das experiment

from a real person :

By Harvey S. Karten.

Have you ever taken part in a psychological experiment? I have, just one in my freshman year at college. Some graduate students assembled eight of us in totally dark room. A pin point of light appeared above our heads. The light seemed to move. Each of us was asked how far the light moved. Little did we know that two of the eight freshmen were shills attempting to influence the behavior of the naive ones like me, to persuade them that the light moved a greater distance than it actually did. In truth, the light did not move at all but a physical law known as the auto-kinetic effect made the light appear to move. Anyway, such an experience is not likely to be made into a movie unless, say, some of us began beating up the shills, which did not happen at least when I was a guinea pig.

A far more cinematic experience takes place in Oliver Hirschbiegel's film "Das Experiment," based on an actual one that took part twenty years earlier in Palo Alto California based in Stanford University. Twenty four men were divided by the professor into two equal groups: one to be guards and others the captors they supervised. Lo, just six days into the two-week experiment, the guards began torturing the prisoners. The plug was pulled.

I think it important to mention that the experiment on which this story is based took part not in Germany but here in the U.S., the land of freedom, lest we consider the similar results that went down at the German lab resulted from the fact that the "guards" were Germans, accustomed perhaps to following orders as good Germans used to be. "Das Experiment" does not therefore appear to be an allegory of Nazism but rather a universal truth. Do you think the results would be replicated? Let's see what happened here...

A dozen Germans from various walks of life are rounded up via an ad promising each 4,000 DM (Deutsche Marken are now obsolete but we're talking $2,000 U.S.) to all those who complete fourteen days in a mock jail. Eight are selected as guards. Twelve are to be their prisoners. On the first day there's a Camp Davidspirit; the guards and prisoners get together and decide to chill for the two weeks, collecting their money nice and easy. But scheisse happens.

One guy, Tarek Fahd (Moritz Bleibtreu), a taxi driver who is a college graduate, gets a job with a newspaper unbeknownst to the others. He is to wear a pair of glasses that can videotape the goings-on and in return the editor will pay him 10,000 DM. This means that he'd better get some drama going and besides he's a wiseass college guy, so he starts taunting the guards. One thing leads to another and the guards go nuts; beating up on the increasingly rebellious prisoners, clubbing them even though violence is prohibited, even shoving one into a black box not a picnic if you're claustrophobic to boot. The battle escalates until near the conclusion of the two-hour pic, Hirschbiegel introduces enough mayhem to qualify "Das Experiment" as a competitor of "XXX."

So what do we make of this? We might have predicted what would happen. After all you don't expect Don Bohlinger and Christoph Darnstadt's screenplay to show the guys living in peace and harmony for the fourteen days! Not only is this a movie but those of us who prepared for the experience know that it's based on the Stanford University experiment in which things go haywire.

However, though we know what's going to happen, we may not be prepared for how involving the film is, how the story pulls us into the action and how we are horrified because the havoc that reigns is not the cartoon mayhem of a 007 experience or a XXX or a cartoon. This is for real. People really do act this way.

In fact the story is so absorbing that I dare say the real purpose of the film is to test not so much what the guards will do to the prisoners who try to humiliate them at first by horsing around and later by serious stuff, but how do we in the audience deal with the situation. If you're itching for blood, Bohlinger, Darnstadt and Hirschbiegel rest their case. Particularly effective acting by Justus von Dohnanyi as the Aryan-appearing guard Berus.