Talk:The Tenth Level
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excerpt of book
[edit]American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957-1965, Kirsten Fermaglich, UPNE, 2007. "Similarly, television producer George Beliak produced a TV movie for CBS in 1976. called The Tenth Level, that legitimized Stanley Milgram’s claims for the political significance of his work while it nonetheless portrayed him as a rather mad scientist and ended with a sharp attack on his ethics. The movie fictionalized Milgram as academic psychologist Stephen Turner, a somewhat quiet man who was consumed with Nazi concentration camp imagery, played by William Shatner. Because Turner was neither black nor Jewish but a “WASP." this obsession was pathological, a reflection of guilt and a need for martyrdom, according to Timer's friend Ben. a black psychologist played by Ossie Davis. With discordant horror-movie music in the background, the movie showed Ulmer's experiments going forward, particularly emphasizing the intense nervous reactions of subjects, but did not let viewers themselves know that the “learner* was not being shocked until the play was more than half over, thus emphasizing the film’s portrait of the psychologist as crazy. After one subject, Barry, a student who had served in the army during Vietnam, had a breakdown during the experiment and destroyed the equipment. Turner was subjected to an ethical inquiry. Many of the subjects that viewers had seen breaking down earlier during the trials testified to the value of the experiment, including Barry. “Had 1 been over there in My Lai. I would have shot dogs. cats, women, children, old men. babies. I would have wasted them all," he told the ethics board. "I’m grateful to Dr. Turner, ‘cause you see I know what is inside of me." Despite Barry’s emotional admission, the last scene of the movie focused on a confrontation between Turner and his former lover, another psychologist on faculty, who demanded that he see the comparison between himself and his subjects: “You’ve been tested (like your subjects],1’ she charged “You had a choice, you could have stopped.... Your ends—which were knowledge—for that you knowingly inflicted pain." Turner had no answer to her angry charges, and the film ended with him sobbing on her shoulder."