the film starts out by lampooning some of the metaphors that were used to describe corporations when the enron and other corporate scandals broke, and then seeks to find its own, more accurate, metaphor for what a corporation is. because corporations are, legally speaking, "persons" under the law and because corporations are legally required to maximize profit for their shareholders and are prohibited from taking any course of action that is not intended to increase profit, the film consults with the DSM-IV and ultimately diagnoses the modern corporation as "psychotic."
this sounds inflammatory, but a similar idea occurred to me when i took my corporations class law school. as a guy who grew up mostly reading science fiction, i was comfortable with the notion of an artificial person. but artificial people in science fiction were treated very differently the artificial people i learned about in corporations class. most science fiction writers adopted, in one form or another, the three laws of robotics invented by isaac asimov:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
looking back, it's somewhat surprising just how ubiquitous "asimov's laws" were. indeed, some stories i read you just refer to them as "asimov's laws" without further explanation, a shorthand that geeks like me had no trouble understanding. their popularity stemmed from the general consensus that before we trust robots to enter our homes, we need some reassurance that these artificial people will not go frankenstein on us. (as it happens, asimov's robot stories, or at least a very loose approximation of them just entered the theaters this weekend as the film i, robot)
the three laws, or at least the first two, are designed to guarantee that artificial people never interfere with the interests of real human beings. so when i was in corporations class, the absence of anything resembling that kind of guarantee when it came to the artificial people that are corporations was really remarkable. if i wrote a science fiction story in which a robot was created only to maximize the financial gains of a select group of people, the entire premise would seem ridiculous. who would create such a thing? you'd obviously be creating some kind of monster. but that, it seemed, was what a corporation was. the point was further hit home when we read cases about corporations that tried to do things that were not motivated by increasing profits, like divesting in south africa during the apartheid era. corporations can be sued by their shareholders if they get too much of a moral compass. in some sense, having too much of a conscience is actually illegal for a corporation. (at least in the sense that it could subject the company to civil liability)
so i decided not to go into corporate law.
but over the years there is this nagging sense that corporations, as an institution, go largely unquestioned in our society. they unquestionably create a lot of wealth, but no one seems to wonder about the side effects. which is why i think the film "the corporation" is so important to be seen. it's a well-reasoned argument against corporations, or at least a society in which corporations are allowed to dominate to the extent they do today. even if the film is not entirely right, it at least airs a position that rarely has a voice in our society.
one problem with the film is its length. by the end of the more than 2 and a half hours, you feel pretty worn out. perhaps it should have been edited down a bit, but its hard to say what should have been left out. i think the filmmakers had so much to say, they couldn't get themselves to pare it down anymore.
there have been a lot of good documentaries hitting the theater lately. i think the control room is still my favorite. but "the corporation" is probably second of the ones that have hit the theater this year. it's better than fahrenheit 911 even though it will never get 1/10th of F911's audience. when F911 came out some (including myself) said that the movies importance was airing arguments that had not appeared in the mainstream media. but the arguments in F911 have at least had some coverage prior to the film. "the corporation" really speaks the unspeakable in our culture. it marshals an attack straight into the heart of the largest most powerful least questioned institution of our age.
