From the start, Michael Almereyda's Experimenter is a cold, awkward movie. It takes place in windowless, institutional rooms, the kind of bare research spaces that universities grudgingly provide for scholars whose study is not in the glitzy sciences. The people who work here though, offer no more warmth than the rooms themselves.
The subject of the film is Stanley Milgram, the real-life famous – and infamous – social psychologist who did experiments on human obedience starting in the early 1960s. The project that made his reputation involved two subjects – one in the role of teacher and the other in the role of learner, but in another room. If the learner made a mistake on various word combinations, the teacher applied an electric shock, and the more mistakes the learner made, the stronger the shocks grew.
Stanley Milgram found that with very few exceptions, his so-called teachers were quite willing to administer the shocks, even when they heard cries of pain from the learners. The teachers would later explain their willingness to shock by saying that they thought they were supposed to do it, that it was part of the experiment and so on.
In 1961, Nazi horrors were even more in mind for people than they are now, so Milgram's work brought up serious questions about excuses and rationalizations that the shockers were only following orders.
The Milgram experiments also brought up questions of research ethics because it turns out that no one was actually shocked. The learners were part of the staff, and they would play recordings of people moaning in pain and pleading to leave. Milgram's field of research was social relations. In many ways, his experiments brought up more complexity than he'd bargained for. When Milgram tells his students one November day in 1963 that President Kennedy has just been assassinated, they think he's working another game on them.
At one point, Milgram watches the old TV show Candid Camera, which was funny, but was also cruel. The show set up situations for unsuspecting people so that the audience could enjoy their confusions and uncertainties. Most of all, Candid Camera showed people in these unexpected circumstances as they try to do what they think they're supposed to do – what everybody else is doing. The TV audience got to laugh at these clueless people, but Stanley Milgram takes notes on his.
Candid Camera had the same ethical problems as Milgram's experiments, and shows the same things about people – and gives the audience the same unease that Milgram maybe should have felt, but didn't.
Peter Sarsgaard plays Milgram as a guy with almost no affect. He dresses like a stereotypic academic social scientist of the early '60s – dull dark suits, nondescript ties. He doesn't smile; he gives no indication of a sense of humor. He's driven. Sarsgaard's Stanley Milgram often turns to the audience to comment on what he or somebody else is doing. It doesn't feel like he's taking us into his confidence; it's more that he talks to us because he doesn't know how to relate to actual people.
The film puts Milgram's subjects in the background. He watches them through windows, like slides under a microscope. For Milgram, they're test subjects, not so much human beings.
But the movie's version of Stanley Milgram is no fool. He cares profoundly about major ethical problems of human life – like how we are responsible for our actions and can't blame the company we work for or social expectations of obedience for our moral complicities. Milgram looks at his wife (Winona Ryder) and says that he chooses her every day – that his life, like all lives, involves choices for which he is responsible.
It's the fascinating ambiguity of the movie Experimenter that this man goes into the most sterile, artificial and inhuman situations to try to figure out the unruly heart of human life. This is a big month for biopics. In its quiet way, Experimenter cuts a lot deeper than the flamboyant Steve Jobs.
