Although there is an old saying "Don't do bad things, don't be afraid of ghosts knocking on the door", but I still can't match the awe of the word "court summons" in my heart, and the search engine in my mind immediately starts to look for the recent actions. For whether there is anything related to the "court summons".
None.
Instead, I remembered several new fraud cases reported in the news recently. One of them is to use telephone fraud. There are many methods and tricks. The result is that there is no escape from one sentence: transfer the money to the designated account, and everything will be at peace. However, these methods and methods have not yet mentioned "court summons", presumably fraudsters have not dared to dare to "break ground on Tai Sui" (facts have proved that never underestimate the imagination of fraudsters). So I was still thinking about it for a long time, and now it is naturally ridiculous, just like the victims in the film "Submission".
Like any hoax that has no technical content after analysis, the story of "Obey" always makes the audience anxious about the IQ of the characters in the play. On a busy weekend, Sandra, the duty manager of the fast food restaurant, suddenly received a call from the police, claiming that one of her female clerks, Becky, stole the customer's wallet, and the customer ran to the police station to report the crime, because the police station is now tight. A police officer named Daniels ordered Sandra to help with the case on the phone. The first thing to do is to get Becky under control, then Daniels instructs Sandra to search Becky's body. After that, the story becomes more and more bizarre, even a little absurd for a person with a normal IQ. In fact, many scams are very naive in retrospect, and even the victims themselves do not believe it. How did they get into such a naive scam? In the end, it can only be explained by "the authorities are obsessed, and bystanders are clear".
In fact, the point of "Obey" is not the hoax itself, because the hoax is so clumsy that experienced audiences can guess the key elements of the hoax from the very beginning, that the policeman is fake. According to this, some viewers believe that the story is not credible, even though it has been stated at the beginning of the film that the story is based on real events, and even at the end, the director uses specific numbers to increase the credibility of this statement. In the subconscious, I also think that this scam is really not very clever, so I use the "real thing adaptation" again and again to eliminate the audience's rejection of the plot.
So how does this botched scam work?
Fraudsters claiming to be police officers and directing their victims' behavior on the grounds of assisting the police may be a key factor in the success of the scam. Many of them reflect people's myths about power.
In the 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of famous experiments to explore people's responses to power. He asked 40 citizens from different occupations as subjects to participate in a study called "The Impact of Punishment on Students' Learning". The subject acts as a "teacher" and, at the direction of the experimenter (Stanley and his assistants), applies electric shocks of increasing intensity and pain to the "student" when the "student" makes a mistake in his study . Although the students resisted in various forms, 26 subjects, under the order of the experimenter, persisted to the end and applied the strongest electric shock to the "student". Later, Stanley changed the experimental elements and conducted 19 independent experiments with as many as 1,000 subjects. The design and results of these experiments shocked the global psychology community and caused people to talk about the relationship between power, personal morality and free will. . Many psychologists from all over the world have repeated this experiment at different times, hoping that the introduction of the two variables "temporal" and "regional" can change the results of Stanley's experiment, but their expectations fell through and the experiment The results are basically consistent with Stanley's, which undoubtedly shows that blind obedience to power is human nature to some extent, regardless of time and place.
Obedience is actually a movie version of Stanley's experiment, which illustrates people's blind obedience to power in the form of a story. In this story, the impostor policeman plays the role of the experiment operator, the duty manager (and her fiancé) plays the role of the subject, and the poor female clerk plays the role of the "student", constantly resisting, only to be overwhelmed More and more "electric shock". Although the duty manager has a little power in the small group of the fast food restaurant, she is usually approachable, but since being guided by the greater power of the "police" call, the audience can see that her power is gradually strengthened, and finally her identity I have already identified with the police because of power relations, as if I have also put on a police uniform.
Seeing this, people can't help but think of another more famous psychological experiment: "Stanford Prison", also known as "Lucifer Effect". Just a decade after Stanley Milgram's experiment, in 1971, Stanley's high school friend, American psychologist Philip Zimbardo, led a research team in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford University Psychology Building. A psychological study of human "human responses to captivity" and "the effect of captivity on authority and supervise behavior in prisons". The research team selected 24 experimenters (all American college students) from a pool of 70 applicants, and randomly selected 12 to play prison guards and the remaining 12 to play prisoners. On the first day, everyone was at peace, but the "prisoners" launched a riot the next day, tearing off the numbers on the prison uniforms, refusing to obey orders, and making fun of the guards. Zimbardo asked the guards to take steps to bring the situation under control. Ultimately, the guards took steps that included forcing prisoners to do push-ups, stripping naked, taking away meals, pillows, blankets and beds, letting prisoners clean toilets with empty hands, and being locked in confinement. The situation is still completely out of control. On the sixth day, the experiment had to be stopped after Zimbardo's colleague Christine raised moral questions. The German film "Death Experiment" in 2001 was adapted from this, and in 2010, Hollywood remade it.
In "Obey", the impostor police asked the manager on duty to find someone to take care of Becky. Because the staff in the store were very busy, the manager on duty asked his fiancé Ivan to take care of him. In the warehouse of the fast food restaurant, Ivan and Becky basically reenact Zimbardo's "Stanford Prison Experiment", although Ivan is not wearing a police uniform and Becky is not wearing a prison uniform, however, the police call gave Ian In case of an invisible police uniform. For the audience outside the plot, this police uniform appears absurd because of the police's impersonation. But the characters in the play are convinced of this, so Becky's role as a prisoner is powerless and can only be slaughtered.
If the impostor was not a police officer, the story might have ended differently. It is precisely because it is the police, a symbol of an authority, that people lose their most basic self-reflection ability. Why are people so blindly obedient in the face of power? Stanley's experiments show that this may be hidden in human nature. This nature may be partly derived from biology, and more may be based on sociology, perhaps in the process of human evolution, through various means of punishment (as in the film Ivan was ordered by the police to punish Becky punishment), internalizing "submission to power" into the genes of the race. This is the most successful ideology, but it is also the most terrifying result. If people lose their reflection on power, they can only "I am a fish, and people are a knife."
At this point, the significance of criticism will be reflected.
Because, criticism first requires reflection and questioning.
At the end of "Obey", out of moral questioning, Ivan doesn't want to look after Becky anymore, and the duty manager has to ask another employee, Harold, to look after him. The imposter policeman wanted to command Harold again as he did others, and Harold only said one word: "Why?". Although there is only one word, everyone knows the weight of this word, it completely changed the plot of "Obey", and if the word came up earlier, this tragedy would not have happened. In fact, there are also people in the play who have the opportunity to propose this word, but in the face of powerful power, they hesitate to say anything. It wasn't just because Harold had his own moral bottom line that it was brought up by Harold - when the police were on the phone telling him to take off Becky's clothes and check for stolen items, Harold said : "I don't think it's a decent thing to see a lady so naked", everyone in the show has such a moral bottom line, why do those people easily take off Becky's clothes according to the police's orders, despite their innermost feelings Have you ever hesitated?
In the face of power, many people easily lose themselves, perhaps because of excessive trust in power, or because of the obscenity of power. The loss of self makes the moral bottom line collapse, but Harold did not do this, he never did Forget one of your rights—questioning and criticizing power, although it’s not easy. However, as E.B. White said in the article "The Townspeople's Meeting": "It is a good thing for people to fight for their rights after all, otherwise, time will eat up these rights little by little like a mouse."
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