Friday, March 16, 2012
Film SXSW: Compliance and the Voice of Authority
Posted by Mark Asch on Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 12:54 PM
In his Q&A, Zobel cited the Milgram Experiment as his main passkey for the material, framing the movie as a sort of what-would-you-do morality play. But he also choose to open the film with an American flag (rustling faintly around the pole in the ChickWich parking lot), and Compliance’s microcosm becomes a convincing, human-scaled demonstration of the kind of psychology behind America’s slow surrender of its civil liberties: our trust in authority, our belief that the innocent have nothing to hide; our poorly informed meekness in matters of due process (in my notes, I seem to have scrawled, in large block letters, “KNOW YOUR RIGHTS”).
Or, to be broader: I’m reading Eichmann in Jerusalem right now, for pleasure, weirdly, and Compliance jibes very much with Arendt’s account of how hierarchies of power seem inherently convincing; how we commit ourselves wholeheartedly to them no matter how arbitrary; how power reinforces itself by turning every tier of people into both exploited and exploiter; and how the reservations we barely bothered to squash at the time become so very articulated and moral in hindsight.
Is Zobel being condescending, ascribing a dumbly submissive mentality to working-class red-state white folks and flattering our implicit sense that we’d know better? Aside from being true in all its particulars, Compliance maintains an empathetic, eye-level realism in its imaging of the ChickWich: the tightly shot dinner rush and prep stations, and the introduction of the staff, with posturing teenage diffidence from the crew and slightly frumpy hard-won competence from management, all seem squarely present enough to ground any movie. If Zobel does err, he does so by surrounding the voice on the phone with drippingly ironic trappings (however accurate his banally all-American the home furnishings may be: though the real-life incident resulted in the acquittal of a suspect, Zobel is pretty unambiguous about his guilt in the film, and was only slightly less so in the Q&A).
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