Indie film Compliance recalls notions that the past decade's worst events are explained by failures to oppose authority.
ne can object to some of its particulars, but Frank Bruni has a quite interesting and incisive New York Times column today about a new independent film called Compliance, which explores the human desire to follow and obey authority.
Based on real-life events
that took place in 2004 at a McDonalds in Kentucky, the film dramatizes
a prank telephone call in which a man posing as a police officer
manipulates a supervisor to abuse an employee with increasing amounts of
cruelty and sadism, ultimately culminating in sexual assault – all by
insisting that the abuse is necessary to aid an official police
investigation into petty crimes.
That particular episode was but one of a series
of similar and almost always-successful hoaxes over the course of at
least 10 years, in which restaurant employees were manipulated into
obeying warped directives from this same man, pretending on the
telephone to be a police officer.
Bruni correctly notes the prime issue raised by all of
this: "How much can people be talked into and how readily will they
defer to an authority figure of sufficient craft and cunning?" That
question was answered 50 years ago by the infamous experiment
conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram, in which an authority figure
in a lab coat instructed participants to deliver what they were told
were increasingly severe electric shocks to someone in another room whom
they could hear but not see. Even as the screams became louder and more
agonizing, two-thirds of the participants were induced fully to comply
by delivering the increased electric shocks.
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