COMPLIANCE EXPOSES A NATION OF SHEEP
Do you believe that it is possible for a prankster to fool personnel running almost 70 fast-food businesses in small towns of 30 states over a period of 10 years into believing that police require managers to mistreat their employees in order to avoid their arrest on phony charges? The film Compliance, directed by Craig Zobel, begins with a screen filled with BASED ON TRUE EVENTS in larger letters than any previous film and ends with a title citing most of the above statistics. When the film ended tonight, at a packed cinema in West LA on the second night of the film’s performance, the audience remained in its seats, silent and stonefaced. Compliance is in effect a docudrama of the last and worst caper before the prankster, who calls himself Officer Daniels (played by Pat Healy), is apprehended in 2004, but not before those in the restaurant who cooperate with the bizarre demands of the prankster are investigated for their culpability in what the actual police investigator calls a rape of one of the employees, a youthful Becky (played by Dreama Walker). As the events play out, I was expecting that someone in the restaurant would question the person on the telephone to authenticate his status or at least would object to his obscene demands. But as the events unfold, the manager and others accept brainwashing, unable to think on their own and oblivious of legal guarantees of civil rights that employers and police must not infringe. The spectacle of the film, which portrays events at a McDonald’s in Mt. Washington, Kentucky, during 2004, brings to mind William Lederer’s famous book A Nation of Sheep (1961), which warns that the public must become better informed about world affairs or American foreign policy will be left to White House ignoramuses who will brainwash the public to believe foolish claptrap. Lederer, of course, was warning that only an informed public could stop American involvement in what became the Vietnam War. Lederer’s message about Americans who cannot think for themselves (validated by Stanley Milgram’s experiments, first published in 1963) has continuing relevance, as the events portrayed in Compliance prove. Vague hints in the film indicate what eventually happened–that personnel in the restaurant who cooperate with the prankster are later convicted of various crimes and that the raped employee won a million-dollar civil lawsuit. But the biggest bombshell, not found in Compliance, is that the perpetrator of the scam was acquitted of all charges for lack of direct evidence! The Political Film Society, nevertheless, has nominated Compliance for best film exposé of 2012. MH