Relevant Film for Psych Students Showing at E Street Cinema

September 16, 2015 –

EXPERIMENTER
In Washington, D.C. at the E Street Cinema 
Oct 23rd – Oct 29th
Washington, D.C. - E Street Cinema (new window)
Directed by Michael Almereyda
Website (new window) || Trailer (new window) || Facebook (new window)
“Experimenter offers a heady brew of theories about the essence of human nature.”
– Scott Foundas, Variety

Yale University, 1961. Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) designs a psychology experiment that still resonates to this day, in which people think they’re delivering painful electric shocks to an affable stranger (Jim Gaffigan) strapped into a chair in another room. Despite his pleads for mercy, the majority of subjects don’t stop the experiment, administering what they think is a near-fatal electric shock, simply because they’ve been told to do so. With Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial airing in living rooms across America, Milgram strikes a nerve in popular culture and the scientific community with his exploration into people’s tendency to comply with authority. Celebrated in some circles, he is also accused of being a deceptive, manipulative monster, but his wife Sasha (Winona Ryder) stands by him through it all. EXPERIMENTER invites us inside Milgram’s whirring mind in this bracing portrait of a brilliant man whose conscience and creative spirit continues to be resonant, poignant, and inspirational.