The Corporation

Directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. I had to finish this movie this morning because we couldn’t watch it to the end last night. This is a significant: if three academics in full political sympathy with a documentary can’t make it to the end, it is too long! Two hours and twenty-five minutes. Jeez.
The film has some enjoyable images and many wonderful soundbites. It seems to have a long “introduction” that would probably be recognizable as such in text form, but in the film simply makes subsequent references to things in the intro part seem repetitive. Until the dissection of the psychopathic personality framework really kicks in (a great motif!), the film feels very rudderless. The usual left heroes–Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore–say predictable and good things, but nothing earth-shattering. Earth-shattering are the comments from Ray Anderson, Chairman of Interface, a carpet company who saw the light big time on the global effects of the Industrial Revolution and the corporate model and is now exhorting his fellow execs to a sustainability model. Very eloquent. Interesting to be reminded of the historical development and totally imaginary quality of the corporate charter, at a time when its naturalness seems take for granted. Also, the history of the corporation as a person and the ridiculous disproportionality of 14th Amendment cases protecting the rights of corporate persons versus the black persons it was designed to help. My new thought on watching the film is that campaign finance reform should totally exclude corporate donations to any electoral candidate ever for any reason, since the corporation’s legal definition forces it to ignore the public interest and focus only on maximizing profit. That such entities should have no voice–financial or otherwise–in elections seems now to me a no-brainer.
Overall, I was disappointed with this film, which I had hoped to use as a teaching tool, perhaps in my upcoming class on Studying Up. Now, I think the book, by Joel Bakan, must be far better than the film. He seems serious and smart, based the interview on the Majority Report Air America show included on the dvd.
Great narrator voice, but one wishes she would speak up a little more and go more slowly.
IMDB link