A simple sprinkling of chemicals into an in-ground pool reveals more about the enigmatic figure at the center of Ted Kennedy’s B.F. Skinner Plays Himself than anything in the film’s previous 54 minutes. The images are from an abandoned documentary profile of renowned behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, filmed, according to correspondence between himself and the documentarian, Philip R. Blake, sometime between 1974 and 1976. The moment is significant only because it shouldn’t exist, at least according to instructions Skinner laid out in that same correspondence. For instance, he would allow scenes of him with his grandchildren and with a group of students. He would also permit scenes of him in his garden, “although there will be no scenes involving the swimming pool.” This audiovisual incongruity partly explains why the project was abandoned; but the footage exists anyways, we see it for ourselves, reassembled in Kennedy’s film as not only a document of an evolving scientific practice, but of a man grappling with the dwindling belief in the utopian potential of his own theories.
Skinner’s early experiments with pigeons tried to induce specific behaviors, such as turning in a circle, by rewarding incremental movements in the desired direction. What utopian society is there to be found here? The Second World War forced Skinner to extend this experimental premise; instead of turning in circles, now the pigeons identified missile targets on screens in the noses of airplanes. After the war he turned his attention away from birds and towards humans, hoping to improve education by experimenting with a similar, rewards-based method of instruction. What are the societal implications if human beings behave not according to their own conscience but, as Skinner argued, to external forces? Will we belong to a society so perfect that the word “rebellion” no longer has a place in our lexicon, or will we just be pigeons, fat on treats, turning in endless circles?
If anything, time has at least ensured that today’s pigeons aren’t just regular, everyday people, subject to the whims of a ruling class, though many of them are. Skinner would argue this isn’t our fault, nor that the problem, actually, is that we’re being controlled at all. The situation we must face is not that any one person, be it Richard Nixon, whom Skinner hated; or any contemporary equivalent that is, let’s say, financially backing, militarily enforcing, and diplomatically sanctioning a genocide in Gaza, is an inherently evil character. The real crisis we face, and perhaps ultimately may never conquer, is a society that reinforces those behaviors.
Which brings us back to the swimming pool. The first question has to be: why did Skinner allow it? Perhaps he wasn’t aware of his being filmed in the moment; there is no direct sound from the image, just audio from a separate, behind-the-scenes conversation between Skinner and the documentarian. Or, maybe he was promised that it wouldn’t be included in the final film, a film we know never came to be, which suggests that the footage was in some final version presented to him later on. There is no easy answer to any of these questions. Skinner’s final correspondence to Blake outlines moments in the film he disagrees with, primarily over how he is characterized, but never once mentions the swimming pool footage. Maybe the promise of more time in the public consciousness was stronger than his will. He was, after all, a deft public figure, able to harness television as a bully pulpit even, or perhaps especially, as his reputation wavered on the brink of controversy. Kennedy’s film offers no answers, just space for speculation, a fact that ultimately characterizes Skinner, too. Once the proponent of behavioral psychology’s utopian promises, by the end of the film we see a man deeply uncertain about its ability to solve our problems. It’s a testament to Kennedy’s erudite summary of Skinner’s research that a film as informationally dense as this concludes with such profoundly clarifying skepticism.
Published as part of Doc Fortnight 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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