Monsters Inc.

By Noy Thrupkaew, The American Prospect. Posted June 8, 2004.

Blighted seeds, tiny children hunched over sewing machines, a nation in convulsive riots over the price of water: What shadowy entity could be behind all these horrors? The corporation, according to the documentary of the same name.

Created by Canadian filmmakers Mark Achbar, Joel Bakan, and Jennifer Abbott, and inspired by Bakan's book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit Of Profit And Power, the film takes on capitalism's juggernaut via two and a half hours of interviews with left-leaning academics, conservative CEOs, psychologists, corporate spies, and activists. Sweatshops, environmental degradation, political murders -- you name it and The Corporation covers it. The film ranges over the collateral damage of profit-making with the passionate zeal -- and the bewildering sprawl -- of a lefty political rally.

Early on, the film is organized around an intriguing conceit: A speedy history introduces the legal development that helped launch the meteoric rise of the corporation; after the Civil War, lawyers began to argue that corporations were "people." Therefore, the 14th Amendment, created to ensure the equal rights of freed slaves, was also applicable to their clients. As legally recognized "persons," corporations thus deserved the same rights and safeguards. So, the filmmakers ask, if a corporation is a person, just what kind of person are we dealing with here?

An insane one, it turns out. Through a series of case studies on pollution, exploitative labor practices, and deceptive marketing strategies, the filmmakers make a convincing argument for putting the corporation in a straitjacket. The corporation is relentlessly selfish; its primary goal, to the exclusion of all others, is to turn a profit for its shareholders. Using up and leaving the cheap labor forces of poor countries? "An incapacity to maintain enduring relationships," according to the psychoanalysist's diagnostic guide, the DSM-IV. Spraying DDT all over people or lying much about antibiotics in milk? "Reckless disregard for the safety of others."

The corporation, the film argues, suffers from a debilitating lack of empathy, an inability to accept responsibility for its actions or to feel sorrow or remorse for the consequences of what it does. The filmmakers' verdict: According to the DSM-IV, the corporation is ... a prototypical psychopath.

Corporations may be crazy, the film says, but the people who work for them aren't. The Corporation's full, sensitive portrayals of the CEOs give the film much of its heft. Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the former head of the Shell Oil Company, and his wife receive a batch of protesters on their front lawn. The activists came bearing a "murderer" banner, but Moore and his wife respond by sitting down for a chat over tea, apologizing for the lack of soy milk for their vegan guests.

Another CEO comes across as positively revolutionary. After Ray Anderson of Interface carpets had an epiphany about environmental sustainability, he radically altered his company's environmental practices and began traveling to spread the progressive word to his fellow CEOs. People who work for corporations aren't amoral, the film asserts; rather, they are often good people who have been insulated within the depersonalizing structure of a corporation. Caught in a bureaucracy worthy of Max Weber or Franz Kafka, they forget their humanity -- and the human cost of the larger corporation's actions.

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