Monsters Inc.

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Monsters Inc.

 

By Noy Thrupkaew, The American Prospect

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.

 

 

 

Too often, however, the film strays from these manageable dimensions. Eager to

get in every nuance and nefarious act, the filmmakers fire off in every

direction. Employees' rights, genetic sequencing, the evils of advertising,

stifled press freedoms: The only thing missing is Mumia Abu-Jamal. Attempting to

absorb all the information, my tiny brain whirled like a hamster on a wheel,

distracted by the film's inventive culture-jammer style – tongue-in-cheek

quotations from old-school educational films, the flashing introductory reel of

logos, the clever checklist graphic for each pathological corporate trait. The

talking heads yammered, the film cut from country to country, theme to theme,

throwing me into a panicked, frothing gallop, all rolling, white-rimmed eyes and

flaring nostrils. I cowered on my environmentally unsound carpet, barraged by

footage of real-life product placements, Agent Orange birth defects, Kathie Lee

Gifford sweatshops.

 

 

 

The filmmakers would have done well to remember their own lessons about human

scale. Unlike the empathy-devoid corporation, The Corporation is an orgy of

empathy – but the effect is ultimately numbing. The explanation of the

fascinating origin of corporate personhood, tied as it is to slavery, happens in

the blink of an eyelash. The evolution of the prophet Anderson, the struggle of

two reporters to air their milk-antibiotic story, the shattering poetry of a

Bolivian water activist's convictions: Each of these could have been a brilliant

stand-alone documentary, one that illustrates the filmmakers' ideas through

human stories, human faces.

 

 

 

For all of its unruly ways, though, the film often reveals moments of

devastating clarity and unexpected optimism. One of their answers to checking

the totalitarian nature of corporations seems unsatisfying; the filmmakers just

swing the pendulum from big business to ... big government! But they build this

solution out of their corporate critique: asserting the rights of the individual

(who can choose to consume responsibly, vote with their dollars, and speak out

in local government forums against the negative corporatization); building

worldwide coalitions based on those individual rights; appealing to CEOs through

progressive voices like that of Ray Anderson. The filmmakers recognize that they

can't put the genie back in the bottle, so they argue for people to

counterbalance companies' power, and for truly responsive corporate behavior.

 

 

 

Despite the all-consuming sprawl of their film, its faint

preaching-to-the-converted feel, the filmmakers still get their simple, powerful

message across: If the corporation wants to be a person, it should try acting

like a good one.

 

 

 

Noy Thrupkaew is a Prospect senior correspondent.

 

 

 

2004 by The American Prospect, Inc. This article may not be resold,

reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written

permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to

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