It all started with a newspaper ad: “Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks.” From there, 24 out of 75 respondents were selected and randomly assigned the roles of “guards” and “prisoners,” to be acted out in a basement hallway at Stanford University in the summer of 1971, complete with realistic-seeming arrests and khaki uniforms. What transpired, however, was a series of harrowing psychological and physical abuses as the guards tested the limits of their power. After only six days, the study was shut down.The story of the Stanford Prison Experiment has been well circulated since — most notably, in its creator Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s book “The Lucifer Effect” and the 1992 documentary “Quiet Rage.” But now, it’s getting yet another work-through as a narrative film, starring Billy Crudup as Dr. Zimbardo, flanked by a cast of familiar child stars — Michael Angarano of “Almost Famous,” Ezra Miller of “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” Keir Gilchrist of “United States of Tara” — as the college-aged participants. On its face, the film, currently in theaters, sounds like an attempt to cash in on the “based on a true story” market — and risks being somewhat redundant, given its adherence to the transcripts and documentation already available. However, through skillfully deployed cinema stylistics, it brings a new level of emotional authenticity to a familiar story. Even more notable is that the film is being released against a backdrop of intensified scrutiny of widespread abuses in police authority. With that in mind, “The Stanford Prison Experiment” takes on gut-wrenching new significance — and ultimately becomes a worthwhile example of the power of narrative filmmaking.“A lot of the material that existed about the experiment is all from, as it should be, a very academic-minded point of view,” said director Kyle Patrick Alvarez. “The idea wasn’t to replace those things, but if there is the trifecta — the book, the documentary, and then this narrative film, where at times it’s fictionalized — that those would all work in tandem to hopefully create one impression of what these six days were like.”“Impression” is perhaps the key word here, as it is in most film adaptations — a justification for fudging historical detail in the interest of making things feel real. “The actual logistics of the [1971] footage, you’ve got one video camera at the end of a hallway. You’re not in there,” Alvarez said. “There’s an opportunity to be immersive.” It’s an opportunity he seizes upon, cameras gradually moving in throughout the film’s runtime, starting with the cooler, more objective wide shots of the opening half hour to a series of claustrophobic close-ups by the time it’s done — most certainly, almost painfully “in there.”As for the fictionalizing of the story, each change was a point of discussion with Zimbardo himself, as the filmmakers tried to “stay true to the soul of it.” In the final scenes, when Zimbardo calls off the experiment, Crudup’s actions are significantly more extreme than the chain of planning and approvals to which academics would actually adhere — because, as Alvarez said, “on film, you want to see the emotion.” Some events, meanwhile, were dialed back compared to true events. “They were stripping down the prisoners much earlier,” he said. “My feeling was, on camera, as soon as you strip someone down, you’re done. I was like, ‘We have to delay that at least 30 minutes.’”To hear that any aspect of the film was toned down is surprising, if only because it’s pretty harsh as is. Beyond even the actual abuse — verbal humiliation, sleep deprivation, forced exercise — the real horror lies in watching the subtle, seemingly effortless transition of the guards from boys to monsters, paralleled with Zimbardo’s zeal to continue the experiment well past the point of distress. Overall, the film serves as a reminder that the ways in which we determine power are often fundamentally arbitrary, and that it can be frighteningly easy to dehumanize a fellow citizen given the right set of circumstances.No one is immune in this film — the participants, the researchers, and least of all the audience — from the implication that unchecked power corrupts, that even the most well-meaning can cause real harm. It’s an effect of which the real-life Dr. Zimbardo is well aware: “What you get, for me, watching the film, is that the viewer is looking through the one-way screen watching what’s unfolding, and then they step back, and they’re observing the observers,” he said. “When it works, the viewer’s part of the experiment.”At its most basic, the Stanford Prison Experiment itself is a study in fiction’s influence — an example of how we let constructs like titles and uniforms dictate our actions, even to the point of dire physical consequence. Or, as Zimbardo put it: “You’re playing a game, but the game becomes reality.”Popular entertainment can be responsible for the perpetuation of warped ideas about how the world works — why, for example, prosecutors find it harder to convict post-“CSI” — just as it can teach us to dehumanize certain characters, certain types. (It’s worth noting that the most vicious of the guards earned the nickname “John Wayne” — he reportedly drew inspiration from the drill sergeant in “Cool Hand Luke.”) But by the same token, it can also imbue an old scientific study with lived-in pathos and transmit that to audiences. “Hopefully putting it in a narrative form reaches people,” Alvarez said, noting that the original documentary is already shown in a number of police training programs.Still, Zimbardo knows how difficult it can be to argue for institutional reforms. “It’s almost impossible,” he said. “I literally went with my graduate students to [Raymond K.] Procunier, who was the head of corrections of California. I said, ‘I’d like to offer my services for free.’ Stanford University set up a prison lobby in the legislature to promote positive reform in prisons.” Their response? “‘No way. Not interested. We don’t want outsiders meddling in our business.’”“Most systems lock themselves in, and they don’t want criticism, they don’t want critique,” Zimbardo added. “They say, ‘this is the way we do it’ — and you say, ‘no, what you’re doing is fucking wrong.’”
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