The City and the Self:
A Film by Stanley Milgram

January 13, 2009

It is absurd how difficult it is to see a film by Stanley Milgram. The City and the Self is a 52 minute long meditation on how life in the city affects human behavior.. and it could be useful for understanding the themes and city-views of major filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen.. but his work is mostly inaccessible. This documentary made 35 years ago sells for $265 from Penn State Media Sales.. and don't even try looking for it on Netflix. This is the kind of work destined only for a lonely existence on shelves in a university.

Milgram is makes a genuine pitch for comprehensibility. This is evident in his book, Obedience to Authority, written in an ingenious manner that draws the reader into the experiment (see my post here). These films appear to be a continuation of his goal of packaging academic work into a form that can reach people.. and make them see the world differently. We could almost call it guerilla academic work. But while this intent is obvious from the films, the distribution philosophy is hopelessly outdated. All these films should be freely available online.

The City and the Self is the film we have at our library, and its pacing was the biggest surprise for me. Not much happens in the first ten minutes or so.. we just get a collage of city images. There's no rush to present the research, but Milgram (with co-creator Harry From) lets the images work on the viewer. Even when we get the actual research examples that explain behavior in crowded situations, they are delivered quickly and with no hint of academic-ese. There's very little bothersome direct camera talk of the type seen in his film on Obedience. He relies now on a calm and intermittent voiceover to explain what we are seeing.

At several points the voiceover rises to something quite powerful.. certainly literary in its ambition:

Listen, there was a case in New York. A woman came home from a night job. She was stabbed repeatedly and over an extended period of time. 38 people were witnesses to this incident. Not one of them went to her aid or even called the police. OK, we can afford to be selective. Sure we don't have enough time for people. We can live with the fact that city people are strangers to one another. But the failure to answer this woman's cry, can we live with this? Is this what the city has made of us? Where did this kind of thing start? Perhaps it started the first time we passed someone who dropped his groceries and we didn't have time to help him.

That last comment about passing someone who has dropped his groceries is a reference to one of Milgram's urban experiments. A collaborator drops groceries on a crowded sidewalk and the experimenter watches to see who stops to help. As you might guess, not many people are willing to help. For Milgram it is not the case that urban dwellers are callous or mean by nature, they simply live in a social setting that diffuses responsibility and makes it difficult to live in a way that we might choose in the abstract. For Milgram people are not bad, they are just caught in systems that crush their ability to respond in a human way.

It would be wrong to say that Milgram is entirely hostile to urban environments. On any number of occasions he shows a fondness for street life and the people of New York (he taught at the City University of New York). There is an obvious gusto about his experiments on crowded streets. But that doesn't mean his portrayal of New York is not the product of a tradition and a way of seeing urban life (Taxi Driver). Some early scenes show New Yorkers refusing to be interviewed as they are walking on the street.. and the implication is that this is urban life. But that reaction can be compared to a very different view of urban life delivered in a near contemporary documentary by Louis Malle, Place de la Republique (1972, see post here). Malle captures individuals in a crowded city talking and being unpredictable.

It's a shame that academic work cannot be made more broadly available so that the connections between it and popular creative work cannot be more evident. Milgram gives every indication of having wanted that kind of broad attention.