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Saw Compliance today and can imagine this will soon get its own thread. An excellent film about a difficult story, far better than it has any right being. I've know about the true life incident that inspired this film for years now and when I'd first heard it was being recast into a fictionalized drama, I could not see the point. Soon after the film started playing, it had changed my mind entirely. Dramatizing the event -- in minute, excruciating detail -- is the point. The big questions that hang over both the real event and the film are simple: "How could this happen? Why didn't anyone stop it?" Fictionalizing the story actually allows the filmmakers to make a more convincing case for the decisions of everyone involved than they've ever managed to make for themselves in real life. Because we're able to see every tiny character flaw (too respectful of authority, too unwilling to cause a ruffle) for exactly what it is, every missed opportunity to put a stop to this horrible ordeal, every person who shirks his/her individual responsibility, every contributing situational factor:

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overwork, distraction, drunkenness, the simple desire to go along to getalong, appeals to the authority of the police, the fact that nobody wants to the be the first one to question the caller's authority but as soon as one person unequivocally does... the use of personal details and names by the prankster (which he has an almost preternatural ability to elicit from his unsuspecting marks and then instantly turn back on them) as well as convincing professional slang and a combination of threats and flattery, the slow and deliberate isolation of the manipulated, the expert escalation of his demands from the merely uncomfortable to the criminally transgressive.

Great casting and acting all around, with an exceptional lead performance by Ann Dowd. Utterly believable atmosphere in the main set, a fast food restaurant. Great cinematography on a what's clearly a budget. Which is to say also: very good directing. And a really nice piece of writing, almost flawlessly structured and executed, that plays out with the tension of a contained thriller and always seemed to be giving me the bit of information or drama I was ready for at just the right moment. The writing is all the more impressive considering that most of the crucial phone dialogue is invented because the writer-director had no access to recordings or transcripts, only to much later interviews with some of the victims.

It's worth noting that David Gordon Green, who produced the film, lauded the direction for delicately handling its subject matter with an approach that, at any given misstep, could have easily turned the end product into something less than the sum of its parts and more like a TV movie.

If I were teaching Social Psychology at the University level, this film would instantly go on my syllabus for the unit on the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Study. It's really that accurate, interesting and worthy of further discussion. This film will no doubt make some board members uncomfortable because of the way that it presents such a convincing case for the situational malleability of human minds/behavior. I've gotten into this a bit on the thread for The Game. But with Compliance nobody can object that "they wouldn't really do that." Because, yeah, they pretty much did.

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Perhaps as many as 70 times!

This isn’t all bad. Ann Dowd and Bill Camp are very good. Characters are developed very well in a very short amount of time at the beginning. We have a window into the personalities and histories of the central figures and their reasons for going along with the fictitious Officer Daniels - Becky’s willingness to put up with a seed of a boyfriend can give some insight as to why she’ll confront intensifying levels of degradation with eye-rolling petulance, Sandra’s awareness of her own ordinariness gives her a special reception to flattery and a henpecked Evan finds himself given a kind of power that he might enjoy despite himself. Blatant when it comes to the actual phone call scenes, but details like these are set up in throwaway lines and glimpsed scenarios. Letting us see the caller is a huge mistake: with it, the focus is shifted from the psychology of compliance to an external avatar of villainy. Without it - and without the “Inspired By…” introduction - this could be prime Buñuel, a colossal absurdity that fakes you out with the very reality that provided the seed of its idea. Not only does this destroy what is interesting about the case to begin with - the reasons why these people did what they were told to do - but it demands our attention divert to a specific performance, and the performance in question is banal. So is the character conception, once Daniels steps into frame - he’s a smirking criminal mastermind, demanding his victims degrade one another in between taking bites of a sandwich or talking to his kid in ham-fistedly ‘ironic’ juxtapositions that would make Todd Solondz vomit. The ridiculous procedural ending is a silly attempt at resolving an unresolvable drama and justifying the film’s existence through incesssant “true story!” clamour and reminds me of one of those horrible, stultifying courtroom resolutions from a 50s B-crime. And lets not even talk about the tastelessness of that wink-wink nudge-nudge cello score, or of a cutaway to a soft drink straw during a scene where

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the victimised Becky is ordered to perform fellatio on Evan.

Adolescent touches like these give the impression of a shock jock capitalising on a notorious real-life incident rather than a filmmaker actually interested in probing the ‘why’ of a criminal collaboration bordering on the surreal.

puxzkkx wrote:Letting us see the caller is a huge mistake: with it, the focus is shifted from the psychology of compliance to an external avatar of villainy. Without it - and without the “Inspired By…” introduction - this could be prime Buñuel, a colossal absurdity that fakes you out with the very reality that provided the seed of its idea. Not only does this destroy what is interesting about the case to begin with - the reasons why these people did what they were told to do - but it demands our attention divert to a specific performance, and the performance in question is banal. So is the character conception, once Daniels steps into frame - he’s a smirking criminal mastermind, demanding his victims degrade one another in between taking bites of a sandwich or talking to his kid in ham-fistedly ‘ironic’ juxtapositions that would make Todd Solondz vomit... Adolescent touches like these give the impression of a shock jock capitalising on a notorious real-life incident rather than a filmmaker actually interested in probing the ‘why’ of a criminal collaboration bordering on the surreal.

Think you're missing the boat on the bad guy. Part of the film's central thesis is the utter ordinariness of the restaurant workers who end up doing horrible things to each other. It wouldn't have been as effective to ignore the ways in which the villain wasn't some faceless criminal mastermind or fringe of society pervert

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but an ordinary Joe in a boring suburban house with family of his own.

I don't see how that "destroys what is interesting about the case" or takes any power away from the film's exploration of "the reasons why these people did what they were told to do." It's also hard for me to see what you mean with the Todd Solondz reference. To me, this is a serious film that respects all of its characters, instead of using them as provocations, playthings and springboards for uncomfortable laughs. The farthest thing from Solondz.

Agree with Oates completely. From what I understand, this was a very accurate depiction of the actual incident, which seemed utterly unbelievable at the time it was reported. Even though I was left slack-jawed and shaking my head at the decisions made by these characters, the knowledge that it all actually transpired rendered the seemingly implausible story riveting. Also agree that it is the detailed dramatization of the event that makes it work so well. Of course I still can't fully grasp the overwhelming naïveté of these people, but I can now begin to see the flaws and insecurities that would allow a person to let themselves be used in such a manner. Every performance was spot-on, and in a perfect world, Ann Dowd would be getting an Oscar nomination.

I'm giving a vote of full and total support for this film, too. Devastatingly difficult to watch, I found my back slumping further and further forward until I was almost in a fetal position at the film's conclusion, but I'm really quite in awe of what was accomplished here. Those involved in making this film had such an unenviable task, but every aspect - the unflinching acting, directing, editing, writing- was handled perfectly. The film isn't exploitative in the slightest, something that I was worried about, going into it with knowledge of the actual events. It is as respectful and objective as it can be. A necessary film, one that leads us to explore and ponder profoundly troubling questions about human morality & psychology, and critical acceptance of authority. I won't be able to shake it for a while, which is probably for the best.

The film in a similar vein that keept coming into my mind after reading all of these comments is Larry Clark's Bully, full of its own coercion, power struggles and casual suburban cruelties.

Just got this screener as part of my Spirit Awards package. I found it to be a very valuable and well-made film.

Compliance reminded me of the extremely well-researched book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101, where the titular ordinary men become instruments in the Nazi's genocidal extermination. Many of the ways psychology operates in that book are shown with humanity and nuance in these performances. The deference to authority, doing one's job, etc etc etc. echo far beyond the series of these prank calls and into some of the worst acts in human history and, assuredly, human future.

I kept thinking the movie was mostly made watchable by having a rather hot girl be the victim, which I was very ambivalent about. And while I saw what the film went for with the perpetrator reveal, those scenes did kind of fall flat.

Here's an article about the real incident complete with a number of photos of the participant plus stills from the CCTV of the actual incident as it unfolded.

The victim settled with Mickey D's for ~ $1M.
I'm sure the whole thing and the ensuing notoriety weren't great to go through, but $1M compensates pretty well. The perpetrator reportedly was acquitted for lack of evidence though it doesn't say what the charges exactly were.

warren oates wrote: Think you're missing the boat on the bad guy. Part of the film's central thesis is the utter ordinariness of the restaurant workers who end up doing horrible things to each other.

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The villain is also part of the "banality" of this process, in the sense that he was a bored guy getting his kicks, and using a phone allowed him to do so without having to face the human consequences of his actions (assuming he would've gotten away with it). If the villain had never been seen, I think the tension would not have carried all the way through because the escalation of the calls would've come across as a bit silly and repetitive. However, as it stands, the second half becomes a game of the villain seeing how far he can push things (via a Hitchcockian identification switch), where as the 1st half plays as a believable (in terms of the calls being believable) thriller from the POV of the workers dealing with an employee theft situation.

Philip French points out this is a version of The Milgram Experiment, psychological reaction to authority, the fast food industry being were conformity, subserviance & obediance & fear of higher levels of management abounds among staff, always on their toes, wary of a surprise inspection...

I had a lot of trouble with this film. My explanation requires a bit of a preamble:
To say that "this really happened" does not absolve the director of all responsibility in deciding to film the event, as if he were merely a window to history rather than a selective distorting lens. Zobel wanted to film this particular event in a way that requires complete enhancement and a lot of speculation, all of which is radically distinct from the actual event, both representationally and, of course, ontologically. But even more fundamentally, I would say that the basic decision to film one event instead of another speaks to any filmmaker's values, biases, and intentions.

Following that, I don't understand Zobel's decision to make a film of this event in the particular way that he did. For one thing, "ChickWich" does not speak to powerful overseers; only by using (quite impossibly, I admit) the actual corporate "McDonald's" rubric would we be able to appreciate the panoptical effect of employee behavior in a remote franchise. Without the historical corporate charge investing these franchises, we are left to think allegorically, and we will tend to ascribe guilt more to individuals caught in this situation, because we know nothing about the invented "ChickWich."

Zobel speculates that the assistant manager Sandra, perhaps even subconsciously, had it out for Becky, given a number of fraught moments, including Becky's mockery of Sandra's sex life and Sandra's subsequent baleful stare, both of which are dramatic inventions that telegraph a secret motivation for Sandra's willingness to have her employee suffer humiliation. This personal grudge is distinct from the influence a corporate environment might have that would permit such a terrible thing to happen, and more attention is brought to bear upon this resentment than any universal human tendency to follow faceless authoritative commands.

Becky is shown to be oddly unaffected at first by her manager's order to disrobe. She is indignant, fleetingly defiant, but in spite of her apparent self-possession, she conforms. The history of the event dictates her compliance, but her personality is an invention that creates dissonance between who she seems to be and what she actually does. What's more, the conventional beauty of her naked physical appearance suddenly sexualizes her presence in a way that makes it too easy to imagine why Van would suddenly look at this young girl as a sexual object (without, of course, justifying any of his behavior). These directorial decisions bring us further and further away from implicating the powers of authority that facilitated this tragedy.

I agree with puxzkkx above that showing the caller was a mistake, partly because, as puzxkkx writes, "the focus is shifted from the psychology of compliance [presumably the raison d'être for this film] to an external avatar of villainy." The caller is a middle-class father who works as some kind of phone support for a nameless corporation, but before we know this, we can only identify him as a man who operates from a home and occasionally smirks at his victims' willingness to do what he commands. These reaction shots enlist our own disbelief, for example, when Van gamely asks the caller if he should put the phone on her back so that he can hear the spanking. By sharing the caller's suppressed grin of astonishment at his own success, we see through the ruse and are lifted above the victims, and as a result, we can more easily condemn the actions of the lower-class employees.

One of the striking details of this event that was omitted from the film version was the fact that the caller David R. Stewart worked for Corrections Corporation of America, a company that owns and manages prisons and detention centers. Does his commanding rhetoric--his ease with a policeman's vernacular--stem from his experience working for this company? Why doesn't the fictional caller in Zobel's work have an identical job? And even if it were legally impossible, doesn't this omission, like the one above involving the switch from McDonald's to ChickWich, erase a large part of the systemic authoritative influence supposedly being implicated in this film?

The result of these decisions, for me, is a story about a vindictive working-class woman with a sexually violent, perhaps mentally impaired fiancé. Sandra's final pathetic attempt to utter pleasantries in the face of the atrocious evidence of her criminal behavior underscores her pathology of denial that further distances her from "us." Because of these peculiar, invented characterizations, the film winds up speaking to neither the pitfalls of power systems nor our positions as individuals in a late capitalist world unduly influenced by authoritative institutions, which, judging by Zobel's accounts, was the Foucauldian thesis behind this film.

Finally, and on a lighter note, while my wife hated the film's presentation and despised the director's methods, I was able to blur my eyes occasionally, abstract the swatches of teal and orange, and enjoy a conspicuous example of what has been decried in the Orange & Teal thread.

I won't even go there with the implication that the film lacks the courage of its convictions because it's not literally showing us a McDonalds. And disliking the film for not being the Harun Farocki essay it isn't and never aspired to be seems equally off-base to me. But what I really don't get are your problems with the film's psychology and with the creation of the characters.

gcgiles1dollarbin wrote:Zobel speculates that the assistant manager Sandra, perhaps even subconsciously, had it out for Becky, given a number of fraught moments, including Becky's mockery of Sandra's sex life and Sandra's subsequent baleful stare, both of which are dramatic inventions that telegraph a secret motivation for Sandra's willingness to have her employee suffer humiliation. This personal grudge is distinct from the influence a corporate environment might have that would permit such a terrible thing to happen, and more attention is brought to bear upon this resentment than any universal human tendency to follow faceless authoritative commands.

For me these moments are more about how clueless, out of touch with her employees (for whom this is a job, not a career) and beaten down Sandra herself is, rather than any of the trumped up personal grudge backstory you're stuck on.

gcgiles1dollarbin wrote:Becky is shown to be oddly unaffected at first by her manager's order to disrobe. She is indignant, fleetingly defiant, but in spite of her apparent self-possession, she conforms. The history of the event dictates her compliance, but her personality is an invention that creates dissonance between who she seems to be and what she actually does. What's more, the conventional beauty of her naked physical appearance suddenly sexualizes her presence in a way that makes it too easy to imagine why Van would suddenly look at this young girl as a sexual object (without, of course, justifying any of his behavior). These directorial decisions bring us further and further away from implicating the powers of authority that facilitated this tragedy.

This line especially jumped out at me: "She is indignant, fleetingly defiant, but in spite of her apparent self-possession, she conforms." Yeah, I'd say that's pretty much the entire point of this film and the Raison d'être of the whole field of social psychology. That in spite of what we imagine to be our individual character, we are all at risk of complying with powerful social pressures to participate in questionable -- even horrible -- actions in ways that may seem, in the context of the rest of our individual personal histories, very much "out of character."

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but it really seems like you're not sure what you're talking about vis-a-vis the basic principles of social psychology the film's portraying. You might want to read up on the work of Milgram, Zimbardo, Cialdini, etc. and key ideas like obedience to authority, cognitive dissonance*, commitment and consistency, social proof, etc. before you attempt to dismiss them summarily in language that seems to be inadvertently describing their insights.

I'm not trying to argue that viewers need to come to this film at the end of some protracted reading list. For the ones it's already working for it's likely that many of these social forces are intuitively obvious. For you, they don't seem to be. So if you're going to propose to critique the on film its own terms you might want to know what they are first.

Finally, how you weren't moved to empathy by Ann Dowd's performance as Sandra escapes me. For a small film as dark and demanding as this one, there's an unusually large and diverse amount of praise on the board in this thread and a few others specifically for the quality and effectiveness of this performance, which is really the lead role in the film.

*[Here's the pretty spot-on definition of "cognitive dissonance" you yourself wrote part of above: A feeling of psychological discomfort created by the difference "between who she seems to be and what she actually does."]

warren oates wrote:For me these moments are more about how clueless, out of touch with her employees (for whom this is a job, not a career) and beaten down Sandra herself is, rather than any of the trumped up personal grudge backstory you're stuck on.

That's how I saw it as well. Sandra was visibly horrified and reluctant to strip search the girl, but was also used to being completely subservient to authority as far as her job duties were concerned (in her mind, these specific duties were being sanctioned by her superior).

warren oates wrote:I'm not trying to argue that viewers need to come to this film at the end of some protracted reading list.

warren oates wrote:You might want to read up on the work of Milgram, Zimbardo, Cialdini, etc. and key ideas like obedience to authority, cognitive dissonance*, commitment and consistency, social proof, etc. before you attempt to dismiss them summarily in language that seems to be inadvertently describing their insights.

Actually, you are tossing around a reading list like it's some sort of prerequisite to understanding this film--doing precisely what you claim not to be doing and what you seem to be accusing me of doing with your meaningless "Farocki" crack--and at any rate, what are you talking about?! When did I cite Milgram, Zimbardo, or Cialdini? You speak of these authors as though they have developed a science of social psychology that everyone universally accepts, rather than a number of theories among many in a vast field. I am totally and purposefully invoking ideas that permeate works on the relationship between the individual and the state, particularly those described by writers like Michel Foucault in his collection of lectures Security, Territory, Population, or David Lloyd & Paul Thomas's Culture and the State--two books I happen to admire--however, I'm not going to demand of my intellectual opponents, like some smug twit, that they must read these before possibly understanding the way in which I describe some indie drama. These ideas strike me as perfectly relevant to Zobel's work, given the corporate environment of this film and the fact that the caller impersonated a policeman. If you think to yourself, Actually, no, your ideas are shit and irrelevant to the picture (which is roughly the tenor of your response)--or if you don't understand them--that's fine, but don't be so insipidly condescending to suggest that I don't know what I'm talking about and then pronounce a litany of work that I am not even discussing. Give people you don't agree with the benefit of the doubt now and then. I didn't direct my post at your personal field of inquiry, but your response toward mine is pretty snide. I mean, forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but...

EDIT: The above is an overheated, reactive wank. I apologize to warren oates for being so unnecessarily ornery.

Hey, I like Farocki films. I just don't think this subject matter would have been better served by his approach or particular theoretical interests.

Zobel's goal was to film a convincing dramatization of a crime that was also an almost perfect "natural experiment," and that was informed by some of the most important ideas in social psychology -- first and foremost Milgram's studies of obedience to authority -- not an analysis based on political theory. Otherwise, like you said in your preamble, he would have made a totally different film.

Social psychology is not my personal/professional field of inquiry, just the one that seems most directly relevant to this film. My point was more about how coming at a work like this from the wrong paradigm tends to distort everything about it so completely that an obviously smart person like you can manage to accurately describe precisely how it's working without concluding that this is, in fact, both the the film's intention and a realistic portrayal of the way our world works. You're unique among the dissenters in accusing the film of doing pretty much what it's aiming to do and claiming that this is somehow a failure. But it's only problematic if you think the film ought to be more abstractly political or more about McDonalds specifically (when it might have been and, in fact, had been numerous other restaurant chains where the caller nearly got as far) or a Foucauldian comment on the American prison industrial complex, or a paen to the notion of individual resistance rather than a story about how otherwise ordinary decent people can be made to do horrible things to each other in the most mundane contexts. The biggest stretch for me are your assertions that Compliance is somehow disdainful of any/all of its working class* characters as individuals rather than, say, a convincing and layered portrait of how fast-food jobs subtly dehumanize and disempower people such that they become situationally easy prey for the manipulations of someone like the caller.+

Like I said after that bit you cut off above, the viewers responding to the film positively need not have studied social psychology formally, so long as they're recognizing the intuitive truth of the dynamics that the field has described and that Zobel is capturing. I'm not sure why you failed to connect with these. But I do think you'd see the film's intentions and achievements differently if you had some more background.

Anyway, if you really don't know the Milgram study, do yourself a favor and look at it sometime. It's a quick read and the film clips are all over the Internet. It really wouldn't take you that much longer to tear through the social psychology section of a good Psych 101 textbook, which would give you most of what you need to know about all this. I'm sensing that part of your problem with this film may be personal assumptions about the conception/construction of the individual that may be entirely at odds with the prevailing body of evidence from this discipline. Part of the reason that social psychology remains perennially popular with undergrads is because its most profound and useful insights are not difficult or obscure but seem almost immediately self-evident. The masters of the field like Milgram are describing a set of laws that most of us already know intuitively from living in a social world. Not just the techniques of control that keep cult members and totalitarian societies in line, but the unspoken rules that underlie the everyday dynamics of commerce, dating, negotiation, con games, advertising, political campaigns (Obama's 2012 brain trust included Robert Cialdini), etc. -- pretty much every interaction where we want something from someone or they from us. I'm sure there are libraries of speculation about such transactions in any given theoretical discipline. Yet social psychology is the body of knowledge that seeks to understand this in practical terms from the street level, in a way that's reverse-engineered to empower us. I've read great anthropology and philosophy texts about similar territory but none that would make me more persuasive or more resistant to persuasion in the way that, say, Cialdini's Influence has.

+[That last part actually makes Compliance sound kind of Foucauldian, at least more so than the poor-sploitation film you've been making it out to be.]
*[Remember that it's ultimately the most economically and socially marginal individual who finally calls bullshit on the whole scenario and he's afforded this role because of his status outside the group.]

puxzkkx wrote: Without it - and without the “Inspired By…” introduction - this could be prime Buñuel, a colossal absurdity that fakes you out with the very reality that provided the seed of its idea. Not only does this destroy what is interesting about the case to begin with - the reasons why these people did what they were told to do - but it demands our attention divert to a specific performance, and the performance in question is banal.

I actually felt knowing it was based on real events made the film even more shocking and gave it an edge, and was anything but banal. If it hadn't had the signpost at the beginning it would have come across as far fetched and heavy handed.