{"id":17792,"date":"2016-03-18T00:12:59","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T07:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=17792"},"modified":"2016-03-16T12:13:38","modified_gmt":"2016-03-16T19:13:38","slug":"experimenter-first-rate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2016\/03\/18\/experimenter-first-rate\/","title":{"rendered":"Experimenter first rate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Sarsgaard in Experimenter<\/em>. (photo from Magnolia Pictures)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It was neither random nor coincidental that groundbreaking social psychologist Stanley Milgram was Jewish, nor that his parents emigrated from Eastern Europe before the war.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Holocaust was a significant motivation to propel him into the areas he was searching, and he explicitly cited [it] as a background for trying to understand darker aspects of human nature,\u201d said Experimenter <\/em>writer-director Michael Almereyda. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t enclosing or limiting how he saw the world, but the obedience experiments \u2013 which are his first experiments, how the film begins and what he\u2019s best known for \u2013 were shaped by his speculation about human nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those 1961 experiments found that most ordinary people would reluctantly follow an order to inflict pain on another person from an authority figure who took responsibility. The controversial results, obtained the same year as the Eichmann trial though published later, suggested that Americans were capable of behaving in a not-dissimilar way than Germans and others infamously did.<\/p>\n

Almereyda\u2019s thoughtful, poignant and dryly comic Experimenter<\/em>, starring Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder, centres on the obedience experiments, the fallout and Milgram\u2019s subsequent career. One of the finest American films of 2015 yet inexplicably overlooked, the DVD was released earlier this year and it can also be rented online.<\/p>\n

Almereyda informs the audience of Milgram\u2019s Jewishness from the outset, and provides several reminders in the course of the film.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seemed inappropriate to elide it or blur it or ignore it because it was a key part of his identity, as a man in the world but also as a scientist asking questions about human behavior,\u201d he said. \u201cI was aware of how deeply Jewish he was, that he married a Jewish woman who also was the daughter of immigrants, that there weren\u2019t that many Jewish people in the community at Harvard and his friends tended to be Jewish, and how that sense of his identity was a huge part of who he was.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a Jew and a social psychologist, Milgram\u2019s perspective was affected by the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

\u201cMilgram comes out with a very heavy quote talking about how, \u2018during the Second World War, people were exterminated with the efficiency applied to making appliances,\u2019\u201d said Almereyda. \u201cThat\u2019s a carefully worded and rather cynical statement, but its impact is resonant to this day. Genocide is a very efficient undertaking these days, and has been throughout the 20th century. You don\u2019t have to be Jewish to be mindful of genocide, but we\u2019re cognizant of that as one of the main shadows in recent human history, and he was trying to come to terms with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

A soft-spoken, self-described \u201cdisplaced Midwesterner\u201d and longtime New Yorker, the 57-year-old writer and director received a secular Jewish upbringing in Overland Park, Kan., before his family moved to Southern California when he was 13. His quirky independent films include Twister<\/em> (starring Harry Dean Stanton and Crispin Glover), mood piece Another Girl Another Planet<\/em>, vampire saga Nadja<\/em> with Peter Fonda and Hamlet<\/em> with Ethan Hawke and Bill Murray.<\/p>\n

Almereyda researched and wrote the Experimenter<\/em> script about seven years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s abidingly interesting and relevant and compelling,\u201d the filmmaker mused during a visit last May when Experimenter<\/em> played the San Francisco International Film Festival. \u201cHe left a lot of papers behind and they\u2019re all at Yale and one can have access to them. I didn\u2019t make up much of this movie. Almost everything, even the wacky, quirky things, is verifiably true.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almereyda confided that he originally wanted a Jewish actor to play Milgram, but was forced to relinquish that ideal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is, as far as I know, no young Dustin Hoffman who\u2019s a leading man right now,\u201d he said with a smile. \u201cYoung Dustin Hoffman would have been a great Stanley Milgram.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Sarsgaard was suggested, Almereyda checked out his performance as Jewish man-about-town David Goldman in An Education<\/em> (2009) and was instantly persuaded.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s a very agile actor, he can do a lot of things and he believes that he could write a book,\u201d Almereyda said. \u201cYou can\u2019t say that about all leading men, you know. So whether he\u2019s Jewish or not, he\u2019s very equipped to play the part.\u201d<\/p>\n

Experimenter<\/em> quickly succeeds in shifting the viewer\u2019s mind from the lead actor\u2019s ancestry to the more pressing question of how much empathy we feel for strangers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe film is meant to be a bit of a mirror, as Milgram\u2019s work was [meant] to mirror human nature,\u201d said Almereyda. \u201cIt\u2019s meant to make you question your own behavior and your own life \u2013 not as an indictment but as a kind of exploration, because we can all be more conscious. That was Milgram\u2019s hope. There\u2019s a lot of ways that immoral or questionable or violent behavior is inescapable in life and in history, but the process of self-awareness is one way to turn the tide.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael Fox<\/strong> is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Sarsgaard in Experimenter. (photo from Magnolia Pictures) It was neither random nor coincidental that groundbreaking social psychologist Stanley Milgram was Jewish, nor that his parents emigrated from Eastern Europe before the war. \u201cThe Holocaust was a significant motivation to propel him into the areas he was searching, and he explicitly cited [it] as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17775,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[787],"tags":[5524,5526,5525,5523],"class_list":["post-17792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tv-film","tag-almereyda","tag-experimenter","tag-milgram","tag-sarsgaard"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}