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DigsMagazine.com.
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Plot synopsis
Corporations invade so much of our day-to-day lives that it's hard to
imagine a time before the concept of the modern corporation even
existed. But the birth of today's powerful corporations, as we learn in
the Canadian documentary The Corporation, is a relatively recent one in
history. And a particularly strange birth it was at that. Up until the
early to mid 1800s, corporations had very specific rules they had to
follow; their charters were time-limited, and their owners were liable
for any harm the corporations might inflict on the public good. But in
the late 1800s, that all changed when a court ruling made bizarre use of
the Fourteen Amendment -- for those who have forgotten their tenth grade
U.S. History lessons, that would be the one that was created to
guarantee the rights of freed slaves -- to establish a corporation as a
"person," separate from the individual owners of the
corporation and with all the rights of a citizen of the United States.
Thus the corporate beast was born, enjoying all the privileges of
constitutional personhood but lacking any actual physical body that
could be held accountable for transgressions it might commit. Imagine a
"person" whose motives are dictated only by profit and
self-interest, a person with no compassion or human empathy, no sense of
guilt. What you get, in essence, is a complete psychopath. Drawing upon
this idea of the corporation as psychopath, The Corporation
examines the history and impact of this institution that has come to
dominant the world, interviewing everyone from CEOs to third-world
sweatshop workers, cultural critics to economists, activists to
corporate spies, in an effort to understand how corporations have become
as powerful and as corrupt an influence on society as they have.
Review
Forget Michael Moore's films: if you want to see a documentary that
really gets you thinking about what's wrong with the current state of
the world, you have to see Jennifer Abbot and Mark Achbar's The
Corporation. It would have been easy to make a cynical, mocking
propagandist diatribe against the evil ways in which today's corporate
behemoths destroy the environment, exploit the poor, manipulate the
media and the government and the consumer, all for the sake of their
bottom lines. But the filmmakers do something much more interesting and
ambitious with their subject matter: they make a sincere effort to
provide a fair, balanced and in-depth look at why corporations act in
the way that they do, jam-packing the film with interviews from people
representing an amazingly diverse range of perspectives. Yes, we get
prominent lefties like the incredibly articulate Noam Chomsky, as well
as the aforementioned Mr. Moore. But corporate players have their voice
too. And contrary to what you might expect, the CEOs aren't even
presented as complete bad guys; one of the film's most compelling
interviewees, in fact, is Ray Anderson, head of a giant carpet
manufacturer, who read a book that made him realize the terrible harm
his very successful company was doing to the environment, and made the
commitment to change company practices so that they could operate in an
environmentally sustainable manner. Yes, it's hard to watch The
Corporation and not get yourself riled up over the way corporations
have come to run the world, but ultimately, this clever, fascinating and
yes, even entertaining movie suggests that there is hope for the future,
and that getting ourselves educated just might be the key. Which is why
everyone should go out and rent this movie, whether you're a raging
anti-capitalist or a cog in the corporate machine. —reviewed
by Yee-Fan Sun
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