Coercion, Power, Seduction: Craig Zobel's Compliance in 2026
There are few things audiences in the United States appreciate less than than the degree the narratives that shape the society they exist in, and therefore themselves and their lives, are often myths. For this reason, it’s not particularly surprising the festival run for Compliance was marred by controversy at the question and answer sessions after its showings.
Compliance is the rare film that achieves this not only without preaching, but also across boundaries usually discussed as different issues and topics, without resorting to the kind of satirical fiction usually designed to achieve this. There’s a degree to which science fiction and dystopian fiction have earned a reputation of being capable of inducing the audience down a rabbit hole of philosophical questions, and are part of what the most ardent fans of those genres appreciate. Compliance produces this effect, by the nature of how closely it hues to reality, by not being satirical at all. That it’s taken from events that did happen, and fills in only that for which there isn’t direct documentation, it opens a rabbit hole of questions that lead to a particular kind of confrontation with some of the myths and narratives that are central to the way society is organized in the United States. It takes a presentation, a dramatization of reality so closely hewing to it, to portray the entangled, intersecting morass it can is, on screen.
In its way, the film is an indictment of how often we avoid the questions it confronts us with. The controversies around it, along with the most common criticisms toward it, are as likely to be unconscious avoidance of that rabbit hole as they are to be moral or technical critiques. At the same time, the events in the film can only happen because we avoid confrontations with its questions.]
Looking back from the standpoint of 2026, Compliance may be the most important film to come out of the United States in the twenty-first century. As we are confronted with the degree individuals and institutions are willing to comply with sadistic authority, despite its obviously nonsensical justifications (the deployment and actions of ICE, a war in Iran, attempting to deploy National Guard in multiple cities), and the blatant nature of misogyny as a vector for corruption (the Epstein files in the reality of a post #MeToo world, the sheer reach of a convicted pedophiles influence and network, the way his trafficking in young woman was basically a currency for access to power), Compliance denies us the easy, simple retreat into explaining it all as individual moral failures, spurred by ambition or lack of conscience.
Unfortunately for Craig Zobel and Magnolia Pictures, controversy didn’t turn into box office receipts, and most of the audience that did see Compliance did so once it reached home exhibition via disc or streaming. What unfolded then was a mirror to the experience that inspired Zobel to write and direct the film. Should one choose, old Reddit threads and other social media posts can still be found that are exemplary of the experience. It begins with incredulousness, the idea that the actions of the characters in the film are impossible, and have no relationship to any kind of reality. This is followed by the revelation that the film is meticulously constructed from real events, and the confused shock of trying to digest what that suggests.
On April 4, 2004, a man called a McDonald’s in Mount Washington Tennessee, identifying himself as a police officer. He said one of the employees was suspected of theft, gave a vague description the assistant manager, Donna Summers, believed was Louise Ogborn. The caller claimed to have a high level manager on the other line, who was informed about the situation. Over the next three and a half hours, Ogborn would be strip searched by Summers and sexually assaulted by Summers fiancé, Walter Nix, at the direction of the caller.
Summers would enter an Alford Plea (essentially a refusal to admit guilt, but an acknowledgment the state had enough evidence to convict) to unlawful imprisonment. She was sentences to one year probation. Walter Nix was plead guilty to sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, unlawful imprisonment and was sentenced to five years in prison.
Zobel has said when he saw the news story detailing the events that took place in the Mount Washington McDonald’s, he was incredulous. Upon realizing this wasn’t an isolated incident, that there had been more than seventy similar incidents over a period of more than ten years, he was left to reckon with the question of how that could possibly happen. Compliance is Zobel’s exploration of that question. The events in the film, and the script, are fashioned from court transcripts and closed circuit security footage.
In the question and answer sessions after the festival screenings and in interviews about the film since, Zobel has repeatedly stated he didn’t set out to make a horror film. As the content of the film is concerned, and its germination from idea to becoming a script, then a feature film, Compliance would be recognized by most critics and audiences as belonging in the true crime drama or docu-drama genre. It at least deserves recognition for being far more dedicated to presenting the reality it is portraying than is usual from either of those genres. Both true crime dramas and docu-dramas often insert fictional interactions or exclude from the real events from to heighten the sense of drama.
They are genres given to sensationalism, a kind of narrative tabloidization of real events. This is, to some degree, understandable. The intent of a narrative film is different than what we’d consider a hard news documentary or a news story. The storytelling is the focus, and where storytelling is concerned, the perspective of the teller will highlight different aspects of the story, depending on who the teller is. This necessary latitude is often abused though, in the drive to make entertainment that’s less interested in exploration or revelation, and more interested in either pulp thrills or easy, comforting emotional conclusions reality rarely affords.
Whatever Zobel’s intentions about the genre, the experience of watching Compliance is equivalent to watching one of the more effective, disturbing films in the horror canon. The events that took place on April 4, 2004 in that McDonald’s are horrific by themselves, certainly. They aren’t any more or less horrific than the most generic horror films though. The real horror of Compliance, the reason it evoked the response of incredulousness and moral indignation, is the degree to which it expertly reveals layers of further horrors, the longer and more thoroughly we consider it. It requires a confrontation with some of our most zealously defended values and ideas about what the United States is as a nation, who we believe we are versus who we are, and as we’re experiencing today, that is a much more complicated, much more affecting variety of horror than we have been willing to broach as a culture.
What we’re presented with is a messy tangle of issues of class, labor, gender, generational divides, and questions of authority and power that loom over all of them. At no point does Compliance provide the audience with an easy, simple avenue of avoidance. One can point to two simple reasons the events of the film take place, the twisted sadism of The Caller, and Sandra’s (Ann Dowd in a truly amazing performance, playing the script's version of Donna Summer) unquestioning compliance in his claims he’s a police officer. That still leaves further questions. What would compel someone to comply with a person simply because they claimed to be a police officer? What leads to someone becoming the kind of person the caller is? The film provides intimations about those answers, but they’re only slight, vague suggestions. In the vein of the phrase, “A hit dog will holler,” it’s very likely the most vocal and emphatic attacks on the film were an attempt to avoid that confrontation.
The most immediate layer of horror is what the character Becky (Dreama Walker in a courage turn as the stand in for Louise Ogborn) is subjected to. There are layers of emotional, psychological and physical violation that are horrific to be confronted with.
The next layer of horror is the understanding that, at the same time, these are mundane violations. This isn’t to downplay or dismiss their effect or their aftermath, in any sense. They are mundane in the regularity with which they occur. A young woman being sexually assaulted is rarely enough to get more than ninety seconds in local news, if anyone thought it important enough to even alert them in the first place. It would get two inches on page seven of a local newspaper. Maybe it would get three minutes and four inches on page three because it’s an assault involving the workplace. The reality is that it is a mundane story, because of its too common. If a local news station or paper assigned a reporter to collect every story of sexual assault they could, there’d be no way to air or print them all. That it is mundane, what that means for so many millions of people is another layer of horror in and of itself.
Then we have Sandra, and her credulous willingness to comply with a voice on the other end of the phone, simply because they claim to be a member of law enforcement, how far she is willing to go in that compliance, and the way the caller manipulates her. Zobel’s genius in the writing of Compliance is understanding that the characters actions indict them, but they are also clearly manipulated in ways power manipulates people daily.
Sandra isn’t a monster. She’s a person struggling to get by in less than ideal circumstances, before the phone even rings. It’s the complicated meeting of the compliance that is part and parcel of those circumstances, being targeted by a sadist who does understand them that takes Sandra into the territory of the monstrous. She has responsibility, because she relinquished her agency in a way that is mundane in the same way the sexual assault of a young woman is mundane. It is rote. It is everyday routine. It is normal, and expected. The meat of Sandra’s existence is to be caught between authority and responsibility, negotiating the two, with few options. Zobel knows he doesn’t need to indict her further, and the discipline with which he seeks to understand what would explain those actions, is a subtle, complicated picture of social and economic hierarchies, and how we respond to them, whether or not we are even aware of them as hierarchies, how they effect us or that we’re negotiating with them constantly.
From the second we meet Sandra, she is trapped between responsibility and authority. Her interaction with the delivery driver who chides her, in a way that has a tone of the most casual sexism, is due to an employee having left a refrigerator partially open overnight. As we come to see, this is a fast food restaurant. It’s staffed by teenagers. Sandra is a supervisor, the equivalent of a manager, from what we see. She’s taken the initiative to try to address the matter of spoiled ingredients, before alerting her regional manager. Initiative is something employees within corporate structures are told is a good trait, something they should endeavor to show. In this case, Sandra’s decision to deal with the problem without her regional manager provokes a chiding from whoever this supplier is, in the form of complaining about missing his son’s game, in relation to a “woman” failing to follow some part of the chain of authority. It’s the kind of casual sexism that comes from a lifetime of seeing women in roles without authority.
From the first interaction, we’re seeing Sandra caught in a web of the contradictions within the norms of labor and gender. It is socially acceptable to treat fast food employees as expendable, replaceable, without any importance, and due little respect. In this, it’s become a norm for teenagers to be the most likely staff. By definition, teenagers lack the experience, the sense of necessity adults have related to employment. At the same time, the public at large, and the corporate entities which oversee the individual locations, basically expect those teenagers to bring a sense of seriousness to the workplace an adult does, while denigrating their labor, not just in the form of low wages, but also in how they are positioned rhetorically as expendable and replaceable. At least nominally, the people who do show they are able to bring the sense of seriousness and responsibility to the workplace expected by those corporate entities and by the public, are appointed supervisory positions.
They are somehow expected to create the environment where that sense of seriousness and responsibility is inherent, for a labor pool it is inherently absent from. As alluring as the argument that “parent’s are supposed to instill a work ethic” is, there is nothing that is going to instill the sense of necessity that comes with one’s entire economic stability being reliant on their employment, except that experience and the sense of precariousness it engenders. Additionally, by design, the part time status of fast food (and most low wage employees), are meant to prevent that reliance.That reliance, that sense of responsibility, comes with expectations that are natural to human interaction, and in every other part of society, encouraged. We call it responsibility, but it’s much more accurately described as a required loyalty, and loyalty without reciprocation. Loyalty, without reciprocation is servitude. At the same time, in the US context, rhetorically at least, we associate servitude with failure and victimization. What reason, exactly, does a person have to treat any of these jobs with the sense of responsibility they attempt to require, and not feel resentment and sense of rebellion… unless they identify with authority, seeing acquisition of responsibility as respite from servitude and as safety from victimization?
What’s left is the “dignity of work,” which doesn’t buy food and can’t be traded for stock. That measure, whether something can be traded for stock or, is the definition of its actual value in a capitalist economy.
Anyone who has ever worked in a low wage job for a large corporation, whether it be corporate owned and operated chains or franchised businesses, nominally owned independently, has had this experience. To be treated as if you are replaceable and meaningless, and yet expected to bring the seriousness and sense of responsibility of a NASA flight engineer is the norm. The “dignity of a good day’s work” transformed into a chain to servitude, rather than anything resembling fulfillment or satisfaction.
It is an acculturated standard that low wage jobs and we, as employees, do not matter, while also being required they act as if this isn’t true the second we don a uniform. This is true of every position we deem “low skill labor” and the people who do it, especially within a context involving standards dictated by a multi-state or multi-national corporation. Employees and authority both become faceless to each other, and in the United States, the mechanisms by which the people over whom authority is exercised can hold it accountable, are few and generally burdensome in cost of time and money, which by nature of being low wage employees, they don’t have.
All of it is designed to evoke maximum compliance, at the least cost.
We meet Becky as she is walking away from her car, headed into the building. Kevin, one of her fellow employees trots up and teases her about not parking in the designated employee parking area.
After this first interaction, we see a short meeting between Sandra and the employees, and we see she does take her job seriously. She is trying to get these kids to take theirs seriously too. The problem is that it’s a nearly impossible situation, and what a manager in this position has to do is someone evoke some sense of personal loyalty, because there are certainly not other factors to inspire it. That’s not a skill set that comes with the job description, and whether its selected for in the hiring process, depends on how well the person doing the hiring understands the actual necessities of the job.
This is followed by a conversation between Becky and the assistant manager, Marti, somewhat stereotypical for two young people. We do get a few key pieces of information though, Becky is anxious that she is going to be blamed for the fridge being left open, she has a sense Sandra doesn’t like her, and says she needs the job. We also find out she has attracted the attention of two or three different boys, and that she’s bought a new phone cover because the decorations on her previous were falling off.
In the midst of their conversation, Sandra walks up, and an exchange about paramours, attraction and desire takes place, which doesn’t put her in a very good light. It’s off putting, but it reveals Sandra has some trouble “reading the room,” and she longs for the combination of camaraderie of being “one of the girls.” There’s a combination of generational divide and its intersection with authority at work. When Sandra walks away, Becky makes an offhand comment to Marti about it, that Sandra overhears, and we can see in her face that it cuts. In saying, “Who even calls it sexting,” Becky is reacting to both. The generational divide is at work in the vocabulary, but the degree Sandra’s comment that “her man really knows how to get her going,” is off putting stems from both the age difference between the three women, and that it comes up against the sense of professionalism Sandra is expected to, and clearly tries to embody. Professionalism is a requirement of the authority she’s given as a manager/supervisor, and yet it’s also a barrier to the kind of sincere, genuine connection human beings need, and Sandra clearly wants to be able to participate in.
Immediately following, Sandra takes a phone call from her fiancee, Van, who is calling to inform her to say he’s going to have a beer with a friend. When Sandra responds he doesn’t need permission to see his friends, it’s clear he’s confused. It’s almost as if he’s just realizing he is calling because he did feel he needs permission, and the way Sandra says it has an twinge of belittlement.
This all goes by relatively quickly, but because of how little there is to set the characters up in the first place, the film being so economical, it is a kind of code key to understanding what follows. All of the answers to the “how” of what happens, are really given to us in this short period, demonstrating the way these characters related to each other. The subtlety of the script is both one of its strongest assets and one of its weaknesses. If we, as audience members can pick up on the dynamics between these characters, and we don’t have advanced degrees in sociology or economics, chances are high we’re familiar with contexts like the one the story takes place in.
The question of “how” this happened, is answered by how well The Caller understands that context. That he claims to be a police officer serves more than one purpose. It not only establishes him as an authority, which comes with an inherent level of threat to the rest of the characters who don’t have a commensurate level of authority, but more important to the situation, it gives him the ability to treat the interactions like interrogations. It’s not coincidence the manipulations The Caller employs are similar to those police use in the process of interrogation. For the audience who does understand and identify with the social, cultural and economic context, the answers lie in the process of manipulation The Caller uses, because it is familiar, whether or not they’ve dealt with police. It’s also not dissimilar to the way employers overcome employees objections to policy or demands of other kinds.
Ultimately, the answer to “how” this happened is the same answer to how any abusive power gets secures compliance from those over whom it exerts power. It’s why “I was just following orders” strikes a chord in the American consciousness, beyond its historical context. The more one’s life is shaped by powers it is difficult or impossible to hold accountable, the more we are familiar with the manipulation of the fears, anxieties and needs it is free to employ. The less power one has in their context within a society, the more they become accustomed and acculturated to complying with it, out of necessity, convenience and in some cases, the desire for recognition. It’s not a coincidence The Caller, both in the film and in the real cases, targeted the people he did. The context of their lives is shaped by authority they have little power to hold accountable, and the numerous, ever present varieties and layers of it.
Every uncomfortable question one may raise in response to Compliance, comes back to the way the majority of people in the US, and most especially those who are on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, are acculturated to comply with authority. It is chilling and heartbreaking that in the films conclusion, when the detective whose been brought to the scene, after Sandra has discovered the hoax she’s been taken in by, he asks Becky why she didn’t just say no when The Caller demanded she assent to a strip search, she replies, “Because I just knew it was going to happen.” It’s a statement that rings with the truth of the degree our attitudes about authority are shaped by the level of difficulty and likelihood of success of resisting or noncompliance, as well as the general attitudes toward it. Everything in the film is related to the way these attitudes and ideas about authority shape us as human beings, including our personal, professional and social relationships, and the degree to which it isn’t a social or cultural norm for us to think about this with any depth.
In considering this, it becomes impossible not to ask if this is part of the reason for the existence of the tangled realities of class, gender, labor, generational divides and attitudes about that shape our daily lives. Is the reason American life is so suffused with coercion that it’s a patchwork of overlapping social, political and economic systems attempting to find and create stability or is it convenient for authority? Are these even different things? Then there’s what is maybe the most difficult question. Does it matter if they are different things, if this is what they produce?
It’s a kind of confrontation rare in film, art more broadly or media more generally.
All of this is important, because the caller trades on our unexplored relationships to authority in order to appeal to Sandra. The terrible beauty of Craig Zobel’s script is that he understands the process of getting people who are otherwise decent to participate in horrible things, isn’t just about coercion in the sense of the fear of punishment. It’s also about seduction, the things power can offer us, the things our social, political and economic conditions deny us, that power can use to manipulate us around barriers of our own morality we wouldn’t otherwise consider circumventing. The coup de grace of his script, is its singular fictitious insert. The Caller is playing a numbers game. He is relying on the fact that the conditions in the area he’s called have created the vulnerabilities he wants to, and knows how to exploit. There were no recordings of the phone calls themselves, so Zobel invents The Caller’s end. He also, in a genius decision, ends the film revealing The Caller is a telemarketer by profession.
By doing this, he implicates the conditions of commerce we live with daily. In the films resolution, it becomes impossible not to recognize the similarities in things like a police interrogation and way we understand things like advertising and sales, and how deeply ensconced they are in coercion and manipulation.
I spent the majority of my working life in customer service and sales. I’ve attended more sales trainings than I care to count or admit. I was, simultaneously, an uncommonly good salesperson, and a terrible salesperson, something my employers could never fully reconcile. I was an uncommonly good salesperson, for a combination of reasons. The first is that I’m genuinely curious about people, and it is bound into my psychology to try to understand how best they feel respected, and to then treat them in accordance with it. It was also bound into my psychology, at a young age, that when people feel comfortable, they are predictable, and predictable people, even if they are assholes, are easier to deal with than unpredictable people. A few experiences in my childhood coded a belief that I would be less likely to be in danger, if people were comfortable with me. These made me an uncommonly good salesperson, in one sense. They gave me the ability to establish relationships with people, who were customers or patrons, that allowed me their trust, and in our commercial environment, trust is hard to come by.
As I understood it, my job was to do the best I could to give people the thing they wanted and suited their needs. Usually because of whatever position, sometimes aided by personal interest/obsession, I had some level of knowledge about whatever it was I was selling that the average person didn’t. Whether it was music, paint, motorcycles, the job was to use what I knew to help the person get what fit their needs. That involves exploration of those needs/wants. It also often includes negotiation between what was available/existed and what wasn’t/didn’t. Sometimes it also meant negotiating terms that both the business I was employed by could survive with, and the terms the person I was negotiating with could afford and/or live with. All of these came together so that I was very good at developing relationships with people that encouraged loyalty. To put it bluntly, people trusted that I was not interested in taking advantage of them, nor would I try to take advantage of them, even if I saw an opportunity to do so, and that I valued that loyalty in the relationship.
I did always value that trust, because I understand why it’s hard to come by in the world as we live in it, and because it is so hard coded into my psychology to treat people in a way they understand as being respected. Because I love motorcycling and want people to feel respected, I genuinely wanted people to leave with a motorcycle that was going to encourage them to ride, and they were going to enjoy and be fulfilled by, as much as I have been. That was the unspoken contract I felt I was making with people.
As an example, in my years working in motorcycle sales, I tried to impress on a few young men that maybe the motorcycle they walked in asking about wasn’t the best choice. I could have much more easily have just taken their money, given them what they wanted and washed my hands of any responsibility, but I am not unaware of the connection between youth, the social conditions we live with, and the draw of taking risks. Additionally, after working at a dealer for a short period of time, the costs those risks could incur, physically and financially, are crystal clear to me. I do, in fact, love motorcycling, so I’m intimately familiar with all of that, as well as the culture within motorcycling and the way it interacts with the broader culture. I’m aware of the statistics, and what they say about the connection between age, motor vehicle accidents more broadly, and motorcycles more specifically.
To put it bluntly, when a young guy walked through the door and was clearly looking for the thing that was going most enable to his taste for risk taking, I’d try to talk him into buying something that would be less enabling, and less expected to be used in risk taking by both the culture within motorcycling and the culture around it. I would try to expand what he understood motorcycling as a practice could offer. Fortunately, because there’s a world outside the United States where the majority of those cultures understand a motorcycle can be designed to purpose, they can provide very different experiences and options in their use.
I love the experience of riding a well designed and built sport bike. It’s fun as all hell. I am also very aware the practical purposes they are designed for is riding on a closed track, enabling and encouraging mortal risks if you aren’t on a closed track and/or being perceived as a specific kind of cool. I will forever believe European nations that use stepped licensing tied to experience and engine capacity are infinitely more sane than the fact that a twenty-one year old (or a person of any age, for that matter) that can afford it, can hop on a 1000cc motorcycle if they’ve never had any experience riding a two wheeled motorized vehicle on actual roads where people drive their cars. The selfish end is that I wanted those people to come back and buy their next motorcycle or their next three motorcycles, and to patronize the business I worked for, for all their motorcycling needs, meaning helmets, gloves, maintenance and so on. A person has to be living, and physically able to ride, to do any of that.
I’ve also been a bartender. I know a bartender or a business can be sued for over serving someone to a degree that leads to their injury or death or the injury or death of others, especially if they get behind the wheel. Serving someone so much alcohol that they die or are hospitalized for alcohol poisoning also opens liability. These principles aren’t so different to me, but there’s no legal repercussions to selling someone a motorcycle that’s going to enable similar risks. As is true with motorcycling, dead people don’t have relationships with bartenders, and they sure as hell don’t tip.
A few times, I succeeded in talking those young guys into motorcycles less likely to encourage and enable the kind of risk taking that ramps up the likelihood of lifelong disability or death. Even when I didn’t, they left feeling I took the time to care about their well being, in a way that wasn’t disrespectful, and that they were heard and understood. If I cared enough about their well being to do that, it was one more person in their lives as a weight against those kinds of risks, and that was the best I could do. I would take the time to do this, to be understood, and to understand, in part because I knew they could go a few miles away, and where it was likely the person they’d encounter was going to try to convince them to buy something even more likely to encourage and enable that risk taking, because it would put a few more dollars in their pocket when commission checks were cut.
“Why buy that 650cc, when the 1200cc is just $100 dollars more a month with the special we’re running? The 650 is nothing to sneeze at, for sure. That 1200 though… it changed what I thought a motorcycle could be, and I’ve never felt anything like twisting that throttle coming out of a turn.” What a person can’t know, until they have some experience with it, is the feeling of that 1200cc coming out of a turn has as much to do recognizing and negotiating your internal tolerance for risk, the skill you have to use those 1200ccs, the way the rest of the bike is designed to interact with them, and matching all of it together for the greatest sense of fulfillment, from yourself and the technical capabilities of the machine. It’s far easier to reproduce the design of a machine capable of more than even the most experienced street riders than it is to make street riders who are capable of matching the technical limits of those machines. The best professional riders in the world, train constantly and follow incredibly disciplined regiments and lifestyles, to be able to push themselves to meet the technical capabilities of 650cc motorcycles. They dedicate their lives to it. They have entire teams dedicated to insuring those machines are as well matched to the rider as their design can possibly allow, and they are maintained to the highest standard. Someone who rides a motorcycle a few times a week, maybe a few times a month, and maybe checks the oil and tire pressure? The minute they try to find the technical limits of what a motorcycle is going to do, is going to be life changing. When it’s not for the better, it’s likely going to be catastrophic. Millions of motorcycles come off the assembly line, annually, that only a small handful of people in the world can actually handle at the limits of their capabilities. The feeling of fulfillment, exhilaration and satisfaction, is more about being in tune with yourself and the machine, than it is pushing the machine to its limits.
Understanding all of this, that it is behind every sentence I speak or write about motorcycling, is why I was a great at selling motorcycles. It all mattered, to me. I’m not ashamed to say I have convinced a handful of people to begin motorcycling, and not just so they’d come buy a bike from me, but because I believed they’d benefit from and appreciate what it brought into their lives.
For these reasons, I was also an uncommonly terrible salesperson, because I was never able to overcome the degree to which so much of our commerce is based on manipulation and coercion. To put it bluntly, I was terrible, absolute, unadulterated shit at “up selling.” Every one of the “sales trainings” I’ve attended served one of two purposes. The first was to teach people to do what I did as a function of the quirks of my psychology, learn how to listen to people to understand their needs and wants, make them comfortable and gain their trust. The other was to overcome barriers of consent, using that same understanding of their needs and their wants, for the purpose of expanding profit. I’ve never been able to overcome the feeling and belief that this is an act of disrespect, that beyond the rules of commerce, it violates the basic social contract of human interactions, so I was terrible at it, even if I could twist myself around the reasons for trying to do it, like keeping a particular job.
I’m not saying they don’t exist, but I don’t think I’ve attend one of those trainings that didn’t lean heavily on the phrase, “Turn a no into a yes.” They invariably featured an entire section or module dedicated specifically to this idea. Although I was never comfortable with it, I’m honestly a little ashamed of the fact that it wasn’t until I’d attended a number of these trainings/seminars, that it occurred to me what other context the phrasing of that statement can be applied to.
There are many thousands of ways these overlap. We are, right now, watching another revelation of the way “turning a no into a yes” relates to labor, power and gender. It must be said that the Epstein files themselves are only extensions of, additions to, what victims have already told us. The victims themselves were not enough to move us the way the revelations of the files have been. And this, is an extension of how something like this network of sex trafficking pedophiles exists and operates, for as long as it did. It’s also not, in itself new. It’s just a different population of power. R. Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts… anywhere you find sexual predation, you find this same process at work. None of them are possible without the power of employers to “turn a no into a yes” where employees are concerned. Preventing victims from coming forward, which all of these have also involved, is impossible without “turning a no into a yes,” and the exact same process and principle.
In labor discussions, we call these “soft skills,” right? But there’s nothing really soft about them when you get down to it. I mean, they can be, but they aren’t inherently or exclusively, and it’s not the genuinely soft ways in which they’re used that they are valued for in business and commerce. It’s these soft skills we say are transferable, and often the hardest to teach. Yet, we have clearly taught a number of generations of boys to become men who believe they are entitled to do whatever they can to turn a not into a yes. For the same reasons, television is a commercial medium. In return for some entertainment, we give companies the chance to come into our homes and turn a no into a yes. Our environments are filled with things like billboards and print advertisements, designed to do the same.
Employers and their managerial class also have power labor in this country doesn’t. Even the most “worker friendly” states in the US don’t have the protections even European nations do, and even in those European nations, many of those protections fall short in design and/or application. The so called “Right to Work” states have basically no protections for workers, and a worker has to rely on federal protections, at best. One can’t be a worker in the US, without having an employer use whatever power or seduction is available to them, to turn a no into a yes.
On top of these, there are the social hierarchies of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, nation of birth and origin…
We live with all of this, daily. For the majority of us, this is “the way it is,” in the sense that when they’re brought to our attention, especially in their individual influence and how they effect us, we bemoan the lack of fairness, but our daily lives and ability to navigate society, require we are compliant to “the way it is.” When petitioned about these realities, if power doesn’t respond with reprisal, it says, “Later. That’s not important right now.” Later only comes when power is given no choice but to enter and continue negotiation, by existential threat or in the case of labor and capital, profits are too severely curtailed.
They are the same skills that are used in police interrogations too, which when the power imbalance is added, is how false confessions are procured. Part of what power is, by definition, is the ability to decide when a negotiation begins, when it ends, and to define the parameters. Police interrogations that end in false confessions most often leverage those powers. In most states, a person can be held for twenty-four to forty-eight hours, without being charged. When facing the power of the state, its ability to irrevocably change our lives at its whim, most people don’t recognize a police interrogation as a negotiation, so it ends up being an interaction with one party negotiating, and the other having no idea that’s what it is, because one party has the power to begin or end it, at their whim, and one doesn’t. False confessions involve those two same principles advertising and sales rely on. Turning a no into a yes, and repetition.
During a police interrogation, a police officer is allowed to lie to the person they are questioning, and in the common terms, our common understanding of the difference between persuasion and coercion, lying or omitting the truth steps over the line into coercion. Why would we relax that standard, when power of the state is involved, considering how much power it has?
Individually, and within whatever in group we might identify with, confronting this reality also means recognizing how many of the narratives we live with about individuality and self determination are fictitious, at worst, and incomplete or naive, at best. It’s part of how people develop the belief we can be invulnerable to cult recruitment or indoctrination. In truth, just about any of us could be recruited and indoctrinated into a cult, it just depends on who the cult feels are its target demographics, and how they sell those ideas. It’s how the economically comfortable or even not immediately, desperately precarious find individual moral failure as the reason for poverty. “What was she wearing?” “Why didn’t she come forward sooner?” For the majority of Americans, the idea that their sense of morality, and their individual identity is both a collaboration with, and response to these systems of power, is anathema.
The truth is, no one is self made. We are all conglomerations of the influences of power, whether that be systemic power or the most personal, proximal power of family. The avoidance of that truth, that reality, does nothing but leave us vulnerable to the manipulations of people who seek power through manipulation and it only lets the worst of us have easier avenues to seducing us or coercing us, without our conscious understanding that this is what is happening.
That reality is the reason Compliance is such a deeply uncomfortable film. It pulls up the pool of ways we are all coerced by, seduced by and subservient to powers that are amoral, in the hopes anyone who wields them shares a sense of morality we recognize or understand, and leaves little in the way of power to obtain accountability when they’re used in abusive and harmful ways. It’s a film that confronts us with the realities we don’t talk about, and maybe don’t even have effective language for, because of how much it serves power that we don’t. Compliance is a confrontation with a toxic pool of influence we all swim in. The real Becky, Louise Ogborn, won a lawsuit against McDonald’s effectively due to the fact that they didn’t sufficiently warn their franchise locations that a number of these calls had happened before one was place to the store in Mount Washington, Tennessee. A few of them had already resulted in employees being strip searched, though they didn’t end in as direct sexual assault. In it’s way, this is revealing about the attitude of power about the conditions it benefits from.
Personally, I think it says something that we do have to struggle for the words, and what it says favors power, and that’s why we don’t have the words.
We have been struggling, as a nation, to find words, to give expression to what it is that’s happening politically, socially and economically. We’ve been struggling to find a diagnosis, to come up with an explanation for why and how we are where we are, experiencing what we are. Compliance is one of the most important films of the twenty-first century because it is the explanation, because it reveals why we don’t have those words, and even more than the words, we need to recognize that compliance is not an evasion of responsibility. It requires we confront the coercions and seductions which bring us to compliance, and asks us whether the cost is worth it.
It's unfortunate that Craig Zobel, Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy and Bill Camp haven't been recognized and afforded the respect due the courage it takes to make a film like Compliance, but again, we'd have to be willing to confront the questions it asks if we did.