Das Experiment
Posted by unbrand on 6 October 2002 | 0 Comments
It’s needless to spell out why, for a German filmmaker, it’s still pretty gutsy to create a movie that shows how easily regular citizens can turn into accomplices of an authoritarian environment who not only quickly buy into preserving this structure, but start enjoying their newly gained power and using/abusing it when pressure seems to justify it. Of course, this is an over-simplified summary of the excellent film Das Experiment, which finally made it to the US 1 1/2 years after its original release.
The premise of the story is a psychological study at the University of Cologne, where 20 men volunteer to participate in a mock-prison situation for two weeks, in exchange for about $2,000. They are randomly assigned roles as guards or prisoners and receive otherwise little instruction except that the guards’ goal is to keep up the order without using violence, while the prisoners must obey and follow a number of rules. The researchers, hoping to gain insight into human nature and behavior under extreme situations, observe the experiment through surveillance cameras. I’m not giving away too much by saying that the participants quickly identify with their assigned roles to point where the line between simulation and reality get blurry.
Although the film is based on a book titled “Black Box”, the real origin of the story (and the basis for Black Box) is an experiment that was conducted at Stanford University in 1971. The official website gives a chilling insight into the study whose purpose was to find out “What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?” Interestingly, the Stanford Prison Experiment showed that not only those who took on the roles as guards or prisoners became, and not just played, their parts, but that even the researchers got absorbed in their own staged scenario to a point where they weren’t just scientific, neutral observers, but “thinking like a prison superintendent rather than a research psychologist.”
Growing up in Germany in the 70s and 80s, “never again” was an always-present motto, and much of my formal education was dedicated to teaching how the political system of post-war Germany was designed to prevent dictatorship and fascism from ever happening again. Important as this is, the more disturbing issues of human potential for creating and supporting such a system were not brought up. It seemed as if both those who taught us, and we ourselves, didn’t consider the possibility that well educated, middle-class kids, happy consumers in a capitalist democracy (or is it the other way round?) could be susceptible to the dynamics of an authoritarian system. Or maybe it was not so much naivete but fear to acknowledge the dark side of all human beings that left these things unspoken (I hesitate to use the word “evil” in this context since it’s been trivialized by the government and used ad nauseam to label anything un-american, whetever the fuck that is supposed to be.)
Das Experiment is ulitmately addressing those bigger questions, What is identity? What makes us human? Can circumstances influence or even radically change what our selves are? And then, what is the true, real self? Kudos to the makers of the film for not trying to provide simple answers, but telling a story that’s disturbing, intense, and provokes you to come up with answers for yourself.