The Business of Business
Consumers of the World Unite! (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: Provocative, surprisingly well-balanced documentary.
The Downside: At 2-1/2 hours long, it becomes kind of a marathon.
psy·cho·path n. A person with an antisocial personality disorder, especially one manifested in perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior.
According to historian Howard Zinn, the corporation earned its existence under the law as an individual at the same time African-Americans did with the 14th Amendment following the Civil War. By law, it is allowed to buy, possess, and sell property and it becomes the sole entity responsible for its misdeeds, which seems fairly pale seeing that a corporation can't be incarcerated even when its actions put scores of people in jeopardy. So, if the corporation is legally a person, what kind of person is it? The thesis of the new dynamic documentary, The Corporation, is that since the corporation exists only to serve itself (i.e. it's shareholders) without concern of the effects its actions bring to those around it, it can be clinically described as a psychopath.
Is this too harsh an assessment? Take the case of the Monsanto Corporation and its use of rBGH, a synthetic hormone designed to increase the milk output of cows. Monsanto continued to market and sell rBGH even after studies concluded that the hormone produced udder infections in cows that discharged bacteria-laden puss into milk- and even after it was determined that rBGH could, in fact, be absorbed by the human body. Two investigative journalists for Fox News, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, picked up the story, only to have Fox fire them after Monsanto threatened the home of "Fair and Balanced News" with a lawsuit and to pull the advertising dollars of its subsidiaries from the network.
The Corporation builds a step-by-step view of the birth of the corporate entity, it's evolution through the Industrial Revolution, and it's eclipsing of politics as a dominating force of the modern era, one that, more and more, the movie argues, is buying the rights to dictate how we live our lives. Think this is absurd? Ask the residents of Borneo whose water supply was privatized by an American corporation so desperate to eliminate any other "competition" that it even claimed legal ownership of the rain by pushing the government to make collection of rainwater illegal. Think about the genomes of living plant and animal species which are, legally, up for grabs for the highest bidder to patent. Think about a guy like Donald Trump who bought himself an exclusive part of the human language when he put a copyright on the phrase, "You're fired." It used to be the expression, "I'd like to buy a vowel," was the stuff of TV nostalgia. Today, it's likely a business plan.
The surprise here is the how the level-headed approach The Corporation takes. Yes, the corporation is an entity built and designed for its own gratification, however the film is also quick to point out that by law, it can do nothing else. It isn't allowed to have a conscience- it is just supposed to generate capital with the blind faith that the market will check its abuses. Its kind of like Roger Ebert's take on the flesh-eating zombies of Dawn of the Dead; intrinsically, they aren't evil or good- they simply do what is in their nature. To prove the point, directors Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan include among the panel are real CEOs like Sir Mark Moody-Stuart of Royal Dutch Shell and Sam Gibara, formerly of Goodyear. Both attempt to argue neither they, nor the corporate entities they sit at the head of, are as malevolent as often described. Certainly, some of them are genuinely nice guys. There is one amusing moment featuring Stuart who, after a gang of protestors arrives at his house with a banner crying "MURDERER" (they're protesting Shell's involvement with despotic regimes in third-world nations), he offers them tea and cookies and sits down on his lawn with them for an impromptu rap session. However, Bakan gets to the point. The CEO doesn't guide the destiny of the corporation. “If you really had a free hand," he says, "if you really did what you wanted to do that suited your personal thoughts and your personal priorities, you’d act differently.“ So if the CEO doesn't have the power to curb the actions of a corporation, does anyone? The film offers one ray-of-hope example in Ray Anderson, a genteel, soft-spoken Southerner who is CEO of Interface, Inc., one of the largest carpet manufacturers in the world. Early on, Anderson had a realization of the impact his company was having on the environment and has chartered Interface to be totally self-sustaining by the year 2020.
There is plenty more to tell. A corporate spy tells of the non-existent barriers between government and Big Business. A marketing executive outlines her brainchild- a study of the consumer effects of children's "nagging" for toys, not to help parents resist such pleading, but to coerce children to nag more effectively. In fact, there is so much jam packed into The Corporation that it becomes its own major liability. There wasn't a single moment that I wasn't captured in rapt attention, but at 2 and 1/2 hours, the film is a pretty exhausting experience and in some places doesn't become as much repetitive as it does redundant.
I've stated before that 2004 is evolving into a stellar year for non-fiction films, both documentary (Control Room) and provacumentary (Fahrenheit 9/11) alike. The Corporation is yet another shining star to add to its list. It does borrow a little from Michael Moore's bag of tricks, splicing in satirical cartoons or segments of old black and white films, but this is a technique that is used sparingly. Mostly, The Corporation is a string of forty-or-so interviewees, (CEOs, political activists, philosophers, environmentalist, etc...) who sit staunchly facing the audience in front of a cold, black background (it is reminiscent of the face-to-face approach used with Robert McNamara in Errol Morris' The Fog of War). This isn't to say that the movie is a talking heads fest; some "experts" are more credible than others, but all are fascinating to listen to, including a New York stock broker who tells of how Wall Street traders were eagerly anticipating rising gold prices even as the Twin Towers were falling on September 11, 2001.
The Corporation does leave one almost painfully funny trick up its sleeve, bringing in the now notorious Moore who tells of the irony he finds in getting vehicles to publish his books and produce his movies through the very corporations he berates. Why? Wouldn't it try to suppress something that objects what it believes in? Think about the $100 million-plus box office Fahrenheit 9/11 pulled in- and what you realize is that is all the corporation has ever believed in in the first place. A-
HOME