Tasked with facilitating the mass exportation of Jews into German ghettos and ultimately to concentration camps where many of them faced extermination, Adolf Eichmann became one the major architects of the Holocaust. Captured in Argentina in 1960, Eichmann was extradited to Israel and indicted on 15 charges, including crimes against humanity. Ultimately found guilty, Eichmann was hanged in 1962.
Eichmann’s defense was that he was merely a transmitter between the Furher and the various soldiers who undertook the executions and punishments of the Jews. This defense was not novel in that it was also employed by soldiers in the Nuremberg trials 15 years before when they asserted that they were merely following orders.
In July 1961, three months after the trial began, Stanley Milgram, a Yale university psychologist, began conducting a series of experiments to determine “the willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority.” In brief, there is the Experimenter (the authority figure giving instruction), the Teacher (the person volunteering to follow the instructions of the Experimenter), and the Learner (the recipient of the teacher’s instructions). The Teacher, who is the focus of this experiment, is a volunteer, and the Learner is actually a part of the experiment but pretends to be a volunteer.
The study is proposed to be concerned with the effects of punishment and learning. The Teacher and Learner meet in a laboratory room, and the Learner is then removed and
“seated in a kind of miniature electric chair; his arms are strapped to prevent excessive movement, and an electrode is attached to his wrist. He is told that he will be read lists of simple word pair, and that he will then be tested on his ability to remember the second word of a pair when he hears the first one again. Whenever he makes an error, he will receive electric shocks of increasing intensity.”
Portions of this experiment that were originally published in Milgram’s essay “Perils of Obedience” will be discussed throughout, but the gist of the results is that people in the presence of an authority figure will, more often than not, actively follow orders regardless of what happens to the Learner. The Learner is instructed to give incorrect answers, and the Teacher, merely following orders – and, at times, with apprehension, does what he is told and increase the severity and duration of electric shocks.
And this is how we arrive at 2012’s Compliance, a film that elicited jeers at Sundance and caused more than a handful of people to walk out of New York City theaters, claiming that this is not the year to glorify violence against women. First, is there an appropriate year to do this? And, second, these criticisms and misguided, and their owners missed the point. Director Craig Zobel is not glorifying violence against women. If he truly wanted to glorify violence, he would have shown the violence and presumed sex act that occurs against Becky (Dreama Walker). But he doesn’t; he elides these, making the audience fill in the gaps, no matter how unnerving they are.
Inspired by true events and set in a small fast-food restaurant in New Jersey, Compliance first gives us a power struggle between Sandra (Ann Dowd — an actress whose potential nomination for Best Supporting Actress might surprise us but shouldn’t), the franchise manager and everyone around her. The food delivery man reprimands her for not properly refrigerating the chicken and disrupting his route; her employees often mock her authority; she is too old to be friends with them, but too young to feel old; her unfamiliarity – or general disinterest — in newer phone technology is a topic of criticism and a generational separator.
The ultimate conflict ensues when the unseen Officer Daniels calls the restaurant. Speaking to Sandra. He claims that a customer has reported seeing Becky steal money from the customer’s purse. He notes that this is also caught on video tape and that he has a “team” ready to move in once the money is discovered. Finally, he informs Sandra that he has “your regional manager, Robert Gilmore, on the other line.” Three lines of authority are quickly limned here: Sandra’s boss, from whom she’s already expecting an angry phone call about the spoiled chicken; “Officer,” a direct connection of the voice to law enforcement; and the presence of a camera.
Each of these helps coerce Sandra to cooperate, completely ignoring the errors in Daniels’ assertions. Vague accusations of theft become authority. If the theft has been caught on camera or witnessed by a “team,” then there is no need to take Becky into the store room and strip search her. Neither is there a need to leave her naked with a skimpy apron to cling to, or humiliatingly strip search her.
But this is how we respond to authority. Perhaps our post-9/11 culture, with the inclusion of the Patriot Act, the Wiretap Act, and the wealth of surveillance equipment that surrounds us, have exacerbated and made more relevant the experiments of Milgram. Five years ago, Obama ran on a platform insisting that he would close the doors of Guantanamo Bay, yet they remain open, and the prisoners inside wait for trials that aren’t forthcoming. The numbers of lawsuits in this country – that far surpass those in the rest of the free world – testify to our need to be absolved of blame. Compliance simply reaffirms that nothing is our fault.
Compliance also illustrates how accusations become truth. A third-party, intangible voice that proclaims knowledge and rank declares that Becky is a criminal. There are few questions asked and they feel perfunctory. Audiences may balk here, but it’s hard to deny a certain degree of understanding. In the face of authority, we toe the line to prevent guilt by association. The Central Park Five, a 2012 documentary by Ken Burns, reminds us that coercion often occurs because we just don’t want to get in trouble – even if that’s where it leads.
There’s also a sense of pleasure that comes from aiding an authority figure. In Compliance, Sandra is able to transcend her menial position and ask, “What can I do? How can I help?” In what way can she help the “victim,” and in what can she do to capture the “criminal”? The irony here is that her actions become criminal and her subject becomes the victim, but the latter is ignored because Becky is originally labeled a “thief.” Here, Sandy exemplifies one of Milgram’s observations that the intermediary between Experimenter and Learner becomes “proud of doing a good job, obeying the experimenter under difficult circumstances.” In this dynamic, Sandra has purpose and – by default – true authority.
But she’s also able to dismiss what happens to Becky when Van, Sandra’s soon-to-be fiancé, gets involved. The acts are alluded to and never crystal clear, but we know they’re not pleasant. Regardless, Sandra can denounce responsibility because she merely handed over the phone. Scoff again if you will, but as Milgram noted in 1961, “For a person to feel responsible for his actions, he must sense that the behavior has flowed ‘from the self.’ … [S]ubjects have precisely the opposite view of the actions – namely, they see them as originating in the motives of some other person.” Simply put, Sandra can absolve herself of her own initial actions because she was being guided and advised by and “Officer.” Subsequently, she can deny her involvement in anything that happens after because she was merely handing off the phone.
Initially, I thought the problem with Compliance was its length and its repeated exploration of this morality struggle between what we feel is right and what we’re told to do. I was also a bit turned off by the last five minutes in which the parties involved begin filing lawsuits and going on television to clear their names and earn a paycheck, but upon reflection, these things that irked me previously only add to Zobel’s point. We might mock those weak enough to fall for this ruse, but similar events have happened throughout the country around 100 times in the past few years. Furthermore, Sandra and her ilk’s blind faith in authority has led this country into two different misguided wars in the last decade, one of which was predicated on falsified documents, conjecture, and misinformation – but those things came from the government, the grandest figure of authority in a country, no?
And, lawsuits seem par for the course nowadays as well. As a post script to the film tells us that, in real life, the plaintiffs in this most recent ruse against them claim that their companies “weren’t issuing specific enough warnings against hoaxes.” In essence, this lawsuit suggests that we would much rather point the finger at someone else than question authority.
And, who better to decide whether this lawsuit is valid than a judge? A symbol of authority.
In the end, Compliance is an audacious film that tests its audience with muted scenes that defy our ability to separate ourselves from the situation that we judge at eye-level. Perhaps one too many people followed orders before an unlikely someone stepped forward to voice their opinion. And perhaps audiences were more outraged by the similarities they viewed in themselves.
