The Corporation
by Jennifer Abbott, Mark Achbar
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Christopher Gora, Mikela J. Mikael, Nina Jones, Richard Kopycinski, Rob BeckwermertDirector: Jennifer Abbott, Mark Achbar
Brand: Zeitgeist Films
Writer: Mark Achbar
Producer: Bart Simpson
Producer: Cari Green
Writer: Harold Crooks
Writer: Joel Bakan
Writer: Thomas Shandel
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 145 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-04-05
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Zeitgeist Films
Movie Reviews of The Corporation
Movie Review: A dim enlightening on the Pornocracy
Summary: 5 Stars
Lengthy, but still yet incomplete, The Corporation develops the psychopathic role of corporations in recent society like no other movie.
Our vigilant government duties, that which ensures a government by, of, and for the people can now be done without involving the people. We can call corporations people and real people can stay home and ruminate in thoughtlessness.
People have little voices that are lost in the atmosphere, so their message goes unheard, and their real wishes and intentions are substituted by a very few gruff corporate white men (aka elitists) who only see how easy life is for them. They imagine, with good intention, it is their role to help other people, so they design a system that takes working-class money and labor, and gives back to them but a small portion of what they had before - much of it as debt. They give it God's blessing and spend their time in celebration of their own righteousness - that they have given people the right to compete with the slaves of other nations which they call free trade. Nowhere to be found is there an indication of representation.
Although investors may hold substantial capital they are often deluded by the corporate executives. Yet, by law, corporations are obligated to the investors, to the point where consumers, labor, and the benefit of the community can be ignored. As suggested by Joel Bakan, as a person corporate behavior is psychopathic - that is, marked by mental disorder. Corporations maintain such power by producing powerful government lobbies and attorneys to represent them. And with this a government can become composed of individuals with close association to the corporations. Here, there is no secret.
The movie does not address the death of the Meritocracy, but I believe it is essential to consider how we define free trade in conjunction with the psychopathic corporation. As individuals we believe in Meritocracy - we believe that people work, and are rewarded for their efforts. In the western agrarian society, such as 18th century America, a person could cut logs to supply their home with energy. They could grow food, become bakers, blacksmiths, traders, and writers. They could then sell their wares. It was a day when ordinary clean homes lined ordinary streets, where people lived happily in community.
But, with corporations and NAFTA the situation slowly became complicated. Peddling wares meant competing to sell wares with larger companies that may not exist within the community, the state, or even within the nation. Today, one must peddle their wares in competition with corporations hiring people that have never known health, environmental, safety or labor standards. Of course, near slaves need not be paid much. There are no logs to be cut to provide energy for homes - these have been awarded to privitized corporations that hold nature's resources as their own right. The apparent reward for labor becomes increasingly smaller, more illusive, more tenuous and abstract. People are reminded that corporations have every right to seek anyone who will work for lower wages. Few people say they feel rewarded for their labor, or see relation between work and pay.
Instead people are paid for image, and personality. They are paid because they are family, relatives or friends with someone having the power to employ. Once employed people become numbers to investors that speculate in widespread layoffs. Once laid off, elderly or sick, people become liabilities and are seen as a plague to a corporation. Corporations want young go-getters that have not become accustomed to disillusionment. However, today young people experience the constant stream of deceit faster than they can learn their jobs, often find themselves owing more money for their education than what they can make in their field of work. Corporations prefer desperate workers willing to work for less. A desperate life situation becomes an integral requirement of a good job applicant.
While people must look good on the outside people hurt on the inside, and are crying.
Why is image so important? Because people have become obsessed - literally stupefied - over the appearance of the body - evidence the boom in cosmetic spending, the obsession over an American President caught in lust, the rush to nudity in entertainment. The result is stupefaction. Stupefaction is rapidly becoming one tool for corporations and government, because it distracts people from what is really going on - that is, the death of the Meritocracy. In its place is a system of methods allowing stupefaction, so that corporations can operate with full control - that is the Pornocracy.
The Corporation briefly addresses commercial advertising and media news (a rather weak link), which indoctrinates and permeates society with stupefaction. The root of the word stupid and stupendous comes from the Latin verb stupere. Stupendous means amazing or astonishing. Corporations are obviously trying to stupefy us with amazing products.
Another convenient tool that the movie missed is petrifaction. Conveniently, politicians use fear as a tool so that voters will observe fears over a stumbling economy and terrorism. Our leaders find these fears translate into votes, so they pass out messages such as "your nation may be attacked" during Presidential campaigns in effort to acquire votes.
Stupefaction and petrifaction are alike in that each makes thought seem unnecessary. People can spend without thought, make important life decisions without thought, vote without thought... lives go by wholly without thought. Thoughtlessness is never a positive outcome for a society.
While there is much more going on than the results of some court decisions made years ago as it seems to imply, the movie does bravely venture into new territory, thus five stars.
Summary of The Corporation
CORPORATION - DVD MovieAn epic in length and breadth, this documentary aims at nothing less than a full-scale portrait of the most dominant institution on the planet Earth in our lifetime--a phenomenon all the more remarkable, if not downright frightening, when you consider that the corporation as we know it has been around for only about 150 years. It used to be that corporations were, by definition, short-lived and finite in agenda. If a town needed a bridge built, a corporation was set up to finance and complete the project; when the bridge was an accomplished fact, the corporation ceased to be. Then came the 19th-century robber barons, and the courts were prevailed upon to define corporations not as get-the-job-done mechanisms but as persons under the 14th Amendment with full civil rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., power and profit)--ad infinitum.
The Corporation defines this endlessly mutating life-form in exhaustive detail, measuring the many ways it has not only come to dominate but to deform our reality. The movie performs a running psychoanalysis of this entity with the characteristics of a prototypical psychopath: a callous unconcern for the feelings and safety of others, an incapacity to experience guilt, an ingrained habit of lying for profit, etc. We are swept away on a demented odyssey through an altered cosmos, in which artificial chemicals are created for profit and incidentally contribute to a cancer epidemic; in which the folks who brought us Agent Orange devise a milk-increasing drug for a world in which there is already a glut of milk; in which an American computer company leased its systems to the Nazis--and serviced them on a monthly basis--so that the Holocaust could go forward as an orderly process.
The movie goes on too long, circles too many points obsessively and redundantly, and risks preaching-to-the-choir reductiveness by calling on the usual talking-head suspects--Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Moore. And except for an endlessly receding tracking shot in an infinite patents archive, there's scarcely an image worth recalling. Still, it maps the new reality. This is our world--welcome to it. --Richard T. Jameson
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