An epic in length and breadth, this The Corporation is a documentary that aims at nothing less than a full-scale portrait of the most dominant institution of our time, i.e the rise and dominance of the private corporation. The corporation is shown as a phenomenon that is both remarkable, if not downright frightening, when you consider that the corporation as we know it has been around for only about 150 years.
The Corporation – A Legal “Person”
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.
Enterprise of Psychopaths
The documentary film 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 film 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 IBM – the American computer giant – 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 film shows how the corporation has come to define and embody everything that is wrong with capitalism – the unrelenting pursuit of profit at all cost. It is a film of enduring significance to anyone who wants to know why the world is the way it is and how our lives are so governed by people who have the least concern for it.