Advance Planning

Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience to authority are almost certainly the most famous social psychology investigations yet conducted. They suggest that ordinary people are willing to harm others (to the point of killing them) on the orders of an authority figure who provides only minimal justification for doing so. What makes them so surprising is that they show that behavior we ordinarily attribute to strong personal convictions is largely under situational control--a basic argument of almost all social psychology.

A familiar pose:  Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram

Experimenter, a new film about the life and work of Stanley Milgram by Michael Almereyda, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It has received good notices. Film critic Amy Taubin chose it as the festival's best film. In the March-April Film Comment, she says:

Michael Almereyda's Experimenter is a spare, formally ingenious biopic about Stanley Milgram, the Yale social psychology professor who in 1961 concocted an experiment that demonstrated that obedience to authority overruled morality and empathy in a large majority of his subjects. . . . Almereyda's screenplay and direction—this is far and away his strongest, most coherent, and moving film—and Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder's performances as the titular experimenter and his wife capture the profound sense of irony that infused the Milgrams' entire life.  

No release date has been announced and no trailer is available yet. The best substitute I could find was this interview. This is not a film that's likely to be shown at the mall, so we'll have to pay attention in order to see it. Watch this space.

The best source of information about Milgram's life and work is Tom Blass's book, The Man Who Shocked the World.

The only other film I know of that directly portrays social psychological research is the 2001 German film Das Experiment, a fictionalized version of Phil Zimbardo's prison simulation, a study closely related to Milgram's work. The film deviates considerably from real events, portraying the lead experimenter as unconcerned about the suffering of the participants and eventually morphing into a thriller about whether the subjects can escape from the laboratory. Phil Zimbardo was not amused. Nevertheless, it's worth checking out if you can find it.

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The Dirty Dozen(*) of 2014

TV Networks on Torture: “Just Do It!”

After the December 9 release of the Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, widely known as the torture report, it became the #1 story on the weekly television news programs. Since journalists seldom express opinions on such matters as whether “rectal hydration” constitutes torture or whether politicians who approved such methods should be prosecuted, the best measure of the corporate media's position on these issues is to examine the guests who are invited to their programs to express their views.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) surveyed the guests on nine TV news programs during the week of December 7 through 14: ABC's This Week, CBS's Face the Nation, CNN's State of the Union and Situation Room, Fox's Fox News Sunday and Special Report, MSNBC's Hardball, NBC's Meet the Press, and PBS's News Hour.

Of the 104 guests on these programs, 53 of them indicated whether they supported or opposed the “enhanced interrogation techniques” described in the report. Thirty-five of them (66%) supported the CIA's actions, while the remaining 18 (34%) were opposed. While some progressive critics worried that the networks would give equal time to torturers, they probably didn't anticipate that the “liberal” media would present more advocates of torture than opponents by a two-to-one margin. (Of course, most of those who supported the CIA's actions usually also claimed that they did not constitute “torture.”)

Sixty-five of the 104 guests were journalists, most of whom remained neutral. The second largest group was 35 current and former government officials. Nine CIA officers were among them, seven of whom defended their agency's practices. Of those who were political partisans, 19 were Republicans and 7 were Democrats. Four of the Democrats spoke against torture while the others had no opinion. Sixteen of the Republicans favored the CIA's actions and three opposed them. For more details on what was actually said, see this report.)

Of course, the most prominent Republican guest was former VP Dick Cheney, who said the report was “full of crap.” As Glenn Greenwald noted, Dick Cheney should be in prison rather than having his ass kissed by the Sabbath gasbags (my language, not his). So far, the only person to be jailed over the CIA torture program is John Kiriakou, a whistleblower who helped to expose it.

While the perpetrators of torture had many opportunities to defend themselves, torture victims were seldom heard from. Their only voice was indirect. Two lawyers representing torture victims, Joseph Margulies and Meg Satterthwaite, were invited to participate in the discussions.

Given this kind of media coverage, it's not surprising that in a Pew Research Center survey of 1001 Americans conducted December 11-14, 51% said the “CIA's interrogation methods” were justified, 29% said they were not justified, and 20% had no opinion. Were they effective in preventing terrorist attacks? The Senate Report concluded they were not, but 56% of respondents thought they were effective, 21% said they were not, and 16% didn't know. The public was almost evenly divided on whether the Senate Report should have been made public. Forty-three percent thought releasing the report was the wrong decision, 42% thought it was the right decision, and 15% had no opinion.

It seems that a lot of Americans are O. K. with torture. They just don't want to know about it.

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Zero Thirty Darkness

This Will Not Surprise You

Who Cares What THEY Think?

Zero Thirty Darkness

I've seen Zero Dark Thirty. The first and last 45 minutes were intensely involving for all the wrong reasons. As for the rest, it was actually fairly dull, showing that real police work doesn't necessarily translate into an interesting movie.

I come down squarely on the side of those who believe the film takes the position that torture was effective in gathering the information that led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The director, Kathryn Bigelow, and the screenwriter, David Boal, argue that the film does not support or endorse torture. They claim to be merely presenting the facts, and that it is up to viewers to draw their own conclusions. Boal says, “It doesn't surprise me that people bring political agendas to the film but it doesn't actually have a political agenda. It's agenda is to tell these people's stories in the most honest and factual way we know how . . .”

First of all, the film doesn't report everything that happened during those ten years. It is necessarily selective. One of the things it completely leaves out is any debate over either the efficacy or morality of torture. (You could argue that an even more significant omission is it failure to present events that occurred before 9/11, which would reveal bin Laden and al-Qaeda to be “blowback” from previous CIA activities in Afghanistan.)

But let's stick to what is in the film. As filmmakers, Bigelow and Boal should be well aware of the basic elements of the cinematic code. A film is a visual argument. Montage—that part of the film that takes place during editing, the arrangement of successive shots—can suggest relationships between people and events that may or may not exist in reality. As Russian director and teacher Lev Kulashov pointed out, A + B can equal something entirely different. Kulashov showed viewers an identical shot of a man's face and asked them to describe his emotional state. When intercut with shots of a plate of soup, a woman in a coffin and a little girl playing, his emotion was described as hunger, sadness and joy, respectively.

Zero Dark Thirty contains a scene in which a prisoner, Ammar, is having lunch with two CIA agents, Dan and Maya. He gives them valuable information that eventually leads to bin Laden's courier and bin Laden himself. Prior to this, we saw scenes in which Ammar was brutally tortured—waterboarded, hung by ropes, and locked in a small box—by Dan as Maya watched. It is virtually automatic that an experienced media consumer will to draw a causal connection between the two scenes—that Ammar gave them the information because of the torture, and to avoid further torture. In fact, Dan reminds him that he could be tortured again. (Boal claims that a scene of Maya in her research room shows that all the important information was already available from detainees who were not tortured, but I would suggest that this scene is not very salient and its meaning is unclear.)

Another Russian filmmaker, V. I. Pudovkin, said montage is “the method which controls the 'psychological guidance' of the spectator.” It is possible, if you have the necessary information, to counterargue with this natural tendency—to tell yourself that the filmmaker's implication that torture is effective is false. However, it is unrealistic to expect very many viewers to draw this conclusion. The film could impact public opinion, as some would argue the fictional television drama already 24 has. Although the reasons are unclear, the percentage of Americans who say torture is rarely or never justified has shown a small but steady decline, from 53% in 2004 to 42% in 2011.

Filmmaker Michael Moore defends Zero Dark Thirty, arguing that the average viewer “will be repulsed” by the torture scenes: “After watching the brutal behavior of CIA agents for the first 45 minutes of the film, I can't believe anyone of conscience would conclude that this is morally NOT right.” But Moore is ignoring the possibility that we have already been desensitized to torture scenes by years of fictional programming. He is also making the egocentric assumption that other people will have the same reaction to the film as he did. But the torture scenes are embedded in a narrative in which the torturers are the heroes and their goal of killing bin Laden is one of which the audience strongly approves. To make things worse, the heroine, Maya, who the film suggests may have been responsible for the death of one prisoner, is is ignored and patronized by her CIA colleagues, making her ultimate triumph a victory for feminism as well.

Below is a discussion of some of these issues that appeared on the PBS News Hour.  

There has been little comment about last 45 minutes in which the Navy Seals fly by helicopter to bin Laden's compound, break into the buildings, and kill bin Laden and several other people. Here again, the problem is omission. No one raises the question of whether the U.S. government had the right to execute bin Laden and several others suspected of lesser crimes without due process of law. Zero Dark Thirty implies, however, that the alternative of bring him back alive for trial was never seriously considered.

Glenn Greenwald maintains that Zero Dark Thirty is U. S. government propaganda directed at American citizens. Peter Maass refers to it as “a troubling new frontier of government-embedded film-making.” Unlike other branches of government, the CIA is forbidden to distribute propaganda in this country. However, this is nothing new for the Defense Department. As David Robb argues in Operation Hollwood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies, film studios usually require military cooperation in order to produce technically realistic-looking war movies. In exchange, the Pentagon is given script approval—veto power over points it disagrees with and the right to insert its own ideology into the films. The predictable result is films that arguably distort history, i.e., Blackhawk Down, or function as recruiting videos for the services, i.e., Top Gun.

But Zero Dark Thirty takes this process a step further. The opening title claims that the film is “based on first hand accounts of actual events.” That is, they received privileged access to classified information of the type that the CIA usually prosecutes people for revealing. But the CIA's claim that torture was instrumental in the hunt for bin Laden is at odds with conclusions drawn by other branches of government, such as the FBI and Congress, and may conflict with the views of a minority of CIA employees. We are getting not the government's point-of-view, but that of a subgroup within the government. The effect is to empower the most brutal and reactionary ideology within the “defense” establishment—the Cheney-Rumsfeld plan for fighting terrorism. The film propagandizes the American people in an effort to get them to accept war crimes by their own government.