The Experimenter

Rabelais

Dagobah Resident
FOTCM Member
This looks like it might be pretty good. I think I'll watch it tonight. A dramatization of the Milgram experiment. IMDB says:

Famed social psychologist Stanley Milgram, in 1961 conducted a series of radical behavior experiments that tested ordinary humans willingness to obey authority.

Director: Michael Almereyda
Writer: Michael Almereyda
Stars: Taryn Manning, Winona Ryder, Lori Singer... etc.

_http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3726704/

Has anyone seen this yet?
 
Rabelais said:
This looks like it might be pretty good. I think I'll watch it tonight. A dramatization of the Milgram experiment. IMDB says:

Famed social psychologist Stanley Milgram, in 1961 conducted a series of radical behavior experiments that tested ordinary humans willingness to obey authority.

Director: Michael Almereyda
Writer: Michael Almereyda
Stars: Taryn Manning, Winona Ryder, Lori Singer... etc.

_http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3726704/

Has anyone seen this yet?

I have not, but I have studied to death those experiments and their surrounding contexts. The Experimenter is mentioned as just one of the latest productions or references to come from Milgram's work. Here's a few more:

It’s (Milgram’s research has) inspired songs by Peter Gabriel (lyrics: “We do what we’re told/We do what we’re told/Told to do”) and Dar Williams (“When I knew it was wrong, I played it just like a game/I pressed the buzzer”); a number of books whose titles make puns out of the word “shocking”; episodes of Law and Order and Bones; a made-for-TV movie with William Shatner; a jewelry collection (bizarrely) from the company Enfants Perdus; and most recently, the biopic The Experimenter, starring Peter Sarsgaard as the title character—and this list is by no means exhaustive.

Source: _http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/electric-schlock-65377
.
In 2011, the filmmaker Eli Roth, best known for the mainstream torture-porn hit Hostel, recreated a version of the Milgram experiments for a Discovery Channel special called How Evil Are You? The year prior, a major French television channel broadcast Le Jeu de la Mort (The Game of Death), which combined an approximation of Milgram’s methods with the trappings of a game show, including a studio audience that egged participants on with cries for punishment. In 2009, the journal American Psychologist ran an article by Jerry M. Burger, a psychologist who claimed to have reproduced Milgram’s results. As it happened, Burger had been put up to his act of scientific replication by ABC News, which funded his research and aired footage of his experiments during “The Science of Evil,” a 2007 episode of its Basic Instincts series pegged to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib.

Source: _http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinking-one-of-psychologys-most-infamous-experiments/384913/

Despite all the so-called supporting replicative studies, if what Gina Perry writes about in her 2013 book Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments means anything, then Milgrams' behavioral experiments deserve even more critical analysis. Personally, I think those studies are less about evil lying dormant or active-but-temporarily-inhibited in ordinary people and also less about Hannah Arendt's "...banality of evil” and more about authoritiarian-follower-or-situational-compliance apologetics and an attempt to diffuse responsibility across the entirety of a population at a time when Political Ponerology might have aimed it squarely at psychos directly responsible for atrocities.
 
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