The Experiment

I just finished watching the movie The Experiment, and it brought me to tears and broke my heart. The basic premise of the movie is a social/behavioral experiment where men were assigned the role of either a prisoner or a prison guard and were to live that way for two weeks. There were rules that the guards were to impose, and breaking the rules was to be met with commensurate punishment. If they lasted the full two weeks, each participant would be paid $14,000. If even a single individual bailed out, the experiment would end, and no one would be paid. If there was any sort of violence or threat to anyone's life, the experiment would likewise end, and no one would be paid. (Spoiler alert!) Things quickly got out of hand, as the guards started to take their roles too much to heart, the prisoners followed suit, and they all discovered that the experimenters' rules on violence and well-being turned out to be a lot less stringent than expected. The guards began to resort to increasingly extreme and inhumane measures to keep the prisoners under control, and the prisoners felt indignation and resentment and struggled with their spirits being broken. The situation escalated and eventually resulted in a riot, with guards and prisoners going at each other. That, finally, led to the experiment being cut short less than halfway in.

I know it's a fictional scenario, an isolated one at that, and that the chances of something like that happening in real life are slim to none (I'm hoping it's none, really), but the way the characters turned ugly and did things to each other and lost sight of their humanity... that's something we see in real life, on a day-to-day basis. Some of it might be as extreme as what happened in the movie; I suppose a similar scenario plays out in many prisons. There's a lot of war, killing, corruption, and so on that goes on in the world. But it also happens in ways that are not as extreme but are nonetheless ugly and are perversions of our humanity. We just hurt each other in so many ways, and often, we don't even realize it, because we are so consumed by whatever selfish reasons we have for behaving as we do. Someone does something hurtful to another, the other retaliates, and with each turn taken, the hurting becomes progressively worse until it becomes all about the hurting and the fighting and the getting even, and we forget our human selves. And by the time we take a timeout, things have just gotten so bad and convoluted, and people's spirits have become so damaged that it's difficult to unravel it all and to say who did what and who started it and to separate ourselves from our pain. We see before us a big tangled mess of fault and pain and responsibility and tears and blood, and it just seems impossible to work through, to untangle or get through or push aside, so we just walk away. We walk away and leave a part of ourselves in there, and that's that.

I don't have a solution, and I'm not here to offer one. I just wish we'd be better to each other, that's all.

It was a great movie. The premise was simple but interesting and offered insight into the human psyche. The actors were brilliant. I'm speechless. I have nothing more to say other than... watch it.