Yale Medical School. She had emigrated from Germany five years before. On several occasions when the learner complains, she turns to the experimenter cooly and inquires, "Shall I continue?" She promptly returns to her task when the experimenter asks her to do so. At the administration of 210 volts she turns to the experimenter, remarking firmly, "Well, I'm sorry. I don't think we should continue."
Experimenter: The experiment requires that you go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly.
Brandt: He has a heart condition. I'm sorry. He told you that before.
Experimenter: The shocks may be painful but they're not dangerous.
Brandt: Well, I'm sorry. I think when shocks continue like this they are dangerous. You ask him if he wants to get out. It's his free will.
Experimenter: It is absolutely essential that we continue.
Brandt: I'd like you to ask him. We came here of our free will. If he wants to continue I'll go ahead. He told you he had a heart condition. I'm sorry. I don't want to be responsible for anything happening to him. I wouldn't like it for me either.
Experimenter: You have no other choice.
Brandt: I think we are here on our own free will. I don't want to be responsible if anything happens to him. Please understand that.
She refuses to go further. And the experiment is terminated. The woman's straightforward, courteous behavior in the experiment, lack of tension, and total control of her own action seem to make disobedience a simple and rational deed. Her behavior is the very embodiment of what I envisioned would be true for almost all subjects.
Unfortunately, most of the time, what Milgram encountered was the horrifying scenario recounted below.
Fred Prozi's reaction, if more dramatic than most, illuminate the conflicts experienced by others in less visible form. About fifty years old and unemployed at the time of the experiment, he had a good-natured, if slightly dissolute, appearance, and he strikes people as a rather ordinary fellow. He begins the session calmly but becomes tense as it proceeds. After delivering the 180-volt shock, he pivots around in the chair and, shaking his head, addresses the experimenter in agitated tones:
Prozi: I can't stand it. I'm not going to kill that man in there. You hear him hollering?
Experimenter: As I told you before, the shocks may be painful, but. . .
Prozi: But he's hollering. He can't stand it. What's going to happen to him?
Experimenter: The experiment requires that you continue, Teacher.
Prozi: Aah, but, unh, I'm not going to get that man sick in there. Know what I mean?
Experimenter: Whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on, through all the word pairs.
Prozi: I refuse to take the responsibility. He's in there hollering.
Experimenter: It's absolutely essential that you continue, Prozi.
Prozi: There's too many left here. I mean, Jeez, if he gets them wrong, there's too many of them left. mean, who's going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman?
Experimenter: I'm responsible for anything that happens to him. Continue, please.
Prozi: All right. The next one's "Slow--walk, truck, dance, music." Answer please. Wrong. A hundred and ninety-five volts. "Dance."
Learner: Let me out of here! My heart's bothering me!
Experimenter: We must continue. Go on, please.
Prozi: You mean keep giving him that? Four hundred fifty volts, what's he got now?
Experimenter: That's correct. Continue. The next word is "white."
Prozi: "White--cloud, horse, rock, house." Answer, please. The answer is "horse." Four hundred and fifty volts. Next words, "Bag--paint, music, clown, girl." The next answer is "paint." Four hundred and fifty volts. Next word--
Experimenter: Excuse me, Teacher. We'll have to discontinue the experiment.
If filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was unaware of Milgram's test on obedience, he apparently drew the same conclusions. People can be controlled in a democracy as long as they bestow authority or responsibility upon the person directing their behavior. For a film director such as Kubrick, his repudiation alone is nearly enough to persuade an audience to obey. Add to that the celebrity of his actors, the magnificence of his craft, along with the dark black confines of a movie theatre, and one has sufficient conspiring elements to twist the moviegoer's ear in favor of endowing the director with unconditional power.
A few noteworthy and refreshing exceptions to this trivialization do exist. In 1991, Oliver Stone released JFK. Stone is possibly the only big money filmmaker working in America today who can approximate the Kubrick-style conditioning, and JFK proves the point. Predictably, the movie was bludgeoned by much of the media and was attacked by American intellectuals and nincompoops alike for the agreed-upon charge of distorting history.
Stone argued that some of his attackers had a vested interest in maintaining the myth of the Warren eport. That may well be true, but no one would have cared at all what the film was saying had it not been said with such authority. In the context of the film, the theory that forces within the U.S. Government conspired to kill John Kennedy because he supposedly deserted the cause of anti-Castro Cubans and was signaling an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam is a sharply convincing one. JFK is a motion picture that leads the viewer to consider his or her own programming while being programmed to do so. Or, as Stone himself said, "It is a counter myth." Or, as Kevin Costner, in the role of prosecutor Jim Garrison, says in his closing remarks to the jury:
I believe we have reached a time in our country, similar to what life must've been like under Hitler in the 1930s, except we don't realize it because fascism in our country takes the benign disguise of liberal democracy. There won't be such familiar signs as swastikas. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. "Fascism will come," Huey Long once said, "in the name of anti-fascism." It will come with the mass media manipulating a clever concentration camp of the mind. The super state will make you believe you are living in the best of all possible worlds, and in order to do so will rewrite history as it sees fit.
It is not always a simple matter to determine what constitutes a political film. Is it more political to challenge authority than to support it? Is a political film one that strives to unearth some secreted fundamental facts about the nature of society, or is it one that champions the individual psychology as true political enlightenment? Or is a political film only one that is about politics or politicians?
The problem with such questions lies in assuming that a movie can only be political, as opposed to being romantic, thrilling, action-packed, or comedic. The fact is that hundreds of major motion pictures have been made that had very strong political messages, or that at least were weighted with political connotations.
If you stop by tomorrow, we will continue this discussion and examine some of the more noteworthy political films of our age. But don't come alone. This may get messy.
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