The Corporation (film)

The Corporation
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Mark Achbar Jennifer Abbott
Produced by	Mark Achbar Bart Simpson
Written by	Joel Bakan Harold Crooks Mark Achbar
Narrated by	Mikela J. Mikael
Music by	Leonard J. Paul
Cinematography	Mark Achbar Rolf Cutts Jeff Hoffman Kirk Tougas
Editing by	Jennifer Abbott
Studio	Big Picture Media Corporation
Distributed by	Zeitgeist Films
Release date(s)	September 10, 2003 (2003-09-10) (Toronto International Film Festival) January 16, 2004 (2004-01-16)
Running time	145 minutes
Country	Canada
Language	English

The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern-day corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychiatrist might evaluate an ordinary person. This is explored through specific examples. Bakan wrote the book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of the documentary.

Synopsis

The documentary shows the development of the contemporary business corporation, from a legal entity that originated as a government-chartered institution meant to affect specific public functions, to the rise of the modern commercial institution entitled to most of the legal rights of a person. The documentary concentrates mostly upon North American corporations, especially those of the United States. One theme is its assessment as a "personality", as a result of an 1886 case in the United States Supreme Court in which a statement by Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite led to corporations as "persons" having the same rights as human beings, based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Topics addressed include the Business Plot, where in 1933, General Smedley Butler exposed an alleged corporate plot against then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt; the tragedy of the commons; Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning people to beware of the rising military-industrial complex; economic externalities; suppression of an investigative news story about Bovine Growth Hormone on a Fox News Channel affiliate television station at the behest of Monsanto; the invention of the soft drink Fanta by the Coca-Cola Company due to the trade embargo on Nazi Germany; the alleged role of IBM in the Nazi holocaust (see IBM and the Holocaust); the Cochabamba protests of 2000 brought on by the privatization of a municipal water supply in Bolivia; and in general themes of corporate social responsibility, the notion of limited liability, the corporation as a psychopath, and the corporation as a person.

Through vignettes and interviews, The Corporation examines and criticizes corporate business practices. The film's assessment is effected via the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV; Robert D. Hare, a University of British Columbia psychology professor and a consultant to the FBI, compares the profile of the contemporary profitable business corporation to that of a clinically diagnosed psychopath (however, Hare has objected to the manner in which his views are portrayed in the film; see "critical reception" below). The Corporation attempts to compare the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave with what it claims are the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, e.g. callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law. However, the DSM has never included a psychopathy diagnosis, rather proposing antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) with the DSM-IV. ASPD and psychopathy, while sharing some diagnostic criteria, are not synonymous.

Interviews

The film features interviews with prominent corporate critics such as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Vandana Shiva, Charles Kernaghan, and Howard Zinn as well as opinions from company CEOs such as Ray Anderson (from the Interface carpet & fabric company), the viewpoints of Peter Drucker and Milton Friedman, and think tanks advocating free markets such as the Fraser Institute. Interviews also feature Dr. Samuel Epstein with his involvement in a lawsuit against Monsanto Company for promoting the use of Posilac, (Monsanto's trade name for recombinant Bovine Somatotropin) to induce more milk production in dairy cattle.

Box office

According to Box Office Mojo, The Corporation grossed over $1.8 million in American box office receipts and had a worldwide gross of over $4.6 million, making it the second top-grossing film for Zeitgeist Films.

Awards

The film was nominated for numerous awards, and won the World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, 2004, along with a Special Jury Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2003 and 2004.

Critical reception

Film critics gave the film generally favorable reviews. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 91% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 104 reviews. Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 73 out of 100, based on 28 reviews.

Variety praised the film's "surprisingly cogent, entertaining, even rabble-rousing indictment of perhaps the most influential institutional model for our era" and its avoidance of "a sense of excessively partisan rhetoric" by deploying a wide range of interviewees and "a bold organizational scheme that lets focus jump around in interconnective, humorous, hit-and-run fashion."

In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert described the film as "an impassioned polemic, filled with information sure to break up any dinner-table conversation," but felt that "at 145 minutes, it overstays its welcome. The wise documentarian should treat film stock as a non-renewable commodity."

The Economist review, while calling the film "a surprisingly rational and coherent attack on capitalism's most important institution" and "a thought-provoking account of the firm", calls it incomplete. It suggests that the idea for an organization as a psychopathic entity originated with Max Weber, in regards to government bureaucracy. The reviewer remarks that the film weighs heavily in favor of public ownership as a solution to the evils depicted, while failing to acknowledge the magnitude of evils committed by governments in the name of public ownership, such as those of the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union or by Monarchies and the Church. The Maoist Internationalist Movement, in their review criticizes the film for the opposite: for depicting the communist party in an unfavourable light, while adopting an anarchist approach favoring direct democracy and worker's councils without emphasizing the need for a centralized bureaucracy.

An op-ed in the Canadian magazine Western Standard reported that the film was "pummelled by experts for getting basic economic facts wrong."

An interview clip with psychiatrist Robert D. Hare appears briefly in The Corporation. A pioneer in psychopathy research whose Hare Psychopathy Checklist is used in part to "diagnose" purportedly psychopathic corporate behavior in the documentary, Hare has objected to the manner in which his work was presented in the film. In Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (2007; co-written with Paul Babiak), Hare wrote that despite claims in promotional material that that the film makers were using psychopathy metaphorically to describe "the most egregious" corporate misbehavior, the finished documentary obviously intends to imply that corporations in general are psychopathic, a claim that Hare emphatically rejects:

To refer to the corporation as psychopathic because of the behaviors of a carefully selected group of companies is like [inaccurately] using the traits and behaviors of the most serious high-risk criminals to conclude that the criminal (that is, all criminals) is a psychopath. If [common diagnostic criteria] were applied to a random set of corporations, some might apply for the diagnosis of psychopathy, but most would not.

Versions

TVO version

It is an extended edition made for TVO that separates the documentary into 3 1-hour episodes:

• Pathology of Commerce: About the pathological self-interest of the modern corporation.
• Planet Inc.: About the scope of commerce and the sophisticated, even covert, techniques marketers use to get their brands into our homes.
• Reckoning: About how corporations cut deals with any style of government - from Nazi Germany to despotic states today - that allow or even encourage sweatshops, as long as sales go up.

DVD version

The DVD version was released as a 2-disc set that includes following:

• Disc 1 includes the film, 17 minutes deleted scenes, 2 tracks of directors' and writer's commentary, filmmakers' Q's & A's and interviews, theatrical trailer, 60 minutes of Joel Bakan interviewed by Janeane Garofalo on Majority Report, Air America Radio, 10 minutes of Katherine Dodds on grassroots marketing, 3 language (English, French, Spanish) subtitles, descriptive audio.
• Disc 2 includes 165 never-before-seen clips and updates sorted by person (Hear More From...) and subject (Topical Paradise). Hear More From... includes updates and goodies like the Milton Friedman Choir singing "An Ode To Privatization". Topical Paradise includes 22 topics, with Related Film Resources include 15 film trailers and a 30-minute UK animated film.

A single-disc set was also released that contained only the main feature.

Current TV Version (SKY)

A Current TV version broadcasted by SKY Italia in December 2011 after an introduction of about 50 minutes had different sections named:

• Pathology of Commerce

That lists the corporations "psychopath aspects":

☑ Callous unconcern for the feeling of others

☑ Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships

☑ Reckless disregard for the safety of others

☑ Deceitfullness: repeated lying and cunning others for profit

☑ Incapacity to experience guilt

☑ Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviour

• Monstrous Obligations
• Mindset
• Basic Training
• Perception Management
• A Private Celebration
• Unsettling accounts
• Hostile Takeover
• Democracy Ltd.
• Psychoterapies
• Prognosis

See also

• Corporatocracy

External links

• The Corporation official website
• TVO site
• The Corporation at the Internet Movie Database
• The Corporation at AllRovi
• The Corporation at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Corporation at Metacritic
• The Corporation at Box Office Mojo
• Interview with Joel Bakan
• Interview with Bakan and Achbar
• Joel Baken compares today's reality to The Corporation
• YouTube:
  • trailer
  • first part of many

Downloads

• The Corporation (and bonus interview) is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
• Soundtrack created by Leonard J. Paul - Leonard J. Paul's entire score for the film is available for free download
• The Corporation online