BEFORE: I realize I'm pretty scattered this week, the Ben Kingsley films were up and down, crime films and Hollywood and summer comedy. Today it's a psychological drama about a real college study, and this is another film with a big cast, so it could have fit in many different places - there are links to some of my Halloween films, but this doesn't seem to really belong in October. But I needed to find a link between the Kingsley films and three films with Annette Bening, and this happens to fit that bill quite nicely, with one of tonight's actors carrying over to tomorrow's film with Bening.
Olivia Thirlby carries over from "The Wackness".
THE PLOT: In 1971, twenty-four male students are selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.
AFTER: We all like to think that we would always do the right thing, given the opportunity, (depending, of course, on each person's definition of what is "right") But would we? If we were suddenly in a high-pressure situation would be we able to survive, or would we fall back on mankind's baser instincts, like "kill or be killed"? What if human society is nothing but an invented construct, with our reactions defined for us by the constant battle between "us" and "them" - and who gets to define those terms, anyway?
That was the thinking behind the psychological experiment set up at Stanford University in 1971, where participants were paid the whopping sum of $15 per day to live in a mock prison on campus, with some students given the roles of inmates and others were assigned to guard them. How would they behave - hell, just splitting people into two teams for a schoolyard sport automatically sets up the "us vs. them" mentality, how amplified would that be when one team would be given authority and put in charge of the other?
The experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks, but was shut down after only six days - and several of the prisoners invoked their right to leave the experiment early. The more important question then becomes, why did the others stay? Very quickly, it seems that the "guards", when given authority, resorted to torture-like methods to maintain control, and prisoners either passively accepted the abuse of the guards, or rose up in protest to try and stop it. Which leads one to the conclusion that the very nature of any prison situation is to always be potentially one step away from a riot.
Some have questioned the methods of the study, however - how much control were the guards told to exert? Were several of the guards conducting smaller "experiments" of their own, when given power over the others. Were the participants acting naturally, or were they acting the way they thought the researchers wanted them to? When you incarcerate people and take away their rights, their free will, their ability to tell time, are they more likely to give up, or did they always know that the study was for a limited time, and would eventually end? What happens when you pay students $15 a day plus room and board, are they going to act a certain way just to earn their money?
It seems like everyone involved was just too close to the situation, because you can't really get a true reaction from an incarcerated person if they know, deep down, that it's not really real. (Plus there was no control group in the experiment, there's another problem...) If someone paid you to go live in a prison for 2 weeks, would you do it? How much money would you want for this, or be honest, would you treat this as a sort of vacation? What if someone recruited you to be in the "human" exhibit for an alien zoo, gave you all the food and entertainment you wanted, plus a companion for mating - would you take that offer?
This film was shot in just 21 days, which isn't much longer than the original planned 2-week term for the experiment. I wonder how close working on this film was to being in the real "mock-prison" environment. Probably on the film set they had better snacks.
There's a lot of prominent young actors in this film, and no doubt many of them will appear familiar, even if you can't quite place them at first. I recognized one student right away from his role as a stand-up comic in Showtime's series "I'm Dying Up Here" (he also played Meryl Streep's son in "Music of the Heart"), but of course the actor who plays Cyclops in the "X-Men" films is here, as is the one who played the Flash in "Justice League". I looked up a lot of the actors to see where I knew them from - whoa, that guy played The Mad Hatter on "Gotham"? Your mileage may vary, of course, you may recognize actors from "The Maze Runner" or "The Perks of Being a Wallflower".
Also starring Billy Crudup (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), Michael Angarano (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), Moises Arias (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 3"), Nicholas Braun (last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), Gaius Charles, Keir Gilchrist (last seen in "It's Kind of a Funny Story"), Ki Hong Lee, Thomas Mann (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Ezra Miller (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Logan Miller (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), Tye Sheridan (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Johnny Simmons (last seen in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"), James Wolk, Nelsan Ellis (last seen in "Get on Up"), Matt Bennett, Jesse Carere, Brett Davern, James Frecheville, Miles Heizer (last seen in "Nerve"), Jack Kilmer, Callan McAuliffe, Benedict Samuel (last seen in "The Walk"), Chris Sheffield, Harrison Thomas, Albert Malafronte, Danielle Lauder, Kate Butler, James C. Victor, Jim Klock, Fred Ochs.
RATING: 6 out of 10 strip searches
No comments:
Post a Comment