The Corporate Psychopaths

If you decide you’re going to watch a film like The Corporation you go into the whole experience with an entirely different mindset than you would with an average film. You don’t have the sudden craving for popcorn because you realize this is a type of required taste by itself. Even when you review a film like this you have to think of a different set of criteria, like it’s “rhetorical effectiveness” or if the content is worth being mentioned in the first place. You’ll find that content covered in The Corporation has been relevant since the dawn of industrialization, let alone the past few years.

Greed and power are the driving forces behind companies (especially the multinationals) today but many people would much rather have you believe there’s a face behind these companies. The Corporation battles this from beginning to end and continually adds reasons why they are hardly “people” even though the United States constitution recognizes them as a separate identity. They even go as far as to point out that if corporation was an actual person they would be described as a psychopath since their business ethics and tactics resemble someone of that condition. That’s the setting and reality The Corporation hopes you discover in the world after you’ve finished watching.

The reason this really works, and the only way it could work, is by showing both sides of any given issue. They let CEO’s, government officials, and representatives voice their opinions but then provide the facts for each issue along with commentary from a reasonable panel (including Harvard and MIT professors, authors, an industry spy, a psychopath consultant, and etc.). They provide these facts in a very conventional format by playing the occasional video clip, sound bite, or by including official documents. But it also means there’s no reason to believe what they’re telling you is falsified.

It also means there are going to be scattered moments of dullness during the production. I even found myself checking the clock a little during the last twenty minutes which is mostly spent wrapping up previous claims. But generally speaking you’ll find more worthwhile information than not over the course of the film. Topics range from IBM making money off Nazi Germany’s concentration camps to Fox News hiding the real facts behind the Monsanto Corporation. Another smaller group of topics tend to blur the line of important and absurd (i.e. Disney creating Celebration, FL).

When you reach the end of The Corporation you’ll notice that it can be both an educational tool and motivation for further action. As Michael Moore says at the end of the film, “I’m convinced that a few people are gonna leave this movie theatre or get up off the couch and go and do something, anything, to get this world back in our hands.” The Corporation doesn’t just want you to enjoy this like a typical film; it wants you to find a way to voice your anger, no matter what the cost.