The Milgram Experiment, or On Playlists

I’ve been listening to Dar Williams’s “The Buzzer” a lot while writing KU2. I listened to it a lot while writing Tap & Gown as well. On the surface, its fast tempo is designed to put you on edge, and like the Jeopardy tune, makes me want to work as quickly as possible.

Clearly, that’s not why I’m listening, though. I originally chose “The Buzzer” for my Tap & Gown playlist because it reminds me of Yale, where the experiment took place. In addition, Dar was one of my favorite musicians in college, which puts me in a “I’m a college senior” mindset. And finally, the topic of the song reminds me a lot of Poe. Or the potential of Poe.

“The Buzzer” is a song ostensibly written from the point of view of a participant in the Milgram Experiment. If you aren’t aware of these groundbreaking and highly controversial psychology experiments, here’s a very quick (and generalized) rundown of what happened: a scientist calls in two volunteers for an experiment on how negative reinforcement improves learning and memory. One volunteer is assigned the role of the “learner” and one the role of the “teacher.” They are put in separate rooms, where they can only hear one another. The teacher is instructed by the scientist to ask the learner a series of questions. If he gets them wrong, the teacher is instructed to shock him with a little machine he has. If the learner continues to get answer wrong, the teacher is instructed to up the voltage of the shock. If the learner screams/faints/begs for the teacher to stop, the scientist tells him to go on.

Now, the truth of the experiment is that only the “teacher” is a true volunteer. Everyone else is in on the experiment, and no one is getting shocked at all. It’s actually an experiment about the willingness of people to obey authority (i.e., the scientist, who supposedly designed the experiment and knows how far is too far). The experiments, done in the early 60s, came on the heels of Nazi war criminal trials.

So that’s the experiment. The song, written 40 years later, imagines a scene where the scientists explain to the narrator what it is she did, and what that makes her. And what’s really fascinating is that the narrator accepts that weakness in herself.

Right away, I knew it was like I failed a quiz.
The man said, “Do you know what a fascist is?”
I said, “Yes, when you do things you’re not proud of,
But you’re scraping by, taking orders from above.
I get it now, I’m the face, I’m the cause of war
You don’t have to blame white-coated men anymore.”
When I knew it was wrong, I played it just like a game
I pressed the buzzer. I pressed the buzzer.

It really just gets better from there. And what’s so brilliant about Dar is the way she encodes these lines with the condescension of the scientist to the narrator, who we see throughout the story is not particularly educated or upper-class. “Do you know what a fascist is?” Well, maybe she does and maybe she doesn’t, but she also isn’t as weak as they are telling her she is.

It reminds me a lot of Poe — the anger, the defensiveness, the willingness to do things that he knows aren’t right and the ability to justify them within himself. I don’t know what would happen if Poe was in the Milgram Experiment. He might be like, “Screw the slowly increasing voltage. Let’s just fry this sucker.”

Or he’d knock out the scientist, take his white coat, and call in the next group of volunteers. Poe loves authority, but mostly because he expects to be authority. He accepts that this is the way life is, and only wants to figure out how he can be the one in charge. I find that potential in him to be very interesting to write about.

There’s a fun character development exercise. Who cares about their favorite ice cream flavor! Put them in infamous historical psychological experiments and let ’em rip! next up: The Stanford Prison Experiment. (Hey, it worked for Logan and Wallace.)

I’m not one of those writers who spends a lot of time talking about theme, because I think that theme is pretty organic in writing. I don’t start out saying, “This book is about friendship,” “this book is about conservation,” etc. It’s more something that I become aware of after the book is written. I think in Tap & Gown, I explored a theme of easy vs. right, which no, are not always at odds with each other, but are often more interesting if they are. At what point does the ease of something make it “right” (if ever)? Where do those two lines intersect? Over the course of the book, almost every major character has to make the decision between something that’s right and something that would make their lives easier. Sometimes they make the wrong answer. Sometimes they make the easy answer and it’s still right, or right for them. Once, someone makes an answer that’s both harder and wrong (and no, it’s not the one y’all who’ve read the book are thinking).

But as I was working on KU2 the other day, I realized that I was dealing with a much more literal analogy of “The Buzzer” and of the Milgram Experiment. The characters go along with certain things in the killer unicorn books because “it’s the way it’s done” or because people in authority tell them it’s the right thing to do. To break out of that, to disbelieve it, or to believe there’s an alternative (let alone fight for one) — in other words, to DISOBEY the authority in society or adults or history or leaders — takes a big leap in logic. And, um, spoiler spoiler spoiler.

Damn. When will this book be out!?!?!?!

Ahem. Anyway, trying to do this without spoilers is tough. But I find it interesting that I can turn to the same song for two such different books, two such different characters, and find so much to work with.