By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — This Friday Craig Zobel’s controversial film Compliance will have its San Diego premier at the Ken Theatre in Hillcrest. Based on an incident at a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Kentucky in 2004, Compliance chillingly depicts how a phone call from a man identifying himself as Officer Daniels commands a fast food restaurant manager named Sandra to detain and eventually strip search a young waitress named Becky because she has allegedly stolen cash from a customer’s wallet.
Daniels played by Pat Healy manically manipulates the unwitting manager Sandra portrayed by Ann Dowd to obey his orders by asserting his authority, praising her cooperation, and warning that failure to heed them could be construed as abetting a criminal. He assures Sandra that the only reason for his reliance on her is that he doesn’t have any police to dispatch to the restaurant that evening. To gain Becky’s acquiescence, he threatens her with jail if she doesn’t cooperate. It turns out to be a hoax with almost every character implicated in some degree in the confinement and humiliation of Becky.
While not a movie about the Holocaust, Compliance draws its inspiration from the postwar social psychology experiments, particularly those conducted by Stanley Milgram, to ascertain why otherwise decent Germans condoned, ignored, or perpetrated Nazi persecution and genocide of the Jews. Milgram set up a situation where the experimenter designated volunteers as “teachers” whose role was to administer electric shocks to “learners” who made mistakes on a test.
The “learners” were actors who feigned being increasingly harmed as the “teachers” ratcheted up the shocks to ostensibly lethal levels. When the experimenter stayed in the room with the “teachers” and the “learners” were kept in another room, nearly two-thirds of the “teachers” inflicted the maximum shock. Milgram concluded that most people are so conditioned to obey their superiors that they relinquish responsibility for actions performed at the behest of such authority figures.
Compliance also confirms the findings of Philip Limbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Paid volunteers were assigned the roles of either prisoners or guards in a mock jail. Both internalized their roles with the guards becoming sadistic disciplinarians and the prisoners demoralized victims. While Sandra never fully exploits her role as Becky’s warden, her fiancé Van does. Becky protests her innocence, but yields to her debasement as if it were her fate.
Compliance illustrates a number of the psychological mechanisms that permit ordinary people to commit injustices in the name of the law. First, this is an incremental process. The initial demands seem innocuous, but once they have been followed, the threshold for what is acceptable is gradually raised. By the time Sandra’s fiancé Van enters the office, Sandra already has questioned, frisked, and undressed Becky.
That Becky has been subjected to these violations of her civil rights and privacy implies that there must be a valid justification for her treatment. This is called the “Just World Hypothesis.” Although we have a legal system that presumes innocence, we possess a strong inclination to eliminate cognitive dissonance. To protect our own sense of security, we assume that where there’s smoke, there must be fire. Why would Daniels single out Becky and enlist Sandra and Van if there wasn’t convincing evidence that Becky had committed the theft?
Then there is the “bystander-effect.” The experiments of John Darley and Bibb Latané disclosed that the more bystanders there are to someone in distress, the less likely it is that anyone will help. If others do nothing, then one can justify his or her own indifference. Or it may be that in a group, we expect someone else will intervene, and relieve us of the responsibility. Becky has coworkers who don’t suspect her of robbing a customer and disagree with how she is being treated, but none of them are willing to risk his or her job or reputation by challenging Sandra and Officer Daniels.
Though it has been acclaimed by many critics, others have condemned Compliance of being voyeuristic and reducing the audience to a guilty bystander. They have contended that Officer Daniels’ orders become so preposterous that Sandra and her fiancé should have questioned his authority earlier. Moreover, variations of the Milgram Experiments where the experimenter leaves the room or the physical proximity of the “learner” is closer, both of which are true in Compliance, have resulted in significantly lower levels of obedience.
Yet Compliance adheres closely to the events that transpired at the McDonald’s in 2004 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqUm-Zk3_Ws) and its epilogue reports that 70 similar incidents have occurred in the United States over the past decade. Perhaps the discomfort critics and audiences feel when watching this film may help them to realize that there is only one alternative to being a bystander, a perpetrator, or a victim―namely, to refuse and resist patently unreasonable orders.
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Lawrence Baron recently retired from being the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University. He is the author of Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005) and editor of The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011). He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com