Warning: Contains SPOILERS for Spiderhead (2022).
The gold stars that Spiderhead's villain Steve uses to demarcate a successful drug experiment have a very dark historical context outside of the Netflix hit movie. Adapted from a George Saunders short story, Spiderhead is a thriller that takes satirical aim at corrupt pharmaceutical companies and the prison industrial context. Spiderhead stars Chris Hemsworth as a sketchy pharmaceutical researcher and Miles Teller as one of the prisoners he experiments on, with the two inexorably drawn into a battle of wills as the movie progresses.
Unlike director Joseph Kosinski's recent escapist hit Top Gun: Maverick, Spiderhead focuses on real-life issues despite the movie's futuristic sci-fi elements. While the drugs depicted in Spiderhead aren't real, the practice of running unethical, experimental pharmaceutical trials on prison inmates unfortunately has ties to real-world events. Not only that, but one dark piece of symbolism used in Spiderhead draws attention to this history.
Early in Spiderhead's twisty story, Hemsworth's villainous Steve can be seen awarding himself a gold star for each successful drug the trials produce. These are similar to the gold stars teachers give students for successful academic performance and compliant behavior, but the image also has another, far darker connotation. During the Holocaust, Jewish prisoners were forced to wear gold stars to signify their status in concentration camps, which were home to some of the most infamous real-life medical experimentation that inspired Spiderhead.
Alongside America's Tuskegee and Guatemala Syphilis Experiments and Japan's Unit 731, the atrocities that Nazi committed in the name of medical experimentation are a dark mark on the history of pharmaceutical science. While Spiderhead doesn't belabor the comparison between Steve's unethical experiments and those of the Nazi regime, the instantly recognizable symbol of the gold star does draw attention to the comparison for viewers who are watching closely. The reason that Spiderhead doesn't double down on the Nazi imagery might be because the experiments depicted in the movie (attempts to alter the emotions of subjects to create a drug that forces compliance) instead have their closest real-life historical ana the CIA's infamous MKUltra program.
Referenced in The X-Files), MKUltra was a secret government program that experimented on civilians in an attempt to shape behavior through electroshock therapy, hypnosis, drug doses, and physical and psychological abuse. The experiments the program undertook were significantly more extreme and dangerous than those depicted in Spiderhead, with multiple deaths connected to the program. According to the CIA, MKUltra was retired in the early 70s and was considered a resounding failure. Similarly, Spiderhead ends with its villain fleeing the island penitentiary where his unethical experiments occur as his own emotion-altering drugs misfire, prompting an alternately blissful and scared reaction from Steve as he careens toward a mountain in a seaplane. However, while the residents of Spiderhead might end up freed thanks to the hero's defeat of Steve, the real-life victims of historical medical experimentation were rarely as fortunate as their fictional counterparts.
