B. F. Skinner Plays Himself. 2025. USA. Directed by Ted Kennedy. World premiere. 72 min.
In his speculative fiction (the 1948 novel Walden Two), his scientific research, and his use of television as a bully pulpit, the influential behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner warned the world of a dystopia, a clockwork orange, in which humans, lacking true free will, could be conditioned to do evil. In B. F. Skinner Plays Himself, filmmaker Ted Kennedy turns unseen raw footage from a 1975 documentary profile—a documentary that Skinner himself, appearing rather imperious and evasive, derailed by imposing a set of impossible demands—into an ingenious inquiry into what the scientist meant when he said, “If I am right about human behavior, I have written the autobiography of a nonperson.” By the 1950s, the significance of the “Skinner box”—a colloquialism that seemed to induce nausea in the inventor himself—made its way from the Harvard science labs into widespread consciousness: an operant conditioning chamber used to control the behavior of pigeons through a system of rewards and punishments was taken up in popular culture as a catch-all for our own unwitting enslavement to unseen, nefarious puppetmasters who manipulate our beliefs, loyalties, shopping habits, and even the way we raise our children. Was that paranoia…or prophecy?