BF Skinner Plays Himself
Archival Producer

Directed by Ted Kennedy.
World premiere.
2025. USA.
72 min.
https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/10310

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?