Oh, The Corporation is worthy of viewing, I suppose, in the sense that Fahrenheit 9/11 is — because its message is so important and not one that you hear very often from the mainstream media. But, like F911, it’s just not very well made. It’s clearly made by Canadians: earnestly well-intentioned, but passionless and a little dull (I just like picking on Canadians, cause they rarely fight back). I had the added joy of seeing it in a theater full of self-congratulatory lefties who liked to applaud after everything Michael Moore said (yes, he’s featured in this documentary, too, although to much better effect than he features himself in his own work — he even goes so far as to indulge in self-reflection, of which I thought him incapable: although he repeats the ludicrous theory he posited in Bowling for Columbine, that the Columbine High School killers acted as they did because the largest employer in Littleton, CO, was Lockheed Martin, he admits that he never thought twice about how his own father and father-in-law contributed to the destruction of the world in their careers as Detroit auto factory workers). You will probably learn some very frightening things — the documentary includes some horrifying anecdotes about corporate arrogance and secrecy, like how Monsanto got two Fox reporters fired, or how IBM helped make the Holocaust run more smoothly — and for that alone, I suppose, you should see it.
Like F911, The Corporation is scattered and overreaches in an exhausting attempt to pull together all kinds of damaging anecdotes without ever really tying them together. It’s mostly an anti-capitalist screed, although it does sometimes allow as how corporations occasionally do semi-decent things, but it’s hard to stay engaged when both sides of the argument are so repulsive. They represent the corporations’ point of view with a free-market dick who brightly explains how companies that employ third-world labor for pennies an hour are actually helping those countries, but I’ve never had much sympathy for the misguided, self-righteous, naive protestors who swarm the WTO and World Bank meetings demanding an end to international trade without ever expressing a realistic alternative vision for helping less-developed nations. There’s a middle ground, but the directors mostly skip right over that. The documentary does include a few inspiring stories — Charles Kernaghan, who fights child labor by actually doing something about it (going to sweatshops, videotaping conditions, and confronting bosses); Ray Anderson, the CEO of the world’s largest carpet manufacturer, who gets religion after reading Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce, determinedly reduces his company’s ecological impact, and evangelizes to his “fellow plunderers” (he’s an especially good case because his North Carolina drawl and his frank admission that he never used to think about how his company was affecting the earth are so different from the usual sustainability types) — but they’re almost too little, too late. The documentary also needlessly mocks corporations that are trying to do the right thing, or at least a few right things — okay, so Pfizer has a smarmy representative showing off the neighborhood it helped redevelop and the subway station it cleaned up; does that mean Pfizer shouldn’t have tried to help their neighbors?
The Corporation raises an old debate: is it better to work within the system for change or try to destroy the system from the outside? (Given my employment, I gather you know where I come down on the issue.) Speaking of my employment, the documentary almost completely ignores the (to me) obvious answer: government. How else do you resolve this impasse, where corporations have no incentives beyond profit, but we need and want most of what they provide? The film quite rightly makes the free-marketeers look like, at best, naïve fools and, at worst, callous plunderers, but it never offers its own solutions (do you force every CEO in America to read The Ecology of Commerce and hope it’ll affect them the way it affected Ray Anderson? Do you revoke the charter of any corporation that violates the law, as one group of activists attempts to do?).
Super Size Me looks even better in comparison to these most recent political documentaries — director/guinea pig Morgan Spurlock stayed focused and, though he threw in plenty of random anecdotes and facts, he never lost sight of the main story — or, just as importantly, the fact that he was telling a story. The (board of) directors of The Corporation haven’t the foggiest idea of how to structure or pace a movie. They start telling Ray Anderson’s story, only to drop it abruptly, then pick it up just as suddenly an hour and a half later. At about the 90-minute mark, they start putting up summations of the anecdotes they’ve been telling, text on a black screen in the style that usually indicates the end of the movie (the “where are they now?” type). But they’re not even close to finished. By the fourth or fifth time this happened, even this piously lefty audience audibly groaned when the text faded away and, instead of credits, we got yet another talking head starting off on an entirely new subject. (This was almost as funny as their reaction — a horrified gasp — when smug-hippie-drink-of-choice Odwalla was identified as a top corporate criminal.) The gimmick that’s gotten the most attention is their diagnosis, based on the DSM-IV mental disorders handbook's list of symptoms, of the corporation as a psychopathic personality. Sure, it’s funny, but the directors take it way too seriously and inflate this simplistic joke into a structure for judging corporate actions. But they almost completely ignore the fact that a corporation is not a person and thus has no personality. Humans have to make the decisions that cause corporations to pollute, endanger, and befoul — are those people psychopaths? Isn’t that more important to explore?
In the end, I have many of the same objections to The
Corporation that I had to F911. It sorely needs an
editor. It would run better as six or eight one-hour TV shows.
It points out so many trees that it loses sight of the forest. It
raises important issues, but in such a trivial, one-sided way and with
such inflexible self-righteousness that it risks alienating many of the
people it would like to convert (I walked out of there feeling like a Republican,
sort of like the first time I walked past a homeless man harassing me for
money and thought reflexively, “Get a job!” and then immediately, “Oh my
god, what’s happening to me?!” — I wanted to ask the people who were applauding
the quasi-socialist statements, “What do you think your life would be like
without corporations? Can you make your own clothes? You do
realize that Birkenstock is a corporation, right?”). The closing
minutes of the movie exhort people to take back their government and rein
in corporations, but it offers no real suggestions for how to do that (it
does show two examples, neither of them palatable: rioting in the
streets and sitting through a public meeting while people whine and complain).
Surprisingly, we were offered no campaign materials for Ralph
Nader, merely a flyer about a meeting to learn about the demonstrations
to counter the Republican National Convention (my friend Amy, inspired
by Dick Cheney,
envisions a sea of protestors with signs reading, “Go
fuck yourself”).
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