Today I am feeling absolutely knackered. I really should have gone to bed early last night, or at least early-ish. Unfortunately I had the television on and a film started at 11:20 which had me hooked and I had to stay up until it ended. At first I was not going to bother as it was sub-titled. Normally I am not bothered at all by sub-titled films but I just didn’t feel I had the mental energy last night.

The film was called Das Experiment. A German film (obviously) about a psychological experiment involving splitting a group of men into two: one half would be prisoners and the other half guards in a simulated prison, so that the organisers can study the way people react to the situation. The experiment is supposed to last for two weeks but is abandoned halfway through when everyone gets too involved in their roles with prisoners having nervous breakdowns, guards brutalising them and all sorts of other things.

At first it might seem a bit unlikely that people would get so involved in a situation so quickly, but the film is based on a real experiment carried out in Stanford in 1971. That was also supposed to last two weeks but was abandoned after 6 days in similar (but less extreme) circumstances. In the real experiment one subject had severe psychological problems after only 2 days!

The Stanford experiment has become pretty notorious. Even the chap who ran it (Phil Zambardo) admits he got too involved, acted wrongly and should have stopped it sooner. He has also said that it should not be repeated. So the really scary thing is that the BBC did exactly that a couple of years ago, at about the same time this film was being made. The BBC put all sorts of safeguards in, and limitations, but even that had to be stopped before it ran its course. Perhaps even more scary is that some of the safeguards and rules were also incorporated in the fictional experiment in the film – and look how that turned out: dead bodies, attempted rape etc. etc. OK it was only a story, but with such strong parallels to fact it seems quite plausible when you look into it.

The film had some flaws as a piece of cinema. Firstly the sub-plot about the main character’s girlfriend, told in flashbacks throughout the film, was confusing and just got in the way. Secondly, the end got too extreme to be entirely realistic, with the action being more typically ‘Hollywood’. Maybe the director felt it was necessary to make the film commmercial enough, or maybe it was felt that audiences who have seen all the Die Hards, Under Seiges, and Lethal Weapons would be jaded to ‘normal’ violence?

Even so it was a very though-provoking film for all that, especially being a German film. The implication in the film (and the real experiments) is that people are not necessarily bad, but can be made to do bad things through the situation they are put in. One obvious comparison to make is with the Nazis in WWII. There are documented cases of war crime atrocities being carried out by ‘normal’ people who were not ideological nazis or career soldiers or under stress of battle, but were reacting to a situation where their victims had been de-humanised. We can all ask ourselves whether that means we all have the capacity to do such things if put in the right (wrong?) circumstances.

A more recent comparison is with events in Abu Ghraib. Very topical with the trial of Lynndie England going on at the moment. In fact there is another story on the BBC News web site which explicity makes a connection between the Stanford Experiment and prisoner abuse in Iraq, and it even has comments from Phil Zimbardo in it.

Wow. This has turned into a bit of a mega-posting really, with reflections on how much inhumanity can be attributed to inate personality and how much to societal pressures… I guess that means that, regardless of some artistic failings, the film succeeds on one level by prompting thoughts on all sorts of levels about all sorts of things. (Like, if thats what can happen after a couple of days, how on earth do normal prisons function at all with prisoners locked up for years and years?) One article about the film’s director said that he was influenced by Fight Club and is a big fan of David Fincher. I can’t help wondering what sort of film Fincher would make if he based it on the same premise…