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Orson Welles once described his approach in “ Citizen Kane ” as “prismatic,” and while there are many differences in subject and style between that cinema milestone and Michael Almereyda ’s “Experimenter,” the two films share a multi-faceted formal playfulness and an essential intellectual seriousness that make them similarly bracing, original and thought-provoking. Part of the latter quality comes from their focus on men (one semi-fictional, the other real) who stand at particular junctures of American history and, like prisms, refract converging elements of our national identity and culture.

The most pleasingly cerebral of recent American films, “Experimenter” concerns Dr. Stanley Milgram ( Peter Sarsgaard in an expertly shaded and intelligent performance), the creator of certain enduringly famous experiments in social psychology, which the film starts out by showing us. In a psych lab at Yale University in 1961, Milgram watches from behind a two-way mirror as an associate (John Palladino) escorts two men into a room where he explains the experiment in which they’ve agreed to participate. One man will be called “Learner” and will try to memorize answers to standardized tests. The other man, “Teacher,” will monitor the responses given by Learner (who’s out of sight) and, when he gives wrong answers, give him a series of increasingly strong electric shocks.

The nominal experiment here is a sham. In reality, Learner is not being shocked; an actor, he plays audiotapes of his voice screaming and protesting as the shocks supposedly mount in intensity. The one being tested is Teacher. How long will he go on shocking a stranger who’s begging him to stop? An overwhelming majority of people say they would stop well before the shocks reach maximum intensity. As it happened, though, both in Milgram’s original experiments and in numerous duplications of them, roughly 65 percent of subjects kept applying the shocks till the end; only 35 percent stopped at some point before.

Temporally, the significance of the Milgram Experiments cuts in every direction.

Past: When they were underway, the Israeli trial of Nazi genocide mastermind Adolf Eichmann, who claimed he was only following orders, was on American television. The son of European Jews who escaped the Nazi terror, Milgram wanted to know how ordinary people could do things that violated their conscious principles. And could it be that folks of other nations – even Americans – would submit just as Germans had? The scandalous book in which he revealed his findings was titled “Obedience to Authority.”

Present (1961): In a sense, the Eichmann trial connects the Holocaust to the era of “The Manchurian Candidate,” when Americans were so fearful of their Communist enemies that they questioned their own psychological make-up, and when an academic-scientific-military complex emerged to deal with such concerns. Needless to say, that complex didn’t disappear along with the Soviet Union.

Future: As the film shows, when Milgram’s findings become public, they spark widespread interest, with some hailing their importance while others denounce the scientist’s methods as unethical and manipulative. Their paradoxical importance continues. During the Vietnam War they are invoked to explain the My Lai massacre. Films of them are still shown to West Point cadets. Need their relevance to the post-9/11 American penchant for torture, both military and more broadly cultural, be stated?

Back to those scenes in the Yale lab. In most movies, no doubt, we would be kept in doubt about the experiment’s real nature until we’d seen at least one Learner shocked to the breaking point. But Almereyda tosses away the possibility of suspense and shows us what’s going on from the first. Filmed with a cool, Kubrickian detachment, these scenes align our p.o.v. not with the experiment’s participants’ but with the scientist’s (and by extension, the filmmaker’s). Rather than conventionally dramatic, the effect is wry, inquisitive, even darkly comic.

During this early sequence, Almereyda intercuts scenes of Milgram meeting the dancer ( Winona Ryder ) who will become his wife. These passages announce that “Experimenter” will concern not just the work but also the man. Yet, if this is a biopic, it’s hardly a conventional one. It seems not at all interested in probing Milgram’s psychology, to wonder why he would undertake this type of work. And, in effect, the film’s wife-and-family parts have a basically negative function in that, rather than explaining anything, simply tell us he was a fairly ordinary guy.

So, ultimately, Almereyda’s emphasis falls on his subject’s work and public life. After the famous experiments and the book that followed, Milgram becomes something of a controversial public intellectual, moves to Harvard (then later City University of NY) and concocts other experimental tests of human behavior, some very interesting but none achieving the notoriety of the earlier ones. As the career unfolds, we become aware of how much the academic-scientific-military complex intersects with the nation’s imagination on various pop-cultural fronts. Milgram himself is on television. He engages with “Candid Camera.” He watches CBS turn his life’s work in a bad TV movie, “The Tenth Level,” starring William Shatner and Ossie Davis .

As we see that monstrosity being shot, Milgram muses to the camera about his chagrin. When he thinks of turning his work into a Broadway musical, he bursts into song on a midtown street. All of which points to one of the film’s chief delights: its eclectic mix of formal stratagems and narrative modes. Almereyda has Milgram address the camera frequently, sometimes telling us of things that haven’t yet happened. He uses rear-screen projection (which serves various purposes, including evoking a bygone cinematic era), various surrealistic touches and all manner of distancing devices.  His tone veers from serious to satiric to wacky to contemplative and back to serious, sometimes within a single scene.

The thread that unifies all this, one might venture, has to do with the issue of free will. The upside of Milgram’s experiments (as one of his mentors attempts to point out) was to show that at least a significant minority of people can resist unwarranted social controls. What about trying to construct an educational system and a society that grow that number? Likewise, though many people love to be manipulated by movies, how about asserting the value of works like “Experimenter,” which, in keeping the emotional temperature low and presenting us with a collage of evidence on related subjects, allows us the interpretive freedom to construct its meanings for ourselves?

No doubt, that kind of freedom is only offered us by a certain type of artist, of which Almeredya is a prime and invaluable example. From early in his career, it was clearly that he was an unusually gifted director, yet rather than allowing himself to be sucked into the mainstream moviemaking system, he has deliberately stayed on the intelligent margins, making a range of films from docs to shorts to modern Shakespeare adaptations to works that deserve the designation experimental. In so doing, he has allowed himself a creative freedom that suffuses his latest like a constant stream of mountain air. “Experimenter,” he might say, “c’est moi.”

Godfrey Cheshire

Godfrey Cheshire is a film critic, journalist and filmmaker based in New York City. He has written for The New York Times, Variety, Film Comment, The Village Voice, Interview, Cineaste and other publications.

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Experimenter (2015)

Rated PG-13 for thematic material and brief strong language

Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram

Winona Ryder as Sasha Menkin Milgram

Jim Gaffigan as James McDonough

Taryn Manning as Mrs. Lowe

Kellan Lutz as William Shatner

John Leguizamo as Taylor

Anton Yelchin as Rensaleer

Lori Singer as Florence Asch

Dennis Haysbert as Ossie Davis

• Michael Almereyda

Director of Photography

• Kathryn J. Schubert

Original Music Composer

• Bryan Senti

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Experimenter

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Rent Experimenter on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Led by a gripping performance from Peter Sarsgaard, Experimenter uses a fact-based story to pose thought-provoking questions about human nature.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Michael Almereyda

Peter Sarsgaard

Stanley Milgram

Winona Ryder

Sasha Menkin Milgram

Dennis Haysbert

Ossie Davis

Jim Gaffigan

James McDonough

Taryn Manning

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"Fascinating...’Experimenter’ offers a heady brew of theories about the essence of human nature." - Scott Foundas, Variety

"Michael Almereyda dissects the life and work of controversial psychologist Stanley Milgram in a highly stylized biopic worthy of its subject." - Scott Foundas, Variety

"Pushes levers with audacity." - LA Times

"Director Michael Almereyda takes a stylized visual approach with bracing results." - LA Times

"A conceptually exciting, intellectually searching portrait of the social psychologist Stanley Milgram (a superb Peter Sarsgaard), whose famous 1960s obedience experiments, in which subjects delivered punishing shocks on command, were later condemned." - Manohla Dargis, New York Times

"Sarsgaard stars in this smart and unsettling exploration of Stanley Milgram’s questionable experiment testing people’s allegiance to malevolent authority, and potentially exposing the dark heart of mankind." - Jordan Hoffman, The Guardian

"Almereyda’s smartly written script attempts to make up for its lack of traditional dramatic elements with continuous questions about Milgram’s—and everyone’s—ability to make a choice in society." - Anthony Kaufman, Screen Daily

"Far and away Almereyda’s strongest, most coherent, and moving film." - Amy Taubin, Film Comment

"A darker comedy, indeed one that Kubrick might have envied, Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter is a spare, formally ingenious biopic about Stanley Milgram, the Yale social psychology professor who in 1961 concocted an experiment that demonstrated that obedience to authority overruled morality and empathy in a large majority of his subjects." - Amy Taubin, Film Comment

"Grounded by strong performances from Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder." - John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter

"Intelligently written and well performed, Milgram’s results are chilling to comprehend, and Almereyda’s closing statements are wisely observed concerning the puppets that human beings tend to be, with awareness of our flawed natures the only available solace we can conceive." - Nicholas Bell Ion Cinema

"Peter Sarsgaard is a mesmerizing." - NY Times

"Fascinating." - FLAVORWIRE

"Uncannily beautiful." - NY Magazine

"The film belongs to Sarsgaard, whose snide inflection and quiet, wall-eyed intensity are ideally suited to the material." - BROOKLYN MAGAZINE

"You’ll find that the film has worked its way underneath your skin while burrowing into your subconscious. Don’t be surprised if it stays there for a while." - CUT PRINT FILM

"Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder give knockout performances." - Examiner

"Many biopics simplify great lives; Experimenter enriches and enlarges one." - Paste Magazine

"Outstanding. Sarsgaard gives one of his finest performances." - Paste Magazine

"An aesthetically and intellectually playful portrait." - Manohla Dargis, NY Times

"The most pleasingly cerebral of recent American films." - RogerEbert.com

"CONCEPTUALLY EXCITING, INTELECTUALLY SEARCHING. Adventurous in form and thought, not just in subject. Mr. Almereyda has a boundless gift for finding new ways to tell old stories." - Manohla Dargis, NY Times

"UNCANNILY BEAUTIFUL. THRILLINGLY REFLECTIVE. A gorgeous photo-realist circus." - David Edelstein, New York Magazine

"MICHAEL ALMEREYDA IS ONE OF OUR TREASURES. ’Experimenter’ may be his ‘Zelig’ or ‘American Hustle’, the riff on history that lands him at the front of the cultural brainpan." - Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

"DARING, BRACING, STUNNINGLY EVOCATIVE. ALIVE AND ALERT FROM ITS FIRST MOMENT. Rarely does a biopic balance its subject’s cultural importance and personal idiosyncrasies as finely as this remarkable film does." - Tim Grierson, Paste

"STANLEY KUBRICK WOULD HAVE LOVED IT. Far and away director Almereyda’s strongest, most moving film. Winona Ryder is superb and so is Peter Sarsgaard." - Amy Taubin, Film Comment

"A BRACING WORK OF SUBDUED AUDACITY." - Sheri Linden, LA Times

" . It delights in surprising the viewer, right up to its mysterious and perfectly judged final moment." - Matt Prigge, Metro

"IT IS A THRILL to see Almereyda plunge full-bore into Milgram’s work and the implications of it both then and now." - Scott Foundas, Variety

ABOUT THE FILM

Yale University, 1961. Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) designs a psychology experiment that remains relevant 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. Disregarding his pleas for mercy, the majority of subjects do not stop the experiment, administering what they think are near-fatal electric shocks, simply because they’ve been told to. Milgram’s exploration of authority and conformity strikes a nerve in popular culture and the scientific community. Celebrated in some circles, he is also accused of being a deceptive, manipulative monster. His wife Sasha (Winona Ryder) anchors him through it all.

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Sundance Film Review: ‘Experimenter’

Michael Almereyda dissects the life and work of controversial psychologist Stanley Milgram in a highly stylized biopic worthy of its subject.

By Scott Foundas

Scott Foundas

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The controversial social psychologist Stanley Milgram gets a biopic as polymorphous as one of his own research studies in “Experimenter,” a highly formal, always fascinating movie from writer-director Michael Almereyda , who here delivers his most fully realized effort in the 15 years since his modern-dress “Hamlet” starring Ethan Hawke. Almereyda conceives of Milgram’s life and work as a kind of constantly evolving theater piece and runs with the idea, resulting in a decidedly Brechtian bit of filmmaking that routinely breaks the fourth wall and employs other bits of theatrical artifice to tell its tale. Such old-school indie-art-movie quirks won’t be to everyone’s liking, but for those who imbibe, “Experimenter” offers a heady brew of theories about the essence of human nature, and a Peter Sarsgaard performance that catches Milgram in all his seductive, megalomaniacal brilliance.

Milgram made his name in the more permissive, laissez-faire era of university-sponsored scientific research previously explored in films like “Kinsey” (which co-starred Sarsgaard) and “Project Nim,” and it’s one of “Experimenter’s” throughlines that, just because Milgram may have employed some scientifically questionable methods, that doesn’t invalidate the merit of his data. When the movie opens in August 1961, the Yale-based Milgram is just embarking on his most famous/infamous study, the “Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures,” in which two randomly selected test subjects are assigned the respective roles of “Teacher” and “Learner,” with Teacher instructed to ask Learner (situated in an adjacent room) a series of multiple-choice questions.

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If and when Learner answers incorrectly, Teacher is to administer a remote-controlled electric shock, the severity of which would increase with each subsequent wrong answer. The catch: Unbeknownst to Teacher, Learner is actually a member of Milgram’s lab team, cued to answer questions incorrectly on purpose and to shout in pain upon receipt of each successive “shock” (when, in fact, no actual shocks are being delivered).

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An American-born Jew of Romanian-Hugarian extraction, Milgram was obsessed by the origins of genocide and the human capacity to rationalize violent behavior, and as Adolph Eichmann stood trial in Israel and Hannah Arendt wrote about “the banality of evil” in the pages of the New Yorker, Milgram was busily putting theory into practice, watching with a mix of fascination and horror as some two-thirds of his nearly 800 test subjects administered the full range of electric shocks. The subjects believed they had no other choice but to obey the directives of Milgram’s lab assistants, that they were therefore “just following orders” — a condition Milgram would go on to term “the agentic state.”

Milgram himself watched these experiments through a two-way mirror, not unlike a cinema spectator. And, except for a few brief flashbacks detailing Milgram’s courtship of his wife, Sasha ( Winona Ryder ), the first 30 minutes of “Experimenter” afford us the same perspective, as one guinea pig after the next (played by a who’s-who of character actors including John Leguizamo, Anton Yelchin and Anthony Edwards) climb into Milgram’s hot seat. Because Almereyda makes us complicit to all the behind-the-scenes illusion, these scenes take on a certain grim hilarity, as the test subjects react (or don’t) to the increasingly frantic cries of Milgram’s resident Learner, the affable accountant Jim McDonough (Jim Gaffigan). But even here, “Experimenter” implicitly asks us to consider the far-reaching implications of Milgram’s scenario, and how, in the position of Teacher, we ourselves would respond.

When “Experimenter” broadens its scope, it does so in an inventively stylized fashion that mixes real locations with rear projections (some static, some moving) and breakaway sets, and features Sarsgaard directly addressing the audience in character — even, at one point, breaking into an impromptu musical number. It’s a risky strategy that Almereyda — a formalist whose early films made extensive use of the arcane PXL Vision analog video format — pulls off deftly (with due credit to production designer Deana Sidney and cinematographer Ryan Samul), because it seems of a piece with Milgram’s own notion of himself and the way Sarsgaard plays him, as a kind of director for whom all the world was a potential stage.

On several occasions, Almereyda even has Sarsgaard trailed onscreen by a full-size adult elephant — the proverbial one “in the room” that Milgram was prodding at in much of his research. Meanwhile, for the good doctor himself, the obedience experiments would become something of a monkey on his back — an early success that he could never quite eclipse, a Wellesian figure forever dwelling in the shadow of his “Citizen Kane.”

Almereyda’s dense, deeply researched yet succinct script confidently winds its way through Milgram’s publication of his theories (in the 1974 book “Obedience to Authority”), his overnight celebrity, the ensuing accusations of ethical impropriety, and the general unwillingness of people to believe what Milgram was saying: that most people, relieved of direct responsibility for their own actions, might be capable of almost any atrocity. A markedly more serious film about science and the politics of science than either “The Theory of Everything” or “The Imitation Game,” “Experimenter” goes on, in its final stretch, to touch on Milgram’s subsequent, equally groundbreaking studies, including the Harvard-based “small world” experiment, which first postulated the theory now known as “six degrees of separation.”

Befitting the movie’s many layers of artifice and self-reflexivity, Milgram (who died of a heart attack in 1984) even lives to see his research dramatized as a 1976 network television movie, “The Tenth Level,” though the scene in Almereyda’s film devoted to its making (with Dennis Haysbert and Kellan Lutz in ill-cast cameos as stars Ossie Davis and William Shatner) is one of the few that seems completely tone-deaf.

Milgram lived for his work, and “Experimenter” is fundamentally an attempt to understand him through it. That means relatively little time devoted to Milgram’s personal life, but enough to know that he wasn’t an easy husband or father, and that Sasha (superbly played by Ryder) — a firm believer in her husband’s research — was willing to take him on his own terms. (In a touching coda, the real Sasha Milgram herself appears onscreen.) “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” Milgram proclaims more than once in “Experimenter,” quoting Kierkegaard. In looking back on Milgram and his experiments more than 50 years after the fact, Almereyda finds much that lingers and haunts. So, too, this movie, long after the lights have come up.

Reviewed at Cinetic Media, New York, Jan. 14, 2015. (In Sundance Film Festival — Premieres.) Running time: 97 MIN.

• Production: A BB Films/FJ Prods./Intrinsic Value production. Produced by Michael Almereyda, Uri Singer, Fabio Golombek, Aimee Schoof, Isen Robbins, Danny A. Aberckaser, Per Melita. Executive producers, Jeff Rice, Claudio Szajman, Rogerio Ferezin, Christa Campbell, Lati Grobman, Trevor Crafts, Lee Broda, Mark Myers. Co-producer, Joseph White.
• Crew: Directed, written by Michael Almereyda. Camera (color), Ryan Samul; editor, Kathryn J. Schubert; music, Bryan Senti; production designer, Deana Sidney; art director, Andy Eklund; set decorator, Nadya Gurevich; costume designer, Kama K. Royz; sound, Jim Morgan; sound designer, Timmy Quinn; supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer, Rob Daly; visual effects supervisor, Jonathan Podwil; visual effects, Mythic Digital; stunt coordinator, Declan Mulvey; assistant director, Michael Pitt; casting, Billy Hopkins.
• With: Peter Sarsgaard, Winona Ryder, Dennis Haysbert, Jim Gaffigan, Taryn Manning, Kellan Lutz, John Leguizamo, Anton Yelchin, Anthony Edwards, Lori Singer, Edoardo Ballerini, Josh Hamilton, Vondie Curtis Hall.

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Experimenter

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Product Description

The true life story of controversial psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose legendary experiment tested ordinary people's willingness to obey orders from an authority figure, even if they felt what they were doing was wrong. This led Milgram's whirring mind, to delve into which into a parade of human behavior inquiries, including the 6 Degrees Of Separation theory

Product details

• MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned)
• Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 2.12 ounces
• Item model number ‏ : ‎ 35223602
• Director ‏ : ‎ Michael Almereyda
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ Multiple Formats, Color, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 38 minutes
• Release date ‏ : ‎ January 5, 2016
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Jim Gaffigan, Kellan Lutz
• Subtitles: ‏ : ‎ English, French, Spanish
• Studio ‏ : ‎ Magnolia Home Ent
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B016F7J8C2
• Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
• #4,184 in Romance (Movies & TV)
• #16,477 in Drama DVDs

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Movie Interviews

'experimenter' star peter sarsgaard on stanley milgrim's radical work.

The Milgram experiments showed that humans will do bad things under the right circumstances. NPR's Rachel Martin interviews the star of the film "Experimenter" that explores Stanley Milgram's life.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Review: In ‘Experimenter,’ Are They Following Orders or Instincts?

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By Manohla Dargis

• Oct. 15, 2015

In “Experimenter,” an aesthetically and intellectually playful portrait of the social psychologist Stanley Milgram, the director, Michael Almereyda, turns a biopic into a mind game. It’s an appropriate take on a figure who’s best remembered for his experiments in which subjects delivered punishing electric shocks on command. Working in the shadow of the Holocaust, and shortly after the capture of the SS official Adolf Eichmann, Milgram (1933-1984) was interested in questions of authority, conformity and conscience. “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders,” Milgram asked. “Could we call them all accomplices?”

The restlessly original Mr. Almereyda comes at this question inventively, sometimes with Milgram — a delicate, sensitive Peter Sarsgaard — talking right into the camera. Mr. Almereyda has a boundless gift for finding new ways to tell old stories, and “Experimenter,” as befits its title, is less a straight biography than a diverting gloss on human behavior, historical memory and cinema itself. It’s a story about a man whose work was haunted by the death camps, was conducted as the United States escalated its presence in Vietnam and was destined to speak to the ages (to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and beyond) because his subject — the all too human being — is reliably barbaric. (Mr. Almereyda’s films include the vampire tale “Nadja” and several Shakespeare adaptations, including a superb “Hamlet” with Ethan Hawke.)

Mr. Almereyda takes Milgram, his work and ideas seriously but doesn’t suffocate them: Despite the story’s freight, the laboratory shocks and Milgram’s insistent melancholia, “Experimenter” is a nimble, low-frequency high. Mr. Almereyda’s self-conscious approach to the material hovers between the quasi-Brechtian and the gently absurd (as a director, his eyebrows are raised, not jumping), which keeps the story and characters grooving right along and ensures that while the past informs the story, it never torpedoes it. Milgram turns out to be somewhat of a downer, understandably so given his interests and the later harsh, career-damaging criticisms of his most famous work. His is very much a voice of the 20th century, but as he chronicles the age with Eeyore-like mournfulness he can also feel like one of history’s comedic straight men.

Milgram conducted his first obedience experiments in 1961 at Yale, where he was an assistant professor. “I set up a simple experiment,” he explained, “to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.” Individual test subjects — the ordinary citizens — were ushered into a room where a facilitator (called the experimenter) said the participant (called the teacher) would be administering electrical shocks to another participant (a middle-aged man called the learner) when the learner made a mistake. The teacher was to deliver the shocks via a bland apparatus that looked right out of a first-generation “Star Trek” episode and ostensibly zapped out 15 to 450 volts.

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The Milgram Experiment

The true story of Dr. Stanley Milgram, a 1950s Yale psychologist who, after researching the holocaust, performed a controversial experiment on the perils of obedience. The true story of Dr. Stanley Milgram, a 1950s Yale psychologist who, after researching the holocaust, performed a controversial experiment on the perils of obedience. The true story of Dr. Stanley Milgram, a 1950s Yale psychologist who, after researching the holocaust, performed a controversial experiment on the perils of obedience.

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• August 14, 2009 (United States)
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Rethinking One of Psychology's Most Infamous Experiments

In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram's electric-shock studies showed that people will obey even the most abhorrent of orders. But recently, researchers have begun to question his conclusions — and offer some of their own.

In 1961, Yale University psychology professor Stanley Milgram placed an advertisement in the New Haven Register . “We will pay you $4 for one hour of your time,” it read, asking for “500 New Haven men to help us complete a scientific study of memory and learning.”

Only part of that was true. Over the next two years, hundreds of people showed up at Milgram’s lab for a learning and memory study that quickly turned into something else entirely. Under the watch of the experimenter, the volunteer—dubbed “the teacher”—would read out strings of words to his partner, “the learner,” who was hooked up to an electric-shock machine in the other room. Each time the learner made a mistake in repeating the words, the teacher was to deliver a shock of increasing intensity, starting at 15 volts (labeled “slight shock” on the machine) and going all the way up to 450 volts (“Danger: severe shock”). Some people, horrified at what they were being asked to do, stopped the experiment early, defying their supervisor’s urging to go on; others continued up to 450 volts, even as the learner pled for mercy, yelled a warning about his heart condition—and then fell alarmingly silent. In the most well-known variation of the experiment, a full 65 percent of people went all the way.

Until they emerged from the lab, the participants didn’t know that the shocks weren’t real, that the cries of pain were pre-recorded, and that the learner—railroad auditor Jim McDonough —was in on the whole thing, sitting alive and unharmed in the next room. They were also unaware that they had just been used to prove the claim that would soon make Milgram famous: that ordinary people, under the direction of an authority figure, would obey just about any order they were given, even to torture. It’s a phenomenon that’s been used to explain atrocities from the Holocaust to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. “To a remarkable degree,” Peter Baker wrote in Pacific Standard in 2013, “Milgram’s early research has come to serve as a kind of all-purpose lightning rod for discussions about the human heart of darkness.”

In some ways, though, Milgram’s study is also—as promised—a study of memory, if not the one he pretended it was.

More than five decades after it was first published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963, it’s earned a place as one of the most famous experiments of the 20th century. Milgram’s research has spawned countless spinoff studies among psychologists, sociologists, and historians, even as it’s leapt from academia into the realm of pop culture. It’s inspired songs by Peter Gabriel (lyrics: “We do what we’re told/We do what we’re told/Told to do”) and Dar Williams (“When I knew it was wrong, I played it just like a game/I pressed the buzzer”); a number of books whose titles make puns out of the word “shocking”; a controversial French documentary disguised as a game show ; episodes of Law and Order and Bones ; a made-for-TV movie with William Shatner; a jewelry collection (bizarrely) from the company Enfants Perdus; and most recently, the biopic The Experimenter , starring Peter Sarsgaard as the title character—and this list is by no means exhaustive.

But as with human memory, the study—even published, archived, enshrined in psychology textbooks—is malleable. And in the past few years, a new wave of researchers have dedicated themselves to reshaping it, arguing that Milgram’s lessons on human obedience are, in fact, misremembered—that his work doesn’t prove what he claimed it does.

The problem is, no one can really agree on what it proves instead.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the experiments’ publication (or, technically, the 51st), the Journal of Social Issues released a themed edition in September 2014 dedicated to all things Milgram. “There is a compelling and timely case for reexamining Milgram’s legacy,” the editors wrote in the introduction, noting that they were in good company: In 1964, the year after the experiments were published, fewer than 10 published studies referenced Milgram’s work; in 2012, that number was more than 60.

It’s a trend that surely would have pleased Milgram, who crafted his work with an audience in mind from the beginning. “Milgram was a fantastic dramaturg. His studies are fantastic little pieces of theater. They’re beautifully scripted,” said Stephen Reicher, a professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews and a co-editor of the Journal of Social Issues ’ special edition. Capitalizing on the fame his 1963 publication earned him, Milgram went on to publish a book on his experiments in 1974 and a documentary, Obedience , with footage from the original experiments.

But for a man determined to leave a lasting legacy, Milgram also made it remarkably easy for people to pick it apart. The Yale University archives contain boxes upon boxes of papers, videos, and audio recordings, an entire career carefully documented for posterity. Though Milgram’s widow Alexandra donated the materials after his death in 1984, they remained largely untouched for years, until Yale’s library staff began to digitize all the materials in the early 2000s. Able to easily access troves of material for the first time, the researchers came flocking.

“There’s a lot of dirty laundry in those archives,” said Arthur Miller, a professor emeritus of psychology at Miami University and another co-editor of the Journal of Social Issues . “Critics of Milgram seem to want to—and do—find material in these archives that makes Milgram look bad or unethical or, in some cases, a liar.”

One of the most vocal of those critics is Australian author and psychologist Gina Perry, who documented her experience tracking down Milgram’s research participants in her 2013 book Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments . Her project began as an effort to write about the experiments from the perspective of the participants—but when she went back through the archives to confirm some of their stories, she said, she found some glaring issues with Milgram’s data. Among her accusations: that the supervisors went off script in their prods to the teachers, that some of the volunteers were aware that the setup was a hoax, and that others weren’t debriefed on the whole thing until months later. “My main issue is that methodologically, there have been so many problems with Milgram’s research that we have to start re-examining the textbook descriptions of the research,” she said.

But many psychologists argue that even with methodological holes and moral lapses, the basic finding of Milgram’s work, the rate of obedience, still holds up. Because of the ethical challenge of reproducing the study, the idea survived for decades on a mix of good faith and partial replications—one study had participants administer their shocks in a virtual-reality system, for example—until 2007, when ABC collaborated with Santa Clara University psychologist Jerry Burger to replicate Milgram’s experiment for an episode of the TV show Basic Instincts titled “ The Science of Evil ,” pegged to Abu Ghraib.

Burger’s way around an ethical breach: In the most well-known experiment, he found, 80 percent of the participants who reached a 150-volt shock continued all the way to the end. “So what I said we could do is take people up to the 150-volt point, see how they reacted, and end the study right there,” he said. The rest of the setup was nearly identical to Milgram’s lab of the early 1960s (with one notable exception: “Milgram had a gray lab coat and I couldn’t find a gray, so I got a light blue.”)

At the end of the experiment, Burger was left with an obedience rate around the same as the one Milgram had recorded—proving, he said, not only that Milgram’s numbers had been accurate, but that his work was as relevant as ever. “[The results] didn’t surprise me,” he said, “but for years I had heard from my students and from other people, ‘Well, that was back in the 60s, and somehow how we’re more aware of the problems of blind obedience, and people have changed.’”

In recent years, though, much of the attention has focused less on supporting or discrediting Milgram’s statistics, and more on rethinking his conclusions. With a paper published earlier this month in the British Journal of Social Psychology , Matthew Hollander, a sociology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, is among the most recent to question Milgram’s notion of obedience. After analyzing the conversation patterns from audio recordings of 117 study participants, Hollander found that Milgram’s original classification of his subjects—either obedient or disobedient—failed to capture the true dynamics of the situation. Rather, he argued, people in both categories tried several different forms of protest—those who successfully ended the experiment early were simply better at resisting than the ones that continued shocking.

“Research subjects may say things like ‘I can’t do this anymore’ or ‘I’m not going to do this anymore,’” he said, even those who went all the way to 450 volts. “I understand those practices to be a way of trying to stop the experiment in a relatively aggressive, direct, and explicit way.”

It’s a far cry from Milgram’s idea that the capacity for evil lies dormant in everyone, ready to be awakened with the right set of circumstances. The ability to disobey toxic orders, Hollander said, is a skill that can be taught like any other—all a person needs to learn is what to say and how to say it.

In some ways, the conclusions Milgram drew were as much a product of their time as they were a product of his research. At the time he began his studies, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major architects of the Holocaust, was already in full swing. In 1963, the same year that Milgram published his studies, writer Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Eichmann in her book on the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem .

Milgram, who was born in New York City in 1933 to Jewish immigrant parents, came to view his studies as a validation of Arendt’s idea—but the Holocaust had been at the forefront of his mind for years before either of them published their work. “I should have been born into the German-speaking Jewish community of Prague in 1922 and died in a gas chamber some 20 years later,” he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1958. “How I came to be born in the Bronx Hospital, I’ll never quite understand.”

And in the introduction of his 1963 paper, he invoked the Nazis within the first few paragraphs: “Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time,” he wrote. “Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded; daily quotas of corpses were produced … These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders.”

Though the term didn’t exist at the time, Milgram was a proponent of what today’s social psychologists call situationism: the idea that people’s behavior is determined largely by what’s happening around them. “They’re not psychopaths, and they’re not hostile, and they’re not aggressive or deranged. They’re just people, like you and me,” Miller said. “If you put us in certain situations, we’re more likely to be racist or sexist, or we may lie, or we may cheat. There are studies that show this, thousands and thousands of studies that document the many unsavory aspects of most people.”

But continued to its logical extreme, situationism “has an exonerating effect,” he said. “In the minds of a lot of people, it tends to excuse the bad behavior … it’s not the person’s fault for doing the bad thing, it’s the situation they were put in.” Milgram’s studies were famous because their implications were also devastating: If the Nazis were just following orders, then he had proved that anyone at all could be a Nazi. If the guards at Abu Ghraib were just following orders, then anyone was capable of torture.

The latter, Reicher said, is part of why interest in Milgram’s work has seen a resurgence in recent years. “If you look at acts of human atrocity, they’ve hardly diminished over time,” he said, and news of the abuse at Abu Ghraib was surfacing around the same time that Yale’s archival material was digitized, a perfect storm of encouragement for scholars to turn their attention once again to the question of what causes evil.

He and his colleague Alex Haslam, the third co-editor of The Journal of Social Issues ’ Milgram edition and a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland, have come up with a different answer. “The notion that we somehow automatically obey authority, that we are somehow programmed, doesn’t account for the variability [in rates of obedience] across conditions,” he said; in some iterations of Milgram’s study, the rate of compliance was close to 100 percent, while in others it was closer to zero. “We need an account that can explain the variability—when we obey, when we don’t.”

“We argue that the answer to that question is a matter of identification,” he continued. “Do they identify more with the cause of science, and listen to the experimenter as a legitimate representative of science, or do they identify more with the learner as an ordinary person? … You’re torn between these different voices. Who do you listen to?”

The question, he conceded, applies as much to the study of Milgram today as it does to what went on in his lab. “Trying to get a consensus among academics is like herding cats,” Reicher said, but “if there is a consensus, it’s that we need a new explanation. I think nearly everybody accepts the fact that Milgram discovered a remarkable phenomenon, but he didn’t provide a very compelling explanation of that phenomenon.”

What he provided instead was a difficult and deeply uncomfortable set of questions—and his research, flawed as it is, endures not because it clarifies the causes of human atrocities, but because it confuses more than it answers.

Or, as Miller put it: “The whole thing exists in terms of its controversy, how it’s excited some and infuriated others. People have tried to knock it down, and it always comes up standing.”

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