Show Your Work: On “Experimenter”

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Søren Kierkegaard

Undoubtedly, Kierkegaard had loftier goals in mind when he penned this observation, but it does neatly underscore a problem inherent to the biographical film. That while a life in and of itself can be interesting and worthy of examination, it does not necessarily mean it fits comfortably into a narratively satisfying story structure. This issue mushrooms considerably when dealing with the life of someone famous or well-known. I’ve written before about the hurdles of rendering a biographical documentary on film, in that the forward plotting of life events become nothing more than ponderous signposts marking time between one famous moment and the next. It usually adds up to an experience no more insightful or affecting than reading the subject’s Wikipedia entry.

When committing a fictionalized version of famous or historical events onscreen, there is also a basic formal obstacle to overcome: authenticity. The suspension of disbelief required to accept an artistic representation of a true story is more difficult to attain, as the fake is almost always going to be compared unfavourably against a known reality. For example, viewers are rarely able to fully accept an actor playing a real person, because the cognitive dissonance is usually too much to reconcile. This is often why “authentic” mimicry of a real person tends to be a major point of discussion when evaluating such things—think of the positive critical response to Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator (2004) or the disparagement of Joaquin Phoenix’s decidedly un-Johnny-Cash-like vocal performance in Walk the Line (2005).

When Kierkegaard’s quote is invoked late in Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter (2015), it comes as a casually-tossed-off mission statement in a film that aggressively pushes back against the strictures of traditional biopics. The film is perhaps too simply described as a biography of world renowned American psychologist Stanley Milgram, of the Milgram Experiment. In 1961, his research team crafted a controlled environment in which subjects are provoked by an authority figure into inflicting pain (or rather, into believing they are inflicting pain) to a person (an actor) in another room. In a film preoccupied with manipulation, Experimenter is itself a manipulation.

There is a playfulness to Almereyda’s film as it knowingly does away with the structural issues of biopics. Rather than starting with the details of Milgram’s childhood, the film opens with the famed 1961 experiment, with Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) addressing the camera, narrating each stage and level of artifice involved in creating the experiment. It’s the introduction of a circuitous narrative structure, beginning not with the birth of Milgram the man, but Milgram the famous academic.

Boilerplate biographical details are later dispensed perfunctorily by Milgram himself again addressing the audience. While describing the mundane details of his birth, Milgram walks down a Yale University hallway teeming with students, faculty… And an elephant, the presence of which goes unremarked upon. The proverbial elephant in the room is not the only instance of Experimenter’s formal experimentation. What starts as a charmingly nostalgic use of rear projection in a car, in which Milgram and his wife Sasha (Winona Ryder) drive to the house of Milgram’s mentor Solomon Asch, stretches beyond the confines of the vehicle. The Asch’s house is rear projected onto a proscenium-style backdrop, as the two couples exchange stories of how they each met their respective spouses (the viewer having already witnessed the Milgrams’ meet-cute in an earlier scene). In another instance, an appearance by Milgram on The Dick Cavett Show is devoid of the applause and cheers of the usual studio audience. These moments puncture any notion of authenticity to reveal the intricate fabrication beneath the fictionalization of real-life events.

The film’s use of actors is also a shrewd exegesis of the typical casting decisions in mainstream biopics. While Sarsgaard’s performance is natural and understated, his physical appearance between scenes plays with idea of “authentic mimicry”—the sudden appearance of Milgram’s thick chinstrap beard is jarring in both that it’s almost purposely fake-looking, yet immediately identifiable as Milgram’s signature look in the 1970s. Other casting choices invoke a sort of uncanny valley reaction (the eeriness of the silent Dick Cavett Show is all the more odd with Tom Bateman as a slightly inexact Cavett), while others do away entirely with the notion of casting a lookalike (Kellan Lutz hilariously looks nothing like William Shatner).

“There are times when your life resembles a bad movie, but nothing prepares you for when your life actually becomes a bad movie,” Milgram laments to the camera while witnessing the filming of the Shatner-starring The Tenth Level (1976), a TV-movie adaptation of Milgram’s obedience experiment. Milgram frets over the cheap-looking sets, unrealistic dialogue, and ham-fisted acting, annoyed that this representation of his work has not been depicted realistically. It’s a very funny moment coming at the end of a film that has consciously done away with verisimilitude by playing up the artifice. In this respect, Experimenter has rather brilliantly encouraged an examination of its creative decisions rather than an evaluation of its fidelity to the past.