'OP-ED COLUMNIST
Ever Meek, Ever Malleable
Ben Wiseman
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: August 25, 2012 146 Comments
I INSTANTLY bought the strip-search. The nude jumping jacks, too.
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But the spanking?
That’s the point in the provocative, gripping new movie “Compliance,”about the degradation of a restaurant employee, when some people in the audience reportedly shake their heads and walk out.
Like them, I was tempted to reject the plausibility of what was happening on-screen. It’s hard to swallow. But “Compliance” asks questions too big — and too relevant to a political season of grandiose persuasion and elaborate subterfuge — to be dismissed or ignored. Although it’s playing in just nine theaters nationwide for now, it deserves a higher profile, broader notice and a viewing from start to finish.
It’s an essential parable of human gullibility. How much can people be talked into and how readily will they defer to an authority figure of sufficient craft and cunning? “Compliance” gives chilling answers.
Made on a modest budget and set during one shift at a fictional fast-food restaurant called ChickWich, it imagines that the manager, a dowdy middle-aged woman, gets a call from someone who falsely claims to be a police officer. (I haven’t spoiled much yet but am about to, at least for anyone unfamiliar with the real-life events on which “Compliance” is based.)
The “officer” on the phone tells the manager that he has evidence that a young female employee of hers just stole money from a customer’s purse. Because the cops can’t get to the restaurant for a while, he says, the manager must detain the employee herself in a back room. He instructs her to check the young woman’s pockets and handbag for the stolen money. When that doesn’t turn up anything, he uses a mix of threats and praise to persuade her to do a strip-search. And that’s just the start.
The manager’s boyfriend later assumes the duties of watching over the detained employee. Cajoled and coached by the voice on the phone, he makes her do those jumping jacks, which are meant to dislodge any hidden loot. By the time he leaves the back room, he’s also been persuaded to spank and then sexually assault her.
Preposterous, right? But the details in the movie are more or less consistent with an incident at a McDonald’s in Kentucky in 2004. And that incident was part of a series of hoaxes in which a prank caller manipulated workers at McDonald’s franchises and at other fast-food restaurants into the kind of invasive, abusive behavior depicted in the movie.
History has amply documented the human capacity for cruelty and quickness to exploit vulnerability, and “Compliance” touches on those themes. But it has even more to say about the human capacity for credulousness, along with obedience.
People routinely buy into outlandish claims that calm particular anxieties, fill given needs or affirm preferred worldviews. Religions and wrinkle-cream purveyors alike depend on that. And someone like Todd Akin, the antihero of last week’s news, illustrates it to a T. The notion that a raped woman can miraculously foil and neutralize sperm is a good 10 times crazier than anything in “Compliance,” but it dovetails beautifully with his obvious wish — and the wishes of like-minded extremists — for an abortion prohibition with no exceptions. So he embraces it.
People also routinely elect trust over skepticism because it’s easier, more convenient. Saddam Hussein is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction; the climate isn’t changing; Barack Obama’s birth certificate is forged; Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years. To varying degrees, all of these were or are articles of faith, unverifiable or eventually knocked down. People nonetheless accepted them because the alternative meant confronting outright mendacity from otherwise respected authorities, trading the calm of certainty for the disquiet of doubt, or potentially hunkering down to the hard work of muddling through the elusive truth of things. Better simply to be told what’s what.
AS Craig Zobel, the writer and director of “Compliance,” said to me on the phone on Friday, “We can’t be on guard all the time. In order to have a pleasant life, you have to be able to trust that people are who they say they are. And if you questioned everything you heard, you’d never get anything done.” It’s infinitely more efficient to follow a chosen leader and walk in lock step with a chosen tribe.
In fact, what’s most distinctive about the current presidential election and our political culture isn’t their negativity — though that’s plenty noteworthy and worrisome — but how unconditionally so many partisans back their side’s every edict, plaint and stratagem. Some of them behave, in a smaller and less sinister way, as characters in “Compliance” do. They surrender to and accept instructions from a designated leader rather than examining each new assertion on its own merits, for its own accuracy. They submit, nudged along by emphatic oratory, slick advertising, facts thoroughly massaged and lies smoothly told.
“Compliance” charts the mechanisms and progress of mind control. The “officer” introduces himself with utter confidence, sure of himself and unambiguous about the necessary course of action. He expresses sympathy, telling his human puppets that he knows how confusing and difficult everything he’s asking of them must seem. He doles out compliments and rebukes, establishing himself as someone who sits rightfully in a position of judgment. He insists that he’s mindful of their self-interest: “You need to listen to me for your own sake.”
And he grows bolder in studied increments, knowing that once a person has decided to believe you, he or she is more likely to continue to, because to rebel at a late juncture is to admit that you’ve been duped all along. At a certain point you’re psychologically invested in fealty. At a certain point a spanking is no longer outside the realm of possibility.
After the restaurant’s manager and employees realize that the “officer” was nothing of the sort, the manager defensively tells a journalist: “He had an answer every time that I asked a question.”
The great hucksters do, and that’s why we should all bear in mind something that the journalist subsequently asks her.
“It never occurred to you,” he says, “to think twice?”
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