A
film review by Roger Ebert, on July 16, 2004.
Land
agent: It ain't anybody. It's a company. -- The Grapes of Wrath
I
was at a health ranch last week, where the idea was to clear your mind for
serene thoughts. At dinner one night, a woman at the table referred to Arizona
as a right to work state. Unwisely, I
replied: Yeah -- the right to work cheap.
She said, I think you'll find the
non-union workers are quite well paid. Exercising a supreme effort of will
to avoid pronouncing the syllables Wal-Mart,
I replied: If so, that's because unions
have helped raise salaries for everybody. She replied: The unions steal their members' dues. I replied, How much money would you guess the unions
have stolen, compared to corporations like Enron? At this point our
exchange was punctuated by a kick under the table from my wife, and we went
back to positive thinking.
The Corporation is not a film my
dinner companion would enjoy. It begins with the unsettling information that,
under the law, a corporation is not a thing but a person. The U.S. Supreme
Court so ruled, in a decision based, bizarrely, on the 14th Amendment to the
Constitution. That was the one that guaranteed former slaves equal rights. The
court ruling meant corporations were given the rights of individuals in our
society. They are free at last.
If
Monsanto and WorldCom and Enron are indeed people, what kind of people are they?
The movie asks Robert Hare, a consultant who helps the FBI profile its
suspects. His diagnosis: Corporations by definition have a personality disorder
and can be categorized as psychopathic. That is because they single-mindedly
pursue their own wills and desires without any consideration for other people
(or corporations) and without reference to conventional morality. They don't
act that way to be evil; it's just, as the scorpion explained to the frog, that
it's in their nature.
Having
more or less avoided the corporate world by living in my little movie critic
corner, I've been struck by the way classmates and friends identify with their
corporations. They are loyal to an entity that exists only to perpetuate
itself. Any job that requires you to wear a corporate lapel pin is taking more
precious things from you than display space. Although I was greatly cheered to
see Ken Lay in handcuffs, I can believe he thinks he's innocent. In corporate
terms, he is: He was only doing his job in reflecting Enron's psychopathic
nature.
The
movie assembles a laundry list of corporate sins: Bovine Growth Hormone, Agent
Orange, and marketing research on how to inspire children to nag their parents
to buy products. It is in the interest of corporations to sell products, and therefore
in their interest to have those products certified as safe, desirable and good
for us. No one who knows anything about the assembly-line production of
chickens would eat a non-organic chicken. Cows, which are vegetarians, have
been fed processed animal protein, leading to the charming possibility that
they can pass along mad cow disease. Farm-raised salmon contains mercury. And
so on.
If
corporations are maximizing profits by feeding strangelovian chemicals to unsuspecting animals, what are we to make
of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that living organisms can be patented? Yes,
strains of laboratory mice, cultures of bacteria, even bits of DNA, can now be
privately owned.
Fascinated
as I am by the labyrinthine reasoning by which stem cell research somehow
violates the Right to Life, I have been waiting for opponents of stem cell
research to attack the private ownership and patenting of actual living
organisms, but I wait in vain. If there is one thing more sacred than the Right
to Life, it is the corporation's Right to Patent, Market and Exploit Life.
If
I seem to have strayed from the abstract idea of a corporation, The Corporation does some straying
itself. It produces saintly figures like Roy Anderson, CEO of Interface, and
the largest rug manufacturer in the world, who tells his fellow executives they
are all plundering the globe and
tries to move his corporation toward sustainable production. All living
organisms on Earth are in decline, the documentary argues, mostly because
corporations are stealing from the future to enrich themselves in the present.
The Corporation is an impassioned
polemic, filled with information sure to break up any dinner-table
conversation. Its fault is that of the dinner guest who tells you something
fascinating, and then tells you again, and then a third time. At 145 minutes,
it overstays its welcome. The wise documentarian should treat film stock as a
non-renewable commodity. [Ebert’s rating: *** out of 4]
Labels:
documentary, history
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