Feature
Not pretty
by Barbara Sumner Burstyn
Hot documentary The Corporation is garnering standing ovations and sparking passionate diatribes around the globe. We meet Canadian producer and director Mark Achbar and ask him about this festival film that features whistle-blowers, gurus, spies, pawns and pundits in its portrayal of corporations as downright psychopathic.
If the corporation were a person, what kind of person would it be? Underpinning the new feature documentary The Corporation, by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, the question is not just a quirky trick. In the US, since the mid 1800s, the corporation has been considered a legal person, with all the protections, rights and privileges of a citizen.
Using criteria from the World Health Organisation and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the standard analytical tool of psychiatrists and psychologists), the film-makers put the corporation on the couch. And the diagnosis is not pretty. The Corporation unravels a self-interested, inherently amoral, callous, deceitful, guilt-free person, someone who breaches social and legal standards to get his way, while mimicking human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. In short: a psychopath.
“The multinational corporation of today is inherently amoral,” says the film’s producer/director Achbar. Slightly bemused, in the way of someone suffering overnight success after 15 years of solid work, Achbar is at home in Vancouver, Canada, packing for three frantic weeks of international screenings and press interviews. With consummate ease, he turns the interview around. What’s up with New Zealand? he wants to know. “Are you seriously heading right?” When I admit that recent polls favour the race-based, economic rhetoric of a particular party, he shakes his head and deluges me with questions about media coverage of international politics. Is the mainstream media locally or multinationally owned? Do we teach school kids how to read the media, how to acquire information on alternative views? Is the progressive voice demonised, represented as the loony left, as anti-growth? Is sustainability an open subject?
I quickly realise that Achbar, a seasoned activist who doesn’t notice that his cuffs are a little frayed, has an idealistic view of New Zealand, as if he wants to hear that we’re an oasis, an example for the rest of the world to follow, rather than an imitator of the kinds of policies and situations that his film so neatly deconstructs.
Later, after he has stuffed his hard-sided frequent-flyer case with his favourite suit, which comes complete with a long red tail that waves endearingly behind him, we go to a local sushi joint. Inside the door is a display of miniature origami. “There’s a new one every time I come,” Achbar says, as he turns one over in his hand, gazing at the tiny folds, the impossibly complex designs that have no purpose except beauty.
During dinner, I recount a comment overheard at a dinner party the night before. “You can’t make a film without forming a company,” a well-fed businessman huffed. “Achbar’s a hypocrite. They’re all hypocrites!”
“It’s ironic,” Achbar responds. “We did have to incorporate to make the film. But there’s a big difference between a publicly incorporated company and a corporate entity to house a small business interest.” Refilling my sake cup, he points out that my businessman dinner companion would have known that, but he typically lets the sentence trail off, not willing to labour the point.
So, what is it about this award-winning film that sparks such passionate diatribe, garners standing ovations at many screenings and has become, in just a few weeks, the highest-grossing documentary in Canada?
The film features whistle-blowers, brokers, gurus, spies, players, pawns and pundits in its efforts to reveal the corporation’s inner workings, curious history, controversial effects and possible futures. There are comments from the usual suspects of the left, such as Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore. But the film is at its most sparkling in interviews with people like Sam Gibara. The CEO of Goodyear, the world’s largest tyre manufacturer, Gibara openly admits that today’s corporations have more power than governments. And the scary Mark Berry. A competitive intelligence professional, he gleefully and guiltlessly uses deception to extract information from corporate executives for their rivals.
Or perhaps it’s the little shots of reality that weave through the film. Interviews with whistle-blowers like Jane Akre, a Fox News journalist who was effectively silenced when her report on the poisoning of milk supplies by Monsanto’s bovine hormone threatened advertising revenues. Or the startling admissions of Ray Anderson, the CEO at Interface, the world’s largest carpet manufacturer, who had an environmental epiphany and reorganised his $1.4 billion company. Anderson now spreads the word on the unsustainability of infinite growth in a finite world.
The balance that such people bring to the film is one of its outstanding achievements. “The film transcends any political position, or a simplistic left/right split,” says Bakan, author of the recently released book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, on which the film is based.
The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and other conservative financial publications agree. They have all given the film favourable reviews, and Bakan, a professor of law at Canada’s University of British Columbia, has a full speaking and screening schedule at such rarefied places as Theseus International Management Institute in France and the International Association of Business Communicators in Los Angeles. And the film and book are being written into the curriculum at the prestigious Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario.
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