You may have seen the black-and-white footage, shot on the Yale University campus in May 1962. A middle-aged man sits at an electrical console, posing memory-recall questions to someone strapped into a chair in the next room and administering electric shocks for each wrong answer. As the shocks get worse and worse—150 volts, 165 volts, 180 volts—the victim complains, shouting that he has a heart condition and demanding to be let out. The man at the console protests to the researcher offscreen, but the researcher offers to take responsibility and orders him to continue. Again and again the man reluctantly raises the voltage—420 volts, 435 volts, 450 volts—even after his victim has fallen ominously silent. Subjects in the experiment, conducted over several months by social psychologist Stanley Milgram, were told it was a study of how punishment affects learning, but the whole electroshock drama was a hoax, the victim an actor. What Milgram really wanted to learn was how people can be conditioned to commit barbarous acts.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is more of an ensemble piece than Experimenter, which makes it a more piercing lesson in social psychology. Billy Crudup contributes a mesmerizing performance as professor Philip Zimbardo, who recruited 24 male students to spend two weeks role-playing as prisoners and guards in a basement wing of the psychology building at Stanford. But the action shifts from Zimbardo and his staff to the guards to the prisoners, the college kids played by an able cast that includes Michael Angarano, Ezra Miller, and Tye Sheridan. Angarano is particularly good as Christopher Archer, who adopts the southern drawl of Strother Martin (the boss man in Cool Hand Luke) to play the captain of the guards. Nicknamed John Wayne by the prisoners, he fosters an atmosphere of casual intimidation and playful torture, putting the prisoners through an endless regimen of tests, calisthenics, and other punishments. The guards are prohibited from assaulting the prisoners, but after only a day that line has been crossed. “Let’s see where it goes,” says Zimbardo as the experiment begins its gradual decline into chaos.
Directed by Michael Almereyda
The Stanford Prison Experiment ★★★
Directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez
