Thursday, July 22, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

The Corporation

Everybody's business: The Corporation exposes a sociopath near you

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Ralph Nader may have failed to ignite enough anti-corporate fervor to support his candidacy this time around (at least among legitimate Democrats), but documentarians like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock have stepped into the breach with wildly populist exposés of their own. Now comes The Corporation, a lucid, extremely thorough and thoroughly entertaining argument against our willingness to permit big business to do--basically--whatever it damn well pleases.

Mustering the cr¸me de la cr¸me of lefties, from Moore himself to professional pessimist Noam Chomsky, filmmakers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott unfold a stunning catalog of corporate perfidy that cannot fail to surprise all but the most informed viewer. Opening with a brief history that establishes the corporation's abuse of the 14th Amendment--and rights intended to protect newly freed slaves--to attain status as a living person, the film briskly moves on to examine a multitude of examples of corporate malfeasance, from the testing of DDT on Japanese citizens to IBM's Nazi connections.

To do so, the directors employ a novel technique: If the corporation is indeed a legal person, they ask, then what kind of person is it? Using the World Health Organization's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," they conclude that corporations are in fact clinical sociopaths, who, by their very nature, must place profits before people and disregard collateral damage. Whether taking the form of a Kathie Lee Gifford sweatshop or the copyrighting of our DNA, they argue, this commercial psychosis is unilateral.

Winner of the Audience Award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, The Corporation tries at times to hit too many targets, veering from advertising techniques that target children to the egregious treatment of two Fox News reporters fired for, of all things, refusing to lie. (On that topic, watch out for Robert Greenwald's new documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism.) But though the exhaustiveness can be numbing, the movie is lively enough--and terrifying enough--to hold your attention. It even ends on a note of hope, as we see Bolivian activists defeat corporate giant Bechtel. A lovely sight, indeed.