THE CORPORATION documentary DVD:
“Starring 7 CEOs, 3 VPs, 2 Whistleblowers, 1 Broker, 1 Spy and 1 really big mess! With a special appearance by the FBI’s top consultant on psychopaths.”
Every year or so, I re-watch this film. & with each viewing, I am reminded just how powerful, consummate & frightening this standout documentary is. This is an enormously important feature. It is not easy viewing, certainly not for lack of content or editing (neither its length, which is huge), but due to the extremely unsettling, sinister & petrifying nature of content & subject which is plumbed & magnified with maximum penetration through a series of distinct chapters. Undressed to its core detail, the incorporated structure’s/corporation’s concept/function & inner-ideology is exceedingly disturbing, a kind of oblivion! & a legitimized abomination.
Assembling a massive array of contributors, from corporate spies, legislators, activists, professors, journalists, CEO’s, marketing directors, psychologists & other specialists in relating roles, the film goes on to scrutinize & dissect the origins, effects & core objectives of this exceptional derivation & the utter’ utter calamity, destruction, harm, peril & death that it inflicts. It goes to extraordinary depths & unearths remarkable & frequently terrifying testimony, descriptions & facts covering the many intersecting actions & ideologies that this perverse mechanism operates under.
One of the main conclusions, & one that bares particularly significant extremity, is the “Personality Diagnostic Checklist” compiled by the World Health Organization for the officially recognized ‘manual of mental disorders’. This jeremiad of behavioral warping includes definitions such as ‘callous unconcern for the feelings of others’, ‘incapacity to maintain enduring relationships’, reckless disregard for the safety of others’, ‘deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning of others for profit’, incapacity to experience guilt’ & ‘failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors’. But of course, the corporate sphere, as a group, as individuals & by default definition; resoundingly & holistically embody these awful abnormalities with horrifying exactitude. & that’s exactly what you are dealing with when observing multinationals, or the brand of extremist capitalism that predominates the global market, or the policies & politics that emulate this obscene entity/diseased ideology which are increasingly prevalent due to the market/corporate sectors malevolent influence & corruption (financialization, privatization, externalization).
Its monstrous. Its anti-life. Its criminally insane. Its indefensible. Its killing us & everything else with it.
There is some truly incredible monologues here, but some of the most profound oration comes from a NY commodities trader called Carlton Brown. All his segments are good, but he does one stint that stretches for about a minute that to me, is among the most potent pieces of film period, where he pontificates the market benefits of disaster, the opportunity in devastation & how 9/11 & the first Gulf war were hugely lucrative events (in immediate terms) for his clients & fellow traders. Right on camera, his conflict of emotions (horror, apprehension, shock) juxtapose to that of economic advantage & profit (excitement, fulfillment) & the realization of how something so wrong, so terrible, so morbid, so insane & so sick is actually ‘good business’ & highly profitable. It is very powerful cinema, albeit very dark, twisted & macabre. But that’s what we are dealing with….that’s what our markets are, & that misery, mass death, destruction & misery is what they beget. & that, is why the shit has to end. We either kill the corporations or they kill us.
Another astronomic section of the picture has scum-supremacist suit-fuck Michael Walker from the Fraser Institute (“Market Solutions”) periphrasting pure anti-life insanity of the most staggering atrocity. ‘The market solves everything’! even the devastation & grievous destruction it itself inflicts. He thinks he is being convincing or reasonable, but your just watching aghast in abject repulsion as this madman & freak dissertates his deranged disease. Its some of the gravest, most inhumane & raving-mad shit you will hear in your life.
It was screened in 2004 to great acclaim, but it is now more critical than ever with amplified urgency.
A follow-up, from the same group, in our current doom-spiral, is a greatly needed motion.
Mark Achbar-Jennifer Abbott-Joel Bakan, 2004, In 2 Film