An Abuse Of Power: Craig Zobel’s controversial drama Compliance explores an unsettling aspect of human behaviour.
By Ian Haydn Smith
Since premiering at Sundance in 2012, Compliance has attracted as much ire as it has acclaim. There have been walkouts at most festival screenings, accompanied by accusations of exploitation and misogyny. Though deeply disturbing in its examination of our acquiescence in the face of authority, it is a compelling film.
We open on a typically busy Friday night at a fast-food restaurant in suburban America. Sandra (Ann Dowd), the manager, receives a call from a police officer (Pat Healy) – whom we know to be an imposter – telling her that Becky (Dreama Walker), a young employee, has stolen money from a customer’s purse and needs to be detained in a room away from the other staff. He assures Sandra that the police will arrive shortly to pick her up. Becky is taken to a storeroom where she is strip-searched and, as the evening progresses, subjected to further humiliation, indignity and abuse. Outside, business in the restaurant continues as usual.
Compliance is based on what became known as the ‘strip search prank call scam’, a series of incidents that occurred between 1994 and 2004, which involved a man calling a restaurant or local store, claiming to be a police detective. He would convince managers to conduct thorough searches of female employees, even requesting that more extreme acts be carried out, on behalf of the police. In particular, the film recalls the events that took place at a McDonalds in Mount Washington, Kentucky on 9 April 2004.
The issues raised in Compliance bring to mind an infamous social experiment carried out by Stanley Miligram at Yale University in 1961. Each test involved two volunteers being placed in adjacent rooms. One – the ‘learner’ – was wired up to a generator, while the other – the ‘teacher’ – asked a series of questions. If the ‘learner’ answered incorrectly, the ‘teacher’ punished them with an electric shock. With each subsequent shock, the charge was increased by 15 volts until it reached a maximum of 450. What the ‘teachers’ did not know was that the ‘learners’ were played by actors and no actual punishment was administered. At certain points, the ‘teachers’ questioned the directive to increase the voltage, but were told by Miligram that they should continue, even against the sound of the ‘learner’ banging on the wall, begging them to stop, falsely claiming that they had a heart condition. In the majority of cases, the shocks were continued.
Coinciding with Adolf Eichmann’s trial for war crimes in Jerusalem, Miligram wanted to interrogate the role of authority in our lives. His results revealed the insidious nature of power and the way it can affect the individual and collective psyche, highlighting abnormal behaviour that occurs when people are placed under excessive degrees of duress. Miligram’s findings play a key role in the events that unfold in Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) and Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure (2008). The first investigates the acts of torture committed by US soldiers against detainees at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, the second at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Miligram’s thesis also goes some way to explaining the actions of the characters in Compliance.
Zobel focuses on the minutiae of working life at the restaurant. We see, in extreme close-up, food being prepared: chicken frying, fries divided into portions, utensils being washed. It is a simple, but effective, ploy; Zobel details the chores that ensure the restaurant operates like a machine, conveying how intense a busy shift can get and how life outside of the restaurant becomes an irrelevance. This is neither an air force base nor a military prison, but for the restaurant to operate effectively, employees must close themselves off from the rest of the world and focus on the job at hand. The man posing as a police officer knows that all he needs to manipulate and coerce is a commanding voice and the appearance of authority. As a result, the employees behave in a way that, under any other circumstance, they would consider utterly reprehensible.
If Compliance comprised of nothing more than Becky’s humiliation, its critics would be justified in attacking it. However, an extended coda allows us to see other victims in the wake of the investigation. Particularly Sandra, whose only ‘crime’ was unquestioning obedience to an authority figure. If we did not witness, often from a painfully intimate perspective, what Becky endures and how such a situation spirals out of control, we might be no better informed than the media figures and investigating officers, swarming over the detritus, in failing to grasp how such an incident could have taken place. Zobel’s film is shocking. And so it should be. In order to operate effectively, society requires some semblance of order, but blind obedience to those who enforce it can undermine the rights it is intended to uphold.
With thanks to Curzon Cinemas
Compliance opens on Fri 22 March. Watch the trailer and book tickets here.