Behind the Shock Machine (42 page)

Prozi’s segment begins when he’s about to give the ninth shock. For thirteen minutes, or almost a third of the film, we watch Prozi’s excruciating attempts to convince the experimenter to stop. His tension is both physical and verbal: he gets up, walks around, pleads with the experimenter, and calls out to the learner.

A couple of times I’ve screened the film in classes, showing a snippet of Prozi to give students a sense of what the experience was like from the subject’s point of view. Each time, a cry has gone up when I’ve tried to switch it off before Prozi’s segment is over. It’s hard not to become engaged with Fred, with his kindness and conflict, his deference and confusion. Our sympathies, and a kind of horrible fascination with how far he’ll go, make it impossible to turn off. Johnson noted
this in his first test run of the edited version. In July 1965, he reported to Milgram:

I ran it in Holt, Rinehart and Winston’s small screening room. A number of other employees from the Foreign Language Dept. were also present . . . no one was fooled by the “punishment-learning” front, and all found it incredible that subjects could have been deceived. They thought the subjects protests phoney. . . . They also felt their lunch hour had been ruined and their faith in mankind shaken. Yet for a week now several of the women have been pestering me to rerun the film on a Saturday for them and their husbands.
⁷

Fred Prozi’s role in
Obedience
reveals a moral ambiguity that has been obscured in most subsequent popular depictions. Milgram wanted us to believe that his experiment was a stage on which a struggle between morality and immorality, victim and torturer, and good and evil was played out. But the footage of subjects, even despite the editing, is not nearly so clear-cut. Who was the victim and who was the torturer? What was good and what was evil? Milgram’s choice of Prozi as star reveals Milgram the artist, with his sensitivity to dramatic potential, at work. What he missed was how Prozi’s performance illuminated many of the complex and troubling inconsistencies of the experiment.

Part of the cutting-room footage shows Milgram asking each man if he would agree to the film being shown to psychologists. Fred Prozi hesitated, then asked whether his face would be shown “nationwide or something?” but Milgram assured him it would be for psychologists only and Fred, reassured, agreed. This wasn’t true. In December 1965, Milgram registered copyright on the film, and by 1969 it was available for sale or hire for university teaching programs. However, television producers recognized the potential in the material, and Milgram was approached repeatedly for permission to broadcast it. He initially turned down such requests, honoring the agreements he had made with those who had been filmed. But in the late 1960s, he granted permission to broadcast it on Italian and German television.
⁸
And in
1974, Milgram allowed CBS’s
60 Minutes
to screen part of it to coincide with the publication of his book.

On Sunday, March 31, 1974, a story about Milgram’s research titled “I Was Only Following Orders” appeared on the show, sandwiched between “Apricot Seeds: Cure or Quackery?” and an interview with Helen Gurley Brown, editor of
Cosmopolitan
, who had been quoted in the promo saying, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

This feature report on the experiments, the first to be aired in prime time, capitalized on the sensationalism surrounding Milgram’s claims that his experiment cast a light on the reasons behind wartime atrocities. It began with a montage of marching soldiers, Eichmann on trial, and footage from concentration camps, showing bodies piled on top of one another. Then Vietnam: people running from bombings, napalm attacks, more bodies. Reporter Morley Safer interviewed Milgram about his research, and Milgram, sitting rigidly, half-turned from Safer, looked wooden and self-conscious. Instead of looking at Safer when he replied, Milgram kept glancing down at his lap. (Tom Blass told me it was because he was looking at his notes.)

The eighteen-minute segment about Milgram’s research featured ten minutes of
Obedience
. I wonder if Prozi ever saw it and, if so, how he felt about his actions being contextualized against images of genocide and torture.

As the
Obedience
footage played, Milgram described what was happening in solemn voice-over. The black-and-white film looked curiously dated in what was by then a world of color television.

Safer remarked that he wouldn’t have gone past the third switch. “Well, Mr. Safer, I’d have to say that’s an illusion,” Milgram intoned. “If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we have seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.” His hesitancy, his lack of eye contact, and his reliance on notes undermined the bravura of his words. He did not look like a man confident about the claims that he was making. Perhaps he was just nervous being on such a high-profile television show, especially in light of the recent criticism his book had received. Or perhaps he sensed that he
was going too far. I like to think that Milgram looked uncomfortable because he had a twinge of remorse—that he hesitated because he was conscious that, while few of his subjects might read his book, many might be watching
60 Minutes
that night and that his responsibility to them extended to how they were depicted in the media.

The
60 Minutes
story was the first in a series of current affairs reports during the 1970s that explored the link between Milgram’s subjects and Nazism. The run sheet for BBC’s
Horizon
, for example, began, “The barbed wire of Auschwitz. Officials loading Jews into railway wagons. A long tracking shot past railway lines in Holland from which the Jews set out on their last journey.”
⁹
It was hardly surprising that in the public mind, despite Milgram’s insistence that it was not personality that shaped behavior, his subjects became synonymous with murderous brutality and ingrained evil.

While prime-time television depicted Milgram’s subjects as New Haven Nazis, other portrayals were concerned about the ethical dimension of the research. Milgram’s use of deception was the inspiration for several imaginative representations, including plays, films, and screen dramas.

The Dogs of Pavlov
, written by Welsh playwright and doctor Dannie Abse, appeared on the London stage in 1971. A fictionalized account of the experiments, it explored the ethics from the subjects’ point of view. In his introduction, Abse argued that research such as Milgram’s divested subjects of their human dignity because they were cheated and lied to (or, as he put it, they were “taken in” by a “bullshit cover story”). Abse addressed the subjects of the experiment directly: “You were conned, and in my view, you have a right to feel angry.” He also called Milgram’s role into question. “In order to demonstrate that subjects may behave like so many Eichmanns the experimenter [referring to Milgram] had to act the part . . . of a Himmler.” He argued that while Milgram was motivated by noble intentions, his subjects were treated like “guinea pigs” and that Milgram had continued when he had a choice to stop.
¹⁰

Abse sent Milgram his introduction to the play. Milgram replied that he felt Abse had been “harsh.” He regarded it as hypocritical that
Abse, who relied on illusion as a playwright, was critical of the same quality in Milgram’s experiment. In fact, he pointed out the similarities between their projects:

I will not say that you cheated, tricked and defrauded your audience [in the play]. But I would hold the same claim for the experiment. Misinformation is employed in the experiment; illusion is used when necessary to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at truths. . . . As a dramatist you surely understand that illusion may serve a revelatory function. . . . The participant, rather than the external critic, must be the ultimate source of judgement; otherwise the criticism is akin to denouncing the misinformation fed to the guest of honor at a surprise party without taking into account his reaction to it.

Soon after this letter, he sent another, as if he couldn’t get Abse’s criticism out of his mind. Abse seems to have infuriated him. In the second letter, Milgram was on the attack. He pointed out that Abse, a playwright and a physician, experienced “contradictions” in both roles—“a reliance on illusion and a hatred of it, a need to treat people as individuals but a need to objectify them”—and yet attacked Milgram for doing the same. While writing a play with the theme of victimization, Abse had “created a victim of [his] own” in Milgram: “You benefit artistically by involving an audience in my experiment, but you keep yourself untainted by denouncing it.” It’s an extraordinarily angry letter, and Milgram admits in the final lines that he “might have gone too far” but hopes that by being frank Abse will understand him better.
¹¹

I wondered why Abse’s introduction had made Milgram so mad. It certainly wasn’t the first time he’d been criticized; he’d had years of it by then. Perhaps it was that he wanted Abse’s approval more than that of his fellow scientists. Perhaps Milgram identified with Abse, who successfully combined his medical career with playwriting and poetry. And even though Milgram did privately admit doubts about the experiment’s status as science, he never doubted its status as a work of art.

Abse’s play reflected a more skeptical view of science and scientists that had gathered momentum since the 1960s. By the mid-1970s, depictions of the experiment in popular culture increasingly focused not only on the ethics of the research but also on the man behind it.

I wondered if it was the experience with Abse that led Milgram to work more closely with the next playwright who approached him. In the mid-1960s, George Bellak had unsuccessfully tried to interest two television networks in the idea of a drama based on the experiments, one of which rejected it as “anti-God.” But, in the following years, the My Lai massacre, the photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phúc (the “napalm girl”), and the Watergate scandal dominated the headlines and captured the public’s interest in the issue of obedience to authority. On his next approach, this time to CBS, the idea of a drama based on the experiments was “snapped up.”
¹²

Bellak wrote to Milgram in September 1974, stating that he’d carried a clipping about the experiments around with him for eleven years with the idea of writing about them, and news of Milgram’s book had prompted him to revisit the idea. CBS had commissioned a script. Would Milgram meet with him or call him to talk about his research? They met, and two months later Bellak sent Milgram his script for
The Tenth Level
.

Clearly, Milgram didn’t like what he read, because he immediately sought legal advice on copyright infringement (presumably of the machine and the experiment) and defamation. But the legal advice stated that they were unlikely to win because the character was fictional.
¹³
Perhaps resigning himself to the inevitable, about a week after he received the script Milgram asked for a fee for helping Bellak to develop the story and 25 percent of any royalties if the play made its way onto stage or screen.
¹⁴

Milgram served as a “technical adviser” during the filming and was paid $5,000 by CBS.
¹⁵
His name doesn’t appear in the credits, which former student Sharon Presley said was because he “wasn’t too happy with it and wouldn’t let his name be associated with it”: “It misrepresents several crucial aspects of the experiment. NO ONE ever went berserk in the real experiment and Milgram never regretted what he had done as the Shatner character does.”
¹⁶

But that wasn’t quite the case. In the year between first seeing the script and its finalization, Milgram seemed to have warmed to the idea of it. Perhaps he took heart from the fact that it was fiction. Two months before the first screening, he approached
TV Guide
and the
New York Times Magazine
to see if they would do an article about him, linked to the upcoming show.
¹⁷
And Milgram’s notes as he watched the program indicate that, overall, he was happy with what he saw. He recognized one character, a woman instrumental in arranging the hearing, as Diana Baumrind. He thought the scenes of the hearing were “excellent” and, despite some “tv hokum,” the show was “quite good.” He was pleased enough, in fact, to draft new ads for his book, tying it to the production:

You saw and were stunned by the
Playhouse 90
drama

THE TENTH LEVEL

Starring William Shatner

Now read the book behind the play:

OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY

An Experimental View

By S. Milgram

Published by Harper and Row

Hardcover $10.00 Paperback $3.45

A National Book Award Nominee 1974
¹⁸

Milgram dominated the interviews and representations of the obedience research throughout the remainder of his life. Following his death in 1984, Milgram’s associates were sought out whenever the experiments hit the news again. At least one program interviewed Williams for comment, and the story focused on his behavior in ordering subjects to continue.

In a 1997 episode of the news program
Dateline NBC
, the story opened with a clip from the original
Candid Camera
, featuring Allen Funt’s voice-over and a laughter track. Referring to a replication of Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment, the journalist asked, “But
what are the outer limits of conformity?” and then warned that the footage to follow “had rarely been seen on network television.” Film from
Obedience
was shown. This time, instead of Fred Prozi, it was another man. Why not Prozi? I wondered. I like to imagine that he was approached and refused permission. Yet the face of a second subject, who looked on as McDonough was strapped into the chair, was blurred, suggesting that the man or his family had also refused permission. The man would eventually be classed as disobedient, but the viewer didn’t know this yet.
Dateline
’s voice-over instructed people to pay attention to the man’s struggle—how he repeatedly turned to Williams as the learner cried out, and Williams’s cold voice, off-camera, instructed him to go on. It was a marked departure from the
60 Minutes
story more than twenty years earlier.