Ogborn, who lives in Taylorsville, Ky., declined to respond to a request for her comments on the movie.posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 3:48 AM on September 8, 2012 [20 favorites]
Her lawyer, Ann Oldfather, said she didn't have time to watch it Friday. But she said watching a two-minute preview was "extremely upsetting."
"I know what Louise went through, and to see it played out on the big screen for commercial exploitation is profoundly unsettling," Oldfather said. "Louise, (McDonald's Assistant Manager) Donna Summers and indeed all of the McDonald's employees were manipulated once by this caller, and are now being exploited by a director who wants to make his name, and a movie company selling 'entertainment.' " *
Ogborn, who lives in Taylorsville, Ky., declined to respond to a request for her comments on the movie.That sounds like another lawsuit waiting to happen.
Her lawyer, Ann Oldfather, said she didn't have time to watch it Friday. But she said watching a two-minute preview was "extremely upsetting."
"Sheridan and King told their subjects — volunteers from an undergraduate psychology course — that the puppy was being trained to distinguish between a flickering and a steady light. It had to stand either to the right or the left depending on the cue from the light. If the animal failed to stand in the correct place, the subjects had to press a switch to shock it. As in the Milgram experiment, the shock level increased 15 volts for every wrong answer. But unlike the Milgram experiment, the puppy really was getting zapped.There are a few things that we've learned from Milgram, and similar experiments
As the voltage increased, the puppy first barked, then jumped up and down, and finally started howling with pain. The volunteers were horrified. They paced back and forth, hyperventilated, and gestured with their hands to show the puppy where to stand. Many openly wept. Yet the majority of them, twenty out of twenty-six, kept pushing the shock button right up to the maximum voltage.
Intriguingly, the six students who refused to go on were all men. All thirteen women who participated in the experiment obeyed right up until the end."
It was weird, because I totally didn't make this movie for career strategy reasons. I really didn't. I know that sounds maybe bullshitty. But I was like, well, I'm really scared of doing a movie like this, and it will bomb and fail in 4 or 5 ways I can think of off the top of my head, or it won't. And I was like, I should be doing that because you should be pushing yourself and making cool stuff. Being scared of a project is the reason to do it.And so forth. He was not trying to play to people's rubbernecking tendencies, but trying to start a conversation about the dynamics that were at work in this situation. The fact that it was lifted from real life is precisely why such a conversation is important, too, because it has, is, and will continue to happen.
You made the movie because you wanted to start a conversation, but then it resulted in these kind of hostile Q&As at Sundance. You've been taking it to other festivals since then-- has it been more of a conversation since then?
Absolutely. I would be lying if i said that there aren't some people that have a negative reaction to the film. The decisions we were making, we kind of knew that some people were not going to be into that kind of movie. It's been totally different. I think there's some acknowledgement that "I feel disturbed by your movie, but I think it's really fascinating, can we talk more about it." Then there are a lot of people who want to put it context of the true stories, understand that kind of thing.
There is virtually no counter-weight to the human desire to follow and obey authority because the institutions designed to provide that counter-weight – media outlets, academia, courts – do the opposite: they are the most faithful servants of those centers of authority.Rather puts a different spin on it. On the general silence around sexual abuse of women by men, or domestic violence. On police brutality against the 'underclass' - poor and black people. What happens to whistleblowers. Believing lies by politicians that align with your own 'tribe', while disbelieving or dismissing truths spoken by those who you don't respect.
Second, it is very easy to get people to see oppression and tyranny in faraway places, but very difficult to get them to see it in their own lives ("How dare you compare my country to Tyranny X; we're free and they aren't")... Thinking that way also relieves one of the obligation to act: one who believes they are free of oppression will feel no pressure to take a difficult or risky stand against it.
But the more significant factor is that one can easily remain free of even the most intense political oppression simply by placing one's faith and trust in institutions of authority. People who get themselves to be satisfied with the behavior of their institutions of power, or who at least largely acquiesce to the legitimacy of prevailing authority, are almost never subjected to any oppression, even in the worst of tyrannies.
...
But the fact that good, obedient citizens do not themselves perceive oppression does not mean that oppression does not exist. Whether a society is free is determined not by the treatment of its complacent, acquiescent citizens – such people are always unmolested by authority – but rather by the treatment of its dissidents and its marginalized minorities.
There's a very interesting moment at the end -- and this part is true, it's basically verbatim from the 20/20 interview -- where a reporter points out to Sandra (the manager) that she's dead wrong about an extremely important detail, and then proceeds to show her the security camera footage. As I watched it, even though I'd just seen all of the events unfold onscreen exactly as they do in the footage, I realized that I was wrong too. The movie didn't just show me that I could be manipulated in the same way the characters in the movie were; it did manipulate me that way.That bit alone sounds like a pretty compelling reason for the movie to exist and an argument for its fealty realism.
The police used this footage to produce a front-and-back composite image of the suspect, and subsequent queries to the private correctional company's human resources department led to the identification of the buyer as David R. Stewart, a married father of five children.posted by localroger at 1:39 PM on September 8, 2012
During his questioning by police, Stewart insisted he'd never bought a calling card, but detectives found one in his house that had been used to call nine restaurants in the past year, including a Burger King in Idaho Falls, on the day its manager was reportedly duped. Police also found dozens of applications for police department jobs, hundreds of police magazines, and police-type uniforms, guns and holsters, indicating that being or becoming a police officer was possibly a fantasy of the suspect.[2]
After his arrest, Stewart was extradited to Kentucky to face charges of impersonating a police officer, and solicitation of sodomy. He was not convicted, with both the defense and prosecution attorneys saying that a lack of direct evidence may have affected the jury's decision
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Since Stewart's arrest, police reported that the calls have stopped. Stewart remains a suspect in similar cases throughout the USA.
I think everyone’s reaction is always that they’re superior and that they’re smarter and that they wouldn’t do that and they wouldn’t put themselves in that situation. But the thing that drew me to it is that I think a lot of people aren’t being honest with themselves. I think my character was put in a situation where she thought the world was falling down around her and she was going to lose everything, her job, what freedom she had, she felt she was going to be sent off to jail and I think there’s a lot of despicable, horrible things that people would to do stop that from happening if they think the walls are closing in on them.BREAKING Dreama Walker volunteered for this role because, unlike some people here, she thought it was a story that needed to be told.
They questioned Arthur’s motives, but none dared tell Arthur as much. The staffers were later interviewed by the Disabled Persons Protection Commission; one of them said they "needed jobs" and so did nothing more than what they were told.posted by desjardins at 9:23 AM on September 9, 2012
Arthur had told the first staffer that 60 shocks were to be given, "and the [student] is heard saying ‘thirteen left.’" In the end, he got 12 more: 10 for yelling, the last two for no reason. Including the shocks in his bedroom, the machine had punished the student at least 70 times and as many as 77. [source article]
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posted by Bwithh at 1:38 AM on September 8, 2012 [1 favorite]