The Stanford Prison Experiment | Little White Lies

The Stan­ford Prison Experiment

10 Jun 2016 / Released: 10 Jun 2016

Group of men in prison uniforms and one person in civilian clothing standing in a hallway.
Group of men in prison uniforms and one person in civilian clothing standing in a hallway.
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Anticipation.

A 2015 Sundance holdover finally makes its way to Europe.

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Enjoyment.

Everyone plays their part well, but it's hard to see the point of this exercise.

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In Retrospect.

Boys will be boys.

A robust dra­mat­ic ren­der­ing of the 1971 psy­cho­log­i­cal exper­i­ment con­duct­ed in a Uni­ver­si­ty basement.

Deep down inside us, right down there in the very depths of our black souls, there’s a shit-kick­ing fas­cist boot-boy just strug­gling to break free. So says the Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment, a psy­cho­log­i­cal study under­tak­en by pro­fes­sor Philip Zim­bar­do in the sum­mer of 1971, in which he paid 24 male stu­dents to enact a fan­ta­sy prison sce­nario in which 12 were giv­en the role of guard, and the oth­er 12 were detainees. Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s film offers a sim­ple, method­i­cal depic­tion of how the exper­i­ment played out.

Like any sci­en­tif­ic study worth its salt, attempts were made by Zim­bar­do (here played by Bil­ly Crudup) to make every­thing as even and real as pos­si­ble. Cam­eras were built into the walls, allow­ing the aca­d­e­m­ic over­seers to mon­i­tor and record the results, but only from select van­tages. What’s sur­pris­ing about the study is how quick­ly every­thing goes bad. Know­ing that they’d been placed with­in a dra­mat­ic, arti­fi­cial sce­nario, many of the par­tic­i­pants allowed their unchecked ids to run wild, and vio­lence took over on day one.

While the exper­i­ment itself left much to rake over, Alvarez’s film has less going for it. There’s some­thing inher­ent­ly coun­ter­pro­duc­tive about the idea of fic­tion­al­is­ing some­thing like this, the process itself serv­ing to both dilute the results and to impose anoth­er lay­er of arti­fice to the already del­i­cate frame­work. The entire point of this exper­i­ment is that it was real peo­ple act­ing via impulse, and react­ing to the bizarre set of con­di­tions into which they had all been placed. What we have here is actors pre­tend­ing to be impul­sive, which rais­es its own set of ques­tions, none of which have any­thing to do with the core aims of the experiment.

Alvarez choses to focus on two per­son­al­i­ties that nat­u­ral­ly come to the fore: Ezra Miller’s Daniel Culp (aka Pris­on­er 8612) and Michael Angarano’s Christo­pher Archer, a guard who decides for rea­sons unex­plained to mod­el him­self on John Wayne. Culp ini­tial­ly remains con­fi­dent that the the­atri­cal nature of the exper­i­ment will ensure his safe­ty, while Archer trans­forms into some­one who is adamant that the pris­on­ers” accept this as reality.

The film draws its own con­clu­sions, sug­gest­ing that every­one involved didn’t real­ly have any idea what they were doing and that eth­i­cal lines were crossed on an almost minute-by-minute basis. There’s no real dra­mat­ic arc to the sto­ry, so Alvarez ramps up a series of small­er ten­sion points and set-pieces. Yet, the film runs out of steam by about the half way mark, where mat­ters have unequiv­o­cal­ly passed through the gates of Hell.

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