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THE CORPORATION
by Peter Sobczynski

July 16, 2004

1/2 (out of 4 stars)

FILM CREDITS: Written by Joel Bakan. Directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott.

Who would have guessed that the hottest trend in film this summer would turn out to be the left-leaning agitprop documentary? First there was "Super Size Me", the first-person account of the physical toll that fast-food can wreak on people. Then, of
course, there was "Fahrenheit 9/11, which I presume needs no further lucubration on my part. Now we have the Canadian-made epic documentary "The Corporation" which, in a way, may be the freshest and most shocking of the bunch. Like "Fahrenheit 9/11", it is brilliantly put together and manages to convey an enormous amount of information in a clear and lucid manner. The difference is that while Moore's film consisted mostly of information that had been public knowledge (for those who bothered to look for it, a good chunk of the material seen in "TheCorporation" will be unfamiliar to most viewers. How do I know that? Because of the simple fact that if much of what is seen and heard was common knowledge, most people, regardless of political affiliation, would be horrified and ready to revolt.

The leaping-off point for the film is the legal quirk that allows corporations-no matter how many people they may employ-to be regard as a single entity; in other words,a corporation is, in the eyes of the law, an actual person. Filmmakers Mark Achbar & Jennifer Abbott and writer Joel Bakan (who wrote the book that served as the basis for the film) take the idea that the corporation is a "person" and subject it to ruthless analysis to find out what kind of person such an entity is. Using the diagnostic tools used by psychiatrists and the World Health Organization, they show that the corporations, by nature of their deeds, are self-interested, inherently amoral (in that profit is their only motive), willing to bend or break rules to achieve their needs and feel no guilt but can pretend to be altruistic and caring when it suits them. According to those standards, corporations could be psychologically classified as psychopaths.

This may sound harsh but after seeing the evidence provided by the filmmakers, you would be hard-pressed to argue otherwise. Consider Bechtel, the corporation that has attempted to privatize water, even rainwater, in Bolivia. Consider the "Nag Factor" study created by the Initiative Corporation-a group that specializes in advertising so subtle as to be unrecognizable-which turned out to be a study to help clients develop ads that would inspire children to nag their parents more efficiently. Consider the links over the years between corporations and fascism; not just the alleged connections between the Nazis and both IBM (who supplied computing equipment used to keep tabs on the concentration camps) and Coca-Cola (who devised Orange Fanta to be sold in Germany during the war) but also the corporate-inspired plot that was alleged to have attempted a military coup to overthrow F.D.R. Consider the chilling notion that some corporations have now been allowed to patent living organisms and are on the way to attempting to do the same thing for DNA.

Of course, the people who serve these organizations are not slavering monsters (well, most of them) but the irony is that the gulf between their personal reasonableness and the actions they undertake in the name of business can sometimes seem even more
appalling than if they were out-and-out ogres. We see one such higher-up, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the former Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, in an extraordinary video in which a group of Earth First protesters confront him at his family home. Instead of ignoring them or calling the cops, he disarms them by sitting down to talk with them while his wife serves tea-even apologizing to the group for the lack of soy milk. As we watch this video, even the most radical-minded viewer will be lulled into thinking that if there were more people like him, corporations might not be so bad. Then comes the punchline to the segment-one that hits with the grim force of a punch to the gut.

One of the most shocking tales told is the one about Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, two Fox News reporters who were ordered redo a story about a synthetic hormone that was developed to increase milk production in cows but which caused them to become ill in the process-the antibiotics used to cure them found their way into the milk and could reduce the resistance to disease of anyone who drank it. When they refused to make the changes asked for (such as substitute the phrase "human health implications" for the slightly more detailed "cancer"), they were fired and sued the network under the status of whistle-blowers. They won but the judgment was overturned when they lost their whistle-blower status on a technicality-falsifying news (which they were asked to do) is not specifically against the law.

Amidst all the gloom, "The Corporation" also points out that there are a few bright spots. We see how several corporate endeavors, including the rainwater in Bolivia, have been stopped by reform movements. Michael Moore, inevitably, pops up to point out that his success is based on a fundamental loophole of corporate behavior; because his work makes money, they are willing to distribute it even if it directly attacks them. (Needless to say, this was filmed before the "Fahrenheit" distribution flap.) More intriguing is the story of Ray Anderson, the CEO of carpet manufacturer Interface. Once he discovered his own company's lack of environmental concern, he actually went about restructuring the entire operation in order to make it more a self-sustaining organization.

Although "The Corporation" makes no bones about its left-leaning point-of-view (face it, when the ads stress appearances by the likes of Moore, Noam Chomsky and authors Naomi Klein and Howard Zinn, it would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise), what drives it along for 145 minutes (while trimmed by 20 minutes from the length that it played at festivals, I must admit that it might have had a little more impact with a few more trims here and there) is not a political agenda but a simple human one. What it is trying to say is that these institutions have grown so powerful and omnipresent that everyone-rich and poor alike-can be affected by them in potentially harmful ways and the sheer number of them only increases the danger. At the beginning of the film is a medley of news clips of talking heads who, while commenting on the excesses of Enron, Worldcom, Tyco and others, suggest that "a few bad apples" should not be allowed to dominate the perception of corporate behavior. Stretching out that metaphor, "The Corporation" could be considered a plate of applesauce made by those same bad apples
and the depressing thing, we discover, is that there is more than enough to go around.

-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI

Copyright © 2004 Peter Sobczynski
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While the views expressed by Peter Sobczynski do not necessarily reflect the views of Criticdoctor.com, the Critic Doctor will occasionally examine Mr. Sobczynski's film reviews to bring forth an honest examination of those views expressed.