Review: Compliance (2012)

When I sat down to watch Compliance (2012, Zobel), I remembered hearing something about the film but had no idea what to expect. The warning at the beginning, “Based on a True Story,” didn’t really affect me the way it used to, knowing how loosely that phrase is used by Hollywood these day – or in the case of Fargo, offered as a mere prop to fool audiences into deeper identification. It was clear from the beginning that Compliance was low budget fare, with a largely unknown cast and a cinema verite approach to storytelling. And then events started to unfold in a way that made me increasingly uneasy and dubious of its plausibility. The story revolves around an 18-year-old employee, Becky (Dreama Walker – even her name seems to compound the notion of the story’s implausibility), who is charged with stealing money from a customer. She is taken in the back of the restaurant by manager Sandra (Ann Dowd), who first searches her bag and locker and then follows a police officer’s orders to strip search her. An employee strip searching another employee, you ask? This is where the plausibility really starts to try the patience. And when you learn that these orders were given by a police officer on the other end of a wireless phone, you start to wonder why they would make such an idiotic movie.

Sure we are used to suspension of disbelief in film, but this is taking it a little far, particularly as she subsequently takes the clothes in a plastic bag out of the room, forcing Becky to bend over so she can look for hidden money and then allows a series of employees and then her fiancé to watch the girl over the next few hours; the whole time covered only by a dirty apron. Not surprisingly, things get out of hand and end up with the girl dancing naked for the fiancé, being examined by him like a gynecologist, being spanked by him naked for 10 minutes and then performing fellatio. As the employees finally realize they are the victims of a prank call gone terribly awry, her fiancé is arrested, Sandra ends up on 20/20 (along with Becky) and the police catch the criminal.

As the credits rolled, I was left to wonder how “True” this absurd story could be. I mean, come on, no one ever questioned this “officer” as he gave them increasingly lewd and outrageous orders? No one called the manager to make sure the story was true (the crank caller claimed the boss was on the other line)? And why did Becky stay and take the abuse for four full hours? So I immediately went online to find out the truth. And there it was in black and white, in both a number of stories of the event from 2004 and actual video footage (You Tube) of the real-life perpetrators and victims. Not only was the film true to actual events with only a few minor, and insignificant, changes, but this was one of 70 similar scams over the course of a decade, with sexual assault occurring on numerous occasions (Mirror; Daily Beast). Like many people who viewed the film, the obvious question became why?

It appears to be a disturbing example of presumed authority and how easily people can fall prey to ignoring reason and their morality in deference to an authority figure. The argument is particularly compelling given the fact that these are young women and bosses in low-paying jobs where they are taught to satisfy the commands of their superiors and customers on a daily basis. But beyond the class and age dynamics of the case is the broader implication of how ready people are to take orders from those with any authority, particularly police officers. The case, in fact, brings to mind a number of famous psychological experiments that followed the Holocaust and the still unanswerable question of why? Hannah Arendt provided one answer for the Holocaust itself with her books The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Eichmann Trial, exploring the “banality of evil” and how easily average, normal people can become instruments of extremely heinous acts including the killing of strangers. Many disagreed with her argument, which is laid out in great detail and with greater nuance in OT, but it is certainly compelling to believe that taking the historical situation of Germany into account, with dire economic situation, its shame from World War I, its necessity of a scapegoat in defeat and the ways Hitler played on the desire to return to power, together with the pure terror that emerges from random violence, helps explain the Holocaust.

However, there is no real threat of violence in these instances and not even any clear indication they will lose their jobs if they don’t comply. They believe a police officer is telling them to do something and are simply following orders. Among those social experiments that might be relevant to the case include the infamous experiments of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 60s, when he had people administer electric shocks to strangers in another room (who turned out to be actors). Even as they screamed and begged the other to stop administering the shocks, most subjects continued maximizing the voltage (Link). We can also consider the Third Wave experiment a Palo Alto history teacher conducted in 1967 with his students, creating a softer mirror of the Third Reich that the students actively embraced without much thought or resistance (Wiki). We could consider Jane Eliot’s Blue-Brown eye experiment, where she took well-behaved and happy children and created a purely constructed line between them (the color of their eyes) and watched them become cruel, segregationist and even violent in 24 hours (PBS: A Class Divided).  Or we can consider research on learned helplessness, generally conducted with animals who are leashed off from nearby food for days, before being unleashed only to find they have given up on trying to get the food and will just sit there. Some have argued a similar psychological effect might be possible in humans, who have lost their sense of self-efficacy (or belief that they have the power to influence themselves and their environment).

In all these cases, humans were manipulated to engage in terrible acts – real or imagined – often merely because they were told to. Does this mean we are a compliant species? Is our culture structured to teach obedience? Has the power of presumed authority undermined our agency and sense of ourselves as subjects in history with the power to change it? Are there differences along the lines of gender, age, race, etc. in readiness to accept the orders of others? I think it would be a mistake to read too much into this case, but it certainly provides fodder for those who believe we live in compliant times, where critical and independent thinking have been replaced by a blind tribalism and tendency toward “group think.” If this is true, it is further bad news for democracy and the power of individuals and the collective to struggle together to change the world for the better. In fact, the learned helplessness, obedience and ignorant complicity in oppression – maybe backed by a cynicism about the possibility of change – provide the ideal milieu for a world where the rich get richer, the powerful more powerful and the rest of us subject to the whims of a ruthless and uncaring market simply out to maximize profits and the greed of the few at any cost. Compliance, indeed!