At its heart, The Corporation is a documentary about the well-intentioned
evil wrought by over-educated white men who think they know what's best for
the world.

Interestingly, the documentary itself sprang from the minds of two
similarly educated white men who think they know what's best for the
world -- but don't blame Rhodes scholar and University of B.C. law prof
Joel Bakan, nor award-winning film-maker Mark Achbar for their white skin,
their male gender or the inherently bourgeois baggage that comes with
living in a privileged society such as Canada.

They really did have good intentions when they set out more than five years
ago to make a movie about one of the least understood, yet most prevalent,
forces in the world today: The Corporation.

Moreover, they brought some female energy into the equation when they
pulled in Galiano Island film-maker, and Video In alum, Jennifer Abbott to
edit the 400 hours of collected footage and turn it into something
coherent, watchable, and ultimately compelling.

Since it premiered last month at the Toronto International Film Festival,
The Corporation has been riding a wave of great buzz and good vibes that
can make a film-maker drool. The movie was runner-up for the audience award
in Toronto. Last week, it was unofficially selected for the Sundance Film
Festival, and this week, it hits the big screen as part of the Vancouver
International Film Festival.

To understand why the movie has made such an impression on audiences in
this country, and stands to make an even bigger impression abroad, you have
to understand exactly what this film-making mod squad has accomplished.

Through interviews, archival research and a cheeky use of the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the psychiatric biz's Bible),
the film-makers not only explore the strange history of the corporation and
its legal rights as a "person" -- a very bizarre result of the Emancipation
in the United States -- but they go so far as diagnosing this man-made
entity as a "psychopath."

Chapter by chapter, they explore a simplified definition of antisocial
personality disorder (the term 'psychopath' doesn't actually exist as an
illness in the DSM) and apply it directly to their research findings.

When they discover corporations are indifferent to the consequences of
their actions, they check off another trait. And so it goes, until they
check off every symptom of generalized antisocial psychosis -- from
indifference, to manipulative behaviour, to the inability to distinguish
lies from truth.

It's all very clever. It's also pretty obvious, but that's what pushed
Achbar and Bakan into action in the first place.

"It is obvious," says Bakan. "But that's what made it so interesting. We
take it all for granted, to the point where the corporation -- as an
entity -- is somewhat invisible."

Bakan tripped over the subject himself in the course of writing an academic
book about why Constitutional rights are not altogether effective in
safeguarding the individual. At about the same time, Achbar was in the
process of researching a movie about globalization.

Before you could say "you got my corporation in your global peanut butter,"
the two realized they would do better working as a team and started on the
long, long road that would take them to corporate hell and back again.

Abbott entered the picture through her working relationship with Achbar,
the Vancouver documentary film-maker who worked with Peter Wintonick on the
film version of Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and chronicled the
real life love story between a transgendered man and his lesbian lover in
Two Brides and a Scalpel.

Abbott was working on Two Brides when Achbar and Bakan got together through
a mutual friend, and before long, she too was involved in the corporate
breakdown.

"The hardest thing was finding a structure," says Abbott. "Using the
checklist really helped set things up, but the interviews dictated the
direction and the flow of the film. As far as the mood went, we didn't want
people to feel despairing at the end -- and that was certainly a
possibility if we'd ended on Bolivia."

Abbott is referring to one of the most disturbing elements in the film,
where the people of a small town in Bolivia are told they no longer have
any right to collect water from rivers, streams or from the sky.

As a result of a World Trade Organization deal, the villagers' water now
belonged to an American corporation -- and to collect it in a pail as it
fell from the sky amounted to a breach of international law.

When you see it played out -- and how many people had to die in order to
make a stand -- it's easy to understand why Achbar, Abbott and Bakan saw
the corporation as psychopath: so many consequences of the corporate age
are perfectly insane.

"Here's an institution modeled after a psychopathic personality, so why
have we allowed it to continue? Why have we given it so much power?" says
Bakan, rhetorically. "That was the meta-narrative."

Funded largely out of their own pockets after every commercial and public
broadcaster turned it down at the treatment stage, the team says they never
went out to make money on this movie.

As self-described "activists," the purpose behind their film, and
consequently Bakan's companion book which hits shelves this fall, was to be
seen and heard. "Film is such a powerful tool. It makes an emotional
impact... which is good if you are an activist and you want to activate
people."

By the same token, even the activists found themselves awash -- every so
often -- in the tepid waters of personal doubt. "Not that I ever doubted
the overall purpose of what we were doing, or the message of the film, but
when we started talking to a lot of these people who I thought would be
these typical suits... I don't know, whether it's my naivete in some way,
but I got a sense of them as real human beings. I could understand their
point of view, and to be quite honest, that really surprised me," says
Achbar.

"Here were these really powerful people -- well, one in particular -- who
really wanted to make the world a better place, who really wanted to lessen
the environment impact of industry and accepted his role as corporate
pillager... He is trying to change things, so we couldn't really reduce
things to absolutes... although to be quite frank, I was a little worried
when I found an appreciation for the humanity in upper levels of corporate
management -- that somewhere in my heart, I had a lot of time for the CEO
of a transnational corporation."

The Corporation's comfort in the grey zone is part of what makes it such a
great movie, as it refuses simplistic solutions for something we've
collectively willed into existence. A recent Ipsos-Reid survey actually
found that the majority (65 per cent) of British Columbians actually gave
B.C. corporations good marks for acting in a socially responsible manner.
By the same token, most people surveyed also said they were pessimistic
about their ability to influence corporate citizenship.

"I think we'd all like to believe people are acting in our best interests.
It certainly feels much better than the alternative... and when you realize
these are just people and you see them playing out this role that's been
ascribed to them, you can separate the person from the role. It also lets
you see how the person can be warped by the role, to the extent they --
through their corporate extension of self -- manifest psychopathic
behaviours," says Achbar.

"As a film-maker, my main interest has always been -- and always will be
people. I'm not a Rhodes scholar like Joel. I'm not an academic. To me,
this movie is really about people and understanding the world we've
created... personally, I don't know how I feel about the future after
completing this film... But given everything we learned through the
process, I guess I feel an optimism of spirit -- but pessimism of the
intellect."

The space between the C and the rest of the word Corporation was actually an accident. My cat stepped on the space button, and I didn't notice until after I'd clicked Submit. Sorry bout any confusion that may have caused.

So in other words, your cat hit the "PAWS" key... ("PAUSE" KEY)

John: I got it, I just didn't think it was funny. *oooooh*

Moderator? Could you fix the title? And could you delete that second board for this movie that I created, not realizing there already was one for this movie? Thanks.

I hope to see this movie. The trailer, which you can see here, looks interesting.

Brian, did you write that blurb yourself or is it from an article? If it's just you, wow, that's well written.

A little of both actually. Much as I'd like to claim the whole thing as my own, anybody who knows me knows I'm not THAT good. :D

Couldn't there be a copyright issue there?

I saw it today, after seeing Bush's Brain. Very interesting, and its use of pop culture clips to help illustrate its theses did a better job of holding my attention than Bush's Brain did. This approach seemed very reminiscent of Michael Moore’s work, and given Moore’s presence in the film, this isn’t surprising. I thought the illustrated history of the corporation was well-done, as was the practical reasons for its existence, in terms of avoidance of individual liability. The use of the corporation as a person metaphor was interesting, particularly the extension of that metaphor into the area of psychopathy.

I think that the film did a good job of arguing some of its points, I think others seemed just flat-out wrong, and others I’m on the fence on pending further discussion.

An example of material that seemed wrong to me was one person in the film mentioning privatization as being a “tyranny,” because government monopoly can be a tyranny too. Private corporations, on the other hand, when hired by the government to administrate some area, are accountable in that they can be fired if they do a poor job. The same cannot be said for the government. The film uses the privatization of Bolivia’s water supply, and yes that was a tyranny, and it was inspiring to see that overthrown, but notice how they had to use an example from a foreign country. Here in the U.S, no one would ever be able to stop anyone from harvesting their own rainwater. Obviously, that was an extreme example. In Jersey City, NJ, for example (right next door to my hometown of Union City), Mayor Brett Schundler, in response to the poor-tasting, government test-failing, and increasingly expensive city water, put the water contract up for bid, and within months, a private company fixed the pipes, and the water became safer and cleaner, meeting the highest standards, and for less money, saving the taxpayer’s $35 million. Jersey City also privatized their EMS service with similar results. Ellis County, Florida also did this, and their ambulance system went from being slow and expensive to quick and efficient, and led to lower taxes eight years in a row. Canada privatized their air traffic control, and it led to decreased delays. Also unwelcome was Michael Moore’s repeating his Bowling for Columbine lie that Lockheed Martin manufactures “weapons of mass destruction,” and the absurd notion that the parents of that community ignored the “connect” between their work at the plant and the massacre committed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at their high school.

An example of material that seemed at odds with what I had previously been told, and which may be served by further exploration, was when Jeremy Rifkin asserted that every single biosystem on Earth is in decline, when the film mentioned that RBGH caused illnesses and defects in cows, and when it made the popular claim that global warming may cause the polar ice caps to melt. I’m not sure what the film meant by the phrase (and I’m working on memory here) “every life system,” but according to John Stossel’s ABC special Tampering With Mother Nature, the EPA has stated that over the past 30 years, the air has been getting cleaner, to the extent that smog days even in Los Angeles have become rare, every major pollutant has been decreasing, and that our lakes and rivers are cleaner as well. The same special featured environmentalist Patrick Moore, a former director of Greenpeace, mentioning that the forest cover in the U.S. today is about the same as in 1920 (a third of the U.S. is now forest) because biotech now allows farmers to feed us on less land, and because the timber industry plants trees to replace ones that are cut down. Moore points out that environmental groups like Greenpeace (which he quit because, according to him, it evolved into more of an anti-corporate and anti-capitalism organization than one having anything to do with ecology) that do not report the accurate amount of trees do so because they subtract trees that are cut down, but do not add ones that grow back. It also featured some of Rifkin’s other less supported predictions that were not in Corporation, like his predictions that cities are unsustainable, and would experience economic decline by the late 1900’s, his prediction that computers will created massive unemployment, etc. Tampering with Mother Nature also mentions that the World Health Organization, INH, AMA, FDA, all say that milk from cows treated with RBGH is perfectly safe. The Corporation showed one reporter mentioning in his story that it causes illness in cows, so I’d like to know if that report was upheld by peer review, or if their information is simply more updated than that which was used in Tampering. As for global warming, Tampering also featured several noted scientists from Harvard, MIT, NASA, and the University of Virginia who stated that there is no consensus of whether global warning is a threat, and that while 1,600 scientists cited a widely circulated letter warning of dire consequences, 17,000 scientists signed a petition saying that there is no convincing evidence that global warning will adversely effect the Earth’s climate.

An example of material that seemed dead-on would be the former FOX News employees whose lawsuit was thrown out because reporting that which is false is not illegal. In my opinion, it should be, and their termination was the worst example of how corporate considerations are dictating editorial news content. That segment made my angry.

The bottom line for me is, the issues raised in this film warrant further discussion. I also like how the film prescribes possible solutions to the problems it highlights, including some inspiring examples of communities that stood up to corporate interests. I’m not sure if prohibiting chain restaurants in a community is such a good idea (or right), but I was quite pleased that another community in Pennsylvania changed local ordinances that prevent corporations there from being sued as people. I was also impressed by the statement that the carpet manufacturer eliminated a third of its “ecological footprint” and will be self-sustaining by 2020, though I would’ve liked to know how it did this, and whether it had to cut back on its productivity or workforce.

The two hours and twenty-five minute running time moved fairly briskly, and it was an entertaining film. I recommend it.

Michael Moore's False Claim about Coca Cola & the Nazis.

In The Corporation, Moore asserted that the Coca Cola company invented Fanta Orange for the Nazis during WWII so that they could continue their operations in Germany without having the Nazis being seen drinking Coca Cola in public.

After I read the page linked to above in which Snopes illustrates that this is not true, I sent the following letter to Michael Moore on September 15th:

Hello, Mr. Moore.

I recently saw "The Corporation." It was a very powerful film. I'm not sure I agree with all its theses and arguments, but it was well-made, and riveting. The reason I am writing is because you appeared in the film and asserted that Coca Cola invented Fanta orange for the Nazis so that (IIRC) the Nazis didn't have to be seen drinking soda with the Coca Cola name on it. However, I just read an account of the origin of that beverage at http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/fanta.asp, which indicates otherwise. Could you give me your view of this information? Will you address it on your site or in your future movies or books? I'd really like to know. Thanks.

Luigi Novi

It's been five days, and while I got the most recent installment of Moore's email newsletter in my Inbox just now, I have not received any reply to my letter. Draw your own conclusions.