Which Way the Wind Blows
- By Jim Hicks
On The Stanford Prison Experiment (Part Two)
(Back to Part One)
A cooper, traditionally, made barrels. Also casks, buckets, tubs, butter churns, hogsheads, firkins, tierces, rundlets, puncheons, pipes, tuns, butts, pins, and breakers. Yet cooperage doesn’t end there.
As the psychologist himself understands it, the central thesis of the 1971 Zimbardo study is precisely that the old saw about “bad apples” just doesn’t cut it. For Zimbardo, a former president of the American Psychological Association, evil is a product of “bad barrels”—and he should know, since he’s the cooper. Before running the original Stanford Prison Experiment, every attempt was made to ensure that no participant came into the experiment with either pre-existing psychological trauma or latent sociopathical tendencies. So all good apples. . . all good eggs. You do remember Roberto Benigni, right? In the cell room of the Jim Jarmusch film Down By Law, Benigni puts his arm around fellow prisoners John Lurie and Tom Waits and reassures them, “We are a good egg.” No doubt about it.
But then again. According to a Pew Center poll conducted between September 5 and October 31, 2003 (as reported by Agence France Presse on November 17, 2005), 63% of US citizens believe that torture is sometimes justifiable. (And, yes, the exact dates are important: the poll happened before the release of the photos from Abu Ghraib.) Moreover, only one week before the film version of The Stanford Prison Experiment premiered across the US, the American Psychological Association went public with a 542-page report on its own investigation, detailing the complicity of its members and of the association itself with Bush-era CIA- and Pentagon-engineered prisoner abuse. Teamwork between psychologists and the military no doubt goes, as philosophers like to put it, all the way down. One notorious example is the Korean War-era SERE program: its “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape” procedures were originally designed to teach to teach soldiers how to withstand abusive interrogations, yet it eventually migrated to Guantánamo, and then to Abu Ghraib, and trained interrogators how to torture more effectively. No one knows this better than Zimbardo: he himself writes about it. Even those original six days at Stanford, let’s not forget, were funded by the Navy.
As I read through reviews of the film version of The Stanford Prison Experiment, as well as interviews of those involved in making it, and even the literature, both scientific and popular, on the larger issues it raises, I note throughout an assumption that, to me at least (and, I’m guessing, to most of the rest of the offshore world) will seem simply naïve—though it does have deep roots in US history. So far everyone everywhere seems to assume that any portrait of artificially engineered abuse is by definition also a critique of authoritarian behavior. After all, as the student who will soon become the recent film’s poster child for evil incarnate remarks, in his preliminary interviews, “Nobody like guards.”
Well now, let’s think about that for a minute. Why then would our military fund an experiment like Zimbardo’s in the first place? Why does any military fund any research anywhere? At the risk of oversimplication, let’s note two key goals. First, military research is defense spending; the military must find the best and most effective armor against any and all potential attacks. But they also develop weapons. In backing Zimbardo’s project, what do you think they were after? It isn’t cynical, or anti-American, it’s simply a matter of logic: when they funded that study, they certainly weren’t looking for the universal secret to peace, love, and understanding. Like Zimbardo, they likely had no idea how it would turn out, but I’m pretty sure they were happy with the results. I also suspect that, within a fortnight, plans were made to weaponize the study. As with SERE, the military does want to defend, but it also creates. Plus, does our military ever decide, on it own, to shut down an experiment?
Unlike most films, in The Stanford Prison Experiment there’s something vital at stake. Unlike most films, there might even be policy implications. So let’s return the discussion to where it began. By now it will be clear that I find the choices made in bringing Zimbardo’s experiment to the silver screen deeply troubling. For instance, I disagree absolutely with the director’s suggestion that, until it was made, audiences had only been able to imagine the reality that the experiment captured—that what was needed was something “more experiential.” I’m certainly happy for all the white-picket lives where this may, perhaps, be temporarily true, but I’d wager that, for most of the rest of the planet, authoritarian abuse is far too intimate already. When I saw the film, the violence portrayed had hardly begun when my wife turned to me and whispered, “We know this. We can see where this is going. So why do we have to watch it?” I asked if she wanted to leave, and she said, no, we could stay.
When we discussed it afterwards, we both agreed that the darkened room at the moviehouse was an obvious echo of the room used by Zimbardo and his team at Palo Alto. Except we couldn’t say we didn’t know how it would turn out. I knew, for instance, that the coin toss which decided the fate of the students wasn’t just separating them into their roles as prisoners and guards, it was separating them into victims and aggressors. In the film, after the first time where colleagues ask whether they should step in to stop the violence, Zimbardo responds, “No. Let the guards figure it out. Let’s see where it goes.” And they do, we know they did. So what do we learn from watching it happen all over again? Passivity, or worse? The movie, as we’ve noted, follows the history of the experiment, apparently verbatim.
I wonder whether it is even possible to make a film on this subject that doesn’t fall into the same “bad barrel” trap that Zimbardo designed way back in 1971. For years I used to ask students whether there was any such a thing as an anti-war film, or whether even the most searing critique of war doesn’t, in the end, teach us that war is an exceptional experience, and therefore also exceptionally valuable. For years I also would suggest that perhaps Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket—if we could really understand it as a single film, and not as a double feature (“Basic Training,” followed by “Vietnam, The Movie”)—might truly be an anti-war film. But then a student told me that, yes, FMJ was indeed his father’s favorite film, and his father was a vet who watched only war films. Turns out, though, that dad only watched the first part. Over and over.
So how would you make a film about the Stanford Prison Experiment that doesn’t repeat it, and that instead teaches us how we might stop the abuse it so successfully engenders? Oddly enough, if we can believe what we’ve heard, Kyle Patrick Alvarez might have already made this film, if only he had chosen to film it. What if, in addition to telling his actors and crew that, This wasn’t going to be that set, he had also filmed his set, as it happened, rather than just the experiment? What if we could have seen both at once: the film, but also how the film was made? After all, what the Zimbardo experiment ostensibly teaches us is how easily, and how quickly, just about anyone can turn into an aggressor, or a victim. It does so, however, by forcing its subjects quite literally into a straitjacket. As its premise, the experiment sorts people into three fixed groups: aggressors, victims, and observers. It ends only when these artificial definitions are refused: Those are not prisoners, those are not subjects. Those are boys, and you are harming them.
We do love our spectacle, though. My suggestion here—that the film Alvarez could and should have made is the one that got away—faces an obvious objection. Brechtian rewrites might be good for an art house, but they’re never going to be movie movies. I wonder. In Threepenny Opera, the moment of Mack’s execution still gets me every time, just as the slaughterhouse scene does in Fassbinder’s Year with Thirteen Moons. And who doesn’t fall for that moment in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead where a staged death by stage knife suddenly seems real? If the lesson is that we must choose our roles with care because the parts become us, perhaps we learn better, and go deeper, in those cases where the barrel built is less than dry, less than tight.
One final note. Like Zimbardo, I’ve chosen to study this stuff, so when my wife objected to the film, but then gave in, saying that we could stay, I knew she was right. I also knew that she’d acquiesced only because I’d chosen the film and I’d been looking forward to it. (After all, I’ve dragged her to worse.) In this case, though, she was also wrong; as it happened, I wanted out of there too. We left before the experiment ended its first day. There was no other way out.
