The Stanford Prison Experiment is the Best Movie You Missed Out On
I first learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment during a psychology class I took senior year of high school. The concept was simple: Philip Zimbardo, a professor at Stanford University in 1971, had conducted an experiment in which he and his team selected a group of 24 male students to participate in a prison simulation. The experiment was meant to explore the effects of deindividualization and disorientation on the human mind. It was also meant to explore the concept of authority; whether a student was selected to be a prisoner or a guard was completely at random, a decision that was made by the flip of a coin.
I just want to point out before we go deeper into this that Philip Zimbardo also narrated several very old videos that we used in the class, and his videos were always super cheesy and he seemed super creepy. Have you ever seen those ’90s videos where everyone has feathered hair and shoulder pads, and they’re demonstrating something like sexual harassment in the workplace or a brand-new concept called online dating? Yeah, it’s like that. Same production value.
So I didn’t take him very seriously.
But as you can expect, the experiment began to fall apart within one day. Turns out when you give people a baton and a uniform, they start to take advantage of the situation and take it way too seriously. The two-week experiment was abruptly terminated after six days due to the level of emotional, mental, and even physical abuse the guards had exhibited toward their prisoner counterparts. Even Zimbardo and his team, for the first few days, refused to acknowledge and prevent the unnecessary acts of cruelty the guards displayed, like forcing their fellow students to use the restroom in buckets placed in their cells (converted classrooms) and prohibiting them from removing the waste, publicly shaming them and stripping them of their clothes, and more.
The film itself, independent from its “based on true events” claim, is fantastic. The cast is filled with young, maybe-recognizable actors (Ezra Miller of Perks of Being a Wallflower, Michael Angarano of Sky High, Moises Arias of Hannah Montana… etc.) who are able to shed their Disney Channel foundations and deliver a performance that is both convincing and terrifying. Obviously, it’s amazingly directed, written, and composed, and Billy Crudup, who plays Philip Zimbardo, captures his cheesy creepiness perfectly and is able to flip it around and make me respect yet abhor the man and his emotionally crippling devotion to his work. The film is contained (my favorite kind!), low-budget, and really only made the festival circuit with a very limited release and a quiet farewell from the screens. This’ll score you major cool hipster points. (It’s now available on DVD and Blu-Ray.)
It’s a great movie.
But more importantly, because of Philip Zimbardo’s involvement in the writing and development of the film, there’s an undeniable realism that cannot be shaken. I spent the whole time torn between, “Oh, man, this is entertainment!” and “Oh, shoot, this is real. This happened. This is a real thing that happened to people.” They strived to make the prisoner and guard uniforms, the classrooms-turned-prison-cells, even the crap buckets, as realistic as Zimbardo himself remembers it. And it shows.
I almost wish they hadn’t been so detailed, everybody’s ‘70s hair was horrible.
Yes, the guards became disgusting monsters that abused their power. In fact, most of them were upset that the experiment ended so suddenly and were unable to understand exactly why. But the more interesting transformations were those of the prisoners, who were convinced that there was no way out of this prison, who requested parole for crimes they didn’t commit, who maybe started to believe that they really did commit those heinous crimes. This movie is the perfect example why “Based on a True Story” works. It’s movies like this that show us the atrocity of the human condition and how weak the mind really is. It’s humbling.
Are there some flaws in the glorification of the movie’s more “moral” characters? Sure. And I’m not going to deny that there was probably some dramatization involved to make the film a little more exciting or digestible, but whatever they did, they did a fantastic job hiding the discrepancies. Zimbardo’s character is despicable for most of the movie, and we all know that the only excuse for creating a movie that’s mostly white men with literally two semi-minor white female characters is an undying dedication to realism (one should desperately, desperately hope).
I have to admit, I chuckled a couple of times, but I hope that it was out of discomfort. This is definitely not a movie for people who are looking to laugh, to feel fuzzy or warm. The Stanford Prison Experiment makes a hopeful statement before the end credits, like based-on-a-true-story movies so often do. This movie is for those of us who are okay with not believing that statement, with knowing that we’re probably not alright, but choose to believe that maybe we, as a species, don’t have to lose to our most primal and sadistic instincts, no matter what uniform we bear.
