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BY MOZE HALPERIN
Coming into Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s The Stanford Prison Experiment with only a vague knowledge of the real-life psychological study on which the film is strictly based(with most of the dialogue taken directly from transcripts), I was struck with an immediate question about a current-day discourse. Since the experiment — which saw college students “enacting” prisoner and guard roles and embodying the predetermined power dynamics with frightening aplomb — took place in 1971, how does the increasing visibility and normalization of BDSM culture in recent years impact the discussion surrounding the study? Indeed, it won’t take long, even for the least creative of Googlers, to see that there’s already been an… interesting confluence of the two (which, for your benefit, I won’t hyperlink to). You’ll also find one perfectly non-pornographic article making the same connection.
The film, as a relatively faithful representation of the experiment (with particular scenes selected and structured for the sake of good filmmaking), ultimately provides much fuel for this question, as it’s released over 40 years after the experiment, when the first thing the phrase “playing prisoner” brings to mind is “sex dungeon.” These connotations are especially resonant with the recent mainstreaming of (heavily diluted) BDSM in Fifty Shades of Grey. The interplay of the experiment and BDSM gives way to a more general question about the curious magnetism of polarized power.
The Stanford prison experiment saw psychologist Dr. Philip Zimbardo set up — and then fill — a simulated prison in the basement offices of the Stanford Psychology Department. He selected 24 students to participate in the study, and after questioning them extensively on whether they’d prefer to be a guard or a prisoner, flipped a coin to determine which role to assign them. Ultimately, neither their preferences nor their nature — as perceived by themselves or by the people running the experiment — had any bearing in the role they’d play. (One obvious but noteworthy difference between this and BDSM is that people who engage in sexual role-play typically choose their sometimes-fluid roles based on proclivity.)
The “guards” were dressed appropriately and given wooden batons, while the “prisoners” were draped in feminizing (interestingly, everyone in the experiment was male) smocks with identification numbers on them. The “guards” were instructed not to physically harm any of the “prisoners” whatsoever, and supposedly signed a contract that contained that regulation — but Zimbardo, the only person who had any say in what constituted crossing a line, became just as embroiled in the pyramidal system he’d set up as his subjects. (Zimbardo self-described as the prison “superintendent,” while his research assistant was the “warden.”)
Soon, at least in their minds, “guards” became guards and “prisoners” became prisoners: means of psychological torture were devised, with guards deriving pleasure from preventing prisoners from sleeping, making them defecate in buckets, locking them in solitary confinement, and sexually humiliating them. One of the most unbearable scenes in the film isn’t one that involves shouting or conflict — it’s one that’s set so deep into the pacification of inmates that it finds the guards calmly forcing them to enact the motions of anal sex with one another.
A shocking notion about the experiment is the idea that any of them could have quit (and lost their pay of $15 a day — the equivalent of $88 today) at any time. Even those who ultimately left the experiment due to trauma did so through a system of imaginary parole — indicating that they’d so thoroughly inhabited their temporary identities that the only way they could conceive of breaking them was within the same vocabulary. As per Zimbardo’s website:
When we ended the hearings by telling prisoners to go back to their cells while we considered their requests, every prisoner obeyed, even though they could have obtained the same result by simply quitting the experiment. Why did they obey? Because they felt powerless to resist. Their sense of reality had shifted, and they no longer perceived their imprisonment as an experiment. In the psychological prison we had created, only the correctional staff had the power to grant paroles.
Much as a safe word indicates, within sexual power play, that a line has been crossed and the activity needs to stop, the prisoners were given a similar option. Thus, apart from, perhaps, duration (but even that’s questionable, as even the most vanilla of BDSM tales, Fifty Shades, reveals scenarios where the roles of master and slave are sustained not just during coitus) and the aforementioned method of selection, it’s initially hard to find much difference at all between the pretend dynamics of S&M and those of the experiment — even down to the way each prisoner was “arrested” at their own home and charged with armed robbery, as though in some form of verbal foreplay. …