Experimenter

I saw this a couple of weeks ago but I'm just now getting around to writing about it. So I guess it's delayed delayed consumption?  Anyway, this was an interesting movie and not all that bad.  The subject matter was interesting (more on that in a moment) but it was also fairly unique in it's style, in that it was more like a play than a movie.

The main character (Dr. Stanley Milgrim, played by Peter Sarsgaard) often steps out of scenes and breaks the fourth wall to act more like a narrator throughout the movie. It was particularly weird at the end when he said something along the lines of "this is the year I died."  Besides that, some of the scenes (especially an early driving scene) that were so obviously shot on a blue screen I assume it was intentially done to make it look like something you would see at a theater.  I couldn't figure out why the movie went with this concept, but it might have just hit me as I wrote that last sentence.  I'll come back to it later. 

Besides Sarsgaard (whou couldn't have more "a's" in his name if he tried), the other main character Winona Ryder, who plays Milgram's wife.  My first thought seeing her was, "what the hell has Winona Ryder been up to?"  She did a pretty good job but I'm not going to use my time here to judge other the specific performances by the actors, unless they were unbelievably good or bad. And Ryder was neither.  At the end of the movie there is a shot of Milgram's real life wife (at least that's what I assumed because it wasn't explicitly stated) which I always appreciate in "based on true events" type movies because otherwise I have to go Google it to see the real stuff. And this wasn't a movie that stuck with me enough to remember to do that later.

Before I go any further, there's one more thing I have to bring up. What the hell was up with Milgram's beard?  

Also showing him breaking the fourth wall.

Was that the style back then?  Or was that just him messing with people. Because I've had a beard for the last few months and there is no way I would want it to look like that. It's like the exact opposite of a mustache. I've heard people say that a goatee is the opposite of a mustache but they're wrong. This is the exact opposite of a mustache.

One reason I think he might have done it to mess with people is because that was kind of his whole shtick. And he was pretty good at it. Before watching the movie I knew that he did the shock experiment, but not much else. Which is interesting because that was a big theme of the movie, that that research had been so impactful that it overshadowed everything else he did. Which sucked because that was one of the first things that he had done. But what I found fascinating was that I was familiar with some of his later experiments, I just didn't know that he had done them.  Like the work he did with the "Six Degrees of Separation" theory.  Although original done by Michael Gurevich (and I'm citing Wikipedia here) in 1961, Milgram's work on the topic got so much publicity that it overshadowed the original work.

Milgram also did work showing how we are influenced by others by having someone stand on a busy street and pretend to stare at something up in the sky. Eventually people stop and start looking too.  This was a phenomenon that I was familiar with, but I had no idea it was associated with Milgram's work.

So, getting back to the movie as a play, I wonder if that was the intention. Some commentary about how we think we're active in our lives, but all we're really doing is living in someone else's play.  I"m not saying that was it for sure, but it seems to fit with Milgram's general feelings and work on the human condition.  I think.

The movie did make me want to learn more about Milgram, or more specifically, about the shock experiments (again with the overshadowing) and luckily my wife had a copy his book on the study, "Obedience to Authority." So look for a post on that soon. (Talk about delayed consumption!  That book was published in the 1974.)