What do you get when the lines of reality start to blur in a psychosocial experiment? Really good material for a movie; such as the 2010 thriller “The Experiment” from director Paul Scheuring, starring Adrian Brody and Forest Whitaker. Beyond the initial material of a psychosocial prison experiment gone wrong, “The Experiment” has a lineage of inspiration to reap from.
The instigating, real-life experiment was Philip Zimbardo’s controversial 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo and his research team at Stanford University recruited 24 males to role play prisoners and prison guards for two weeks. This study of human behavior under intense, claustrophobic situations was the source of German author Mario Giordano’s 1999 novel, “Black Box.” An irresistible thriller with low-budget appeal, German director Oliver Hirschbiegel adapted it for the screen in the 2001 film, “Das Experiment.”
In 2002, even the BBC got in on the action, broadcasting a similar documentary, in the vein of reality TV, “The Experiment: the BBC Prison Study.” Now, almost forty years after the original Stanford Prison Experiment, American director Paul Scheuring (“A Man Apart,” “Prison Break”), released his remake, “The Experiment.” With a limited theatrical run (now playing in Denver at the Landmark Mayan theater), “The Experiment” picked up a direct to video deal with Sony Pictures. It’s worth a trip to the theater, or picking up a rental, but perhaps the film’s most fruitful presence will be in Criminal Justice and Psychology courses.
It is the kind of experiment that stimulates controversy and in retrospect intense academic, even informal debate. The findings of the Stanford experiment and the BBC study varied, thus not reaching a consensus on human behavior. Still, the BBC Prison study was included in course work at Oxford and Cambridge University. Perhaps the American remake of the film will provide the cliff notes, or Spark notes if you’re younger than 30, conducive to American classrooms. The research itself falls more towards rhetoric than results, which is tough material to present in a cinematic narrative.
The narrative of Scheuring’s “The Experiment,” is cut and paste, yet still a satisfying introduction to this fascination with prison studies. If one read the original findings from Zimbardo at Stanford, read Black Box, and topped it off with the BBC and Hirschbiegel’s raw cinematic interpretation, the current remake would constitute little more than a shrug. Yet for Scheuring to capture audiences on the tail end of situations like Abu Ghraib, it’s a smart film that lights the candle from the other end.
It is truly only a candle of light shed on the decades of debate, studies, controversy and criticism of the American Prison system alone. There are also the centuries of human brutality, power struggles and primal eruptions society is so often stripped down to. In that respect, “The Experiment” is a barely registered synaptic spark on an EEG screen.
At the same time, “The Experiment” strives to capture this bigger picture with an abstractly disturbing barrage of violent imagery in the opening credits. It is imagery that tells us from the start that this is so much larger than a controlled study gone out of control. It is images that stir a primal reminder that we are nothing more than animals kept in check by pacification and sublimation. The film drills deep into this reptilian core of the brain, showing that when reduced to role of captive and subjugator, slave and ruler, prisoner and guard, survival is the only response.
The film’s symbolic totems may be simplified, yet provide appropriate visual references to cling to while speculating your own identity in such a scenario. Whether prisoner or guard, the film succeeds in forcing its audience to question the possibility of their own violent tendencies, power trips and submissive breakdowns.
Take for instance the clever casting of Forest Whitaker as one of the volunteer subjects, Barris. Whitaker’s Oscar winning role as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland” holds tremendous preparation for his role in “The Experiment.” We also come to know Whitaker’s Barris as a repressed momma’s boy, which in cinematic language can only mean one thing; psycho!
Adrian Brody’s character, Travis, relies heavily on his back-story as a peace activist with a goal of following a bleeding heart lover to India. Of course India is the home to the poster-boy for pacifism, the iconic Mohandas K. Gandhi. Whether or not audiences pick up on these subtle touches of casting and character development, acknowledging them makes the epic clash between these two characters all the more enjoyable, or disturbing.
It is interesting to note that one of the original research subjects at Stanford was a peace activist who joined the study with subversive motives. Perhaps Brody’s character is a nod to this subject, who in the end succumbed to his own identity crises as a prisoner. The most revealing truth behind the film is that the study was cut off after only 6 days. Like some strange religious metaphor for human behavior, the original 24 men could only handle 6 days of the experiment. They were seemingly normal young men, trying to make a buck, who were reduced to primal behavior in less than a week. Though, it is fair to say that anyone with even the slightest Freudian perspective on behavior is not surprised when it takes only moments for the primal scream to consume the cerebral cathedral of illusions we live by.
If you take the findings of the studies and the questions provoked by the films as basis alone for an argument, it’s a wonder why the prison system has lasted for centuries. A necessity in matters of safety and justice perhaps, yet this experiment that plays before our eyes in the film, is an everyday reality for millions of prisoners and guards alike. It may only be the cinematic tactics of a thriller, but it’s almost unbearable to subject your mind to two hours of this behavior. It truly provokes the question of how we manage to undergo this global experiment called society without tearing each other to pieces.
