In preparation for my End of 2012 Wrap-Up episode, I came across Craig Zobel’s film Compliance. Based on several true incidents, the manager of a fast food restaurant receives a phone call from someone claiming to be a police officer. The caller tells the manager that one of her employees has stolen money from a customer and instructs the supervisor to interrogate the employee in a manner that gets increasingly degrading. Compliance is a tough watch and it has some significant shortcomings, particularly in the ending, but it is also a fascinating dramatization of deference to authority a la the infamous Stanley Milgram experiment.
Compliance makes for especially interesting viewing in light of the controversy over Zero Dark Thirty. Critics of Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film have gone so far as to compare her to Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will. (I would argue that Riefenstahl’s reputation as an apologist for evil is greatly exaggerated, but I’ll leave that for another day.) The attacks on Bigelow hold that Zero Dark Thirty excuses the use of torture by Americans and even suggests that it led investigators to the location of Osama bin Laden. This accusation is not supported by the content of the film. Zero Dark Thirty does depict torture but the plot does not connect torture to finding bin Laden. It isn’t until the prisoners are treated humanely that they provide useful information. That fact has been lost in part because the torture scenes are so strong but also because many of those critiquing the movie haven’t bothered to watch it.
Defending her film, Bigelow remarked that “depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.” This statement is true but it is also unremarkable. Of course depiction is not endorsement. If it were, Schindler’s List would be the most anti-Semitic film ever made. For a culture that spends so much time absorbing stories this should not be a controversial idea.
The resistance that Bigelow has run up against is partly rooted in viewing habits. Audiences have been conditioned to expect stories to present overly simplistic moral conflicts and to spoon-feed that simplicity to viewers in unchallenging, bite-sized portions. When a film like Zero Dark Thirty comes along and does not overtly spell out the moral lesson it is sometimes more than mainstream audiences—and critics—are prepared to handle.
Resistance to Zero Dark Thirty is also rooted in liberal frustration with the Obama Administration. Although they ended the use of torture techniques, the president and his associates have failed to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and chose not to prosecute those who advocated and carried out torture policies. This, and the failure of the mainstream news media to keep torture in the public eye, has left the arts as the only place in which American audiences can reckon with what was done in our name. In the same way that the infamous Nixon-Frost interviews gave the disgraced president the trial he would never receive, art is the only remaining venue to correct the public record.
But the filmmakers of Zero Dark Thirty did not set out to make a film about torture. The topic comes up in due course but the point of Zero Dark Thirty is to immerse the audience in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and capture the frustration, danger, and moral ambiguity of being on the frontlines of a covert war. The filmmakers succeed in doing that and at its best Zero Dark Thirty is a harrowing thriller. The critics and politicians attacking Zero Dark Thirty are not angry with this film for what it is. They are upset with the film for what it isn’t.
And this is why Compliance is such an interesting film. Like Zero Dark Thirty, Zobel’s picture elicited a polarized reaction from audiences, but this may be the picture that critics of Zero Dark Thirty have been looking for. The movie is bleak and uncompromising but more importantly Compliance is about the very thing that Zero Dark Thirty is unable to depict: the way people defer to authority and how a quest for justice can breed unjust behavior. The design of Zero Dark Thirty is, to use Bigelow’s words, a boots-on-the-ground experience. The story unfolds from the point of view of those in the trees of counter-terrorism and so neither they nor the filmmakers can see the forest. More simply, Zero Dark Thirty is about what and how. Compliance, by contrast, is designed so that the audience observes how an otherwise moral person becomes a tool of exploitation and how the victim submits to the illusion of authority. This gives the movie a broader point of view that allows the viewer to ask more fundamental questions about why people act the way that they do.
As a critic I spend a lot of time bemoaning the lack of interesting or challenging films. Especially in the cinematic wasteland that is the first quarter of the year, it can be very dispiriting to sit through movie after movie that was made with cynical contempt for its audience. Whatever the shortcomings of Zero Dark Thirty and Compliance, these films were made by highly skilled filmmakers who sought to challenge their viewers. Attacking these pictures and the people who created them because they make us uncomfortable does a disservice to everyone. It discourages filmmakers from taking on challenging material and it distracts critics and moviegoers from the kinds of discussions these films intend to incite. Part of art’s function in society is to unsettle our collective assumptions. Compliance and Zero Dark Thirty do that and they should be praised for it.