Conscious Choice Seattle: IT’S SHOW TIME

June 2004

IT’S SHOW TIME

This spring’s Seattle International Film Festival set a record for most films in the Documentary category. Why? Because we are bringing our hearts and minds and citizenship to the movies in increasing numbers. We bring more to our seats than large boxes of popcorn and empty, escapist thinking.

For instance, the film “What the #$*! Do We Know!?” exploring the intersection between science and mysticism opened to enthused audiences in mid-May at the Loew’s Uptown in Queen Anne. It has drawn 5,000 people a week in Portland for two months. A live-action dramatic narrative starring Oscar-winner Marlee Matlin provides a storytelling element that keeps viewers emotionally involved.

Another film, “Super Size Me,” opened here in May to wide acclaim. Morgan Spurlock, its producer and star, ate three meals a day at McDonald’s for 30 days. His rapidly declining health made for good cinema at the Sundance Film Festival in January, plus some Unhappy Meals at McDonald’s headquarters in suburban Chicago. Despite official word that McDonald’s did not pull Super Size items off its menu because of the documentary, it is likely not coincidence that the corporate decision was announced six weeks after the film’s debut. What’s more, the fast-food giant started an active adult Happy Meal program the day before the movie opened nationally in early May.

A third documentary with equal parts activism and entertainment opens this month at the Egyptian Theatre on Capitol Hill June 18. It won the Audience Award at the Sundance fest and pivots on the stroke-of-genius cinematic decision to put corporations to the same psychological profiling as psychopaths and criminals (more about “The Corporation” follows).

These are movies that will change the way we moviegoers think about social justice at work, our place of worship, home and even fast-food franchises. One can only hope it has the same effect in Hollywood.

Crazy, Inc.

Three Canadian filmmakers put corporate behavior on the psychiatrist’s couch. The analysis? Psychopathic, amoral, deceitful, manipulative and completely self-interested.

by Paul Shalmy

Ezra Pound once asked Henry Miller if he had ever thought about money and how it got that way. Canadians Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan have given big money serious thought, and the result is a provocative documentary about the modern corporation.

What is surprising is that, far from being a dour example of why economics is called the dismal science, “The Corporation” is such a compelling film that it has won a bunch of awards, including the Audience Award for best documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. The film is catching the attention of mainstream media, such as the Wall Street Journal, and for one standout reason. It puts corporate behavior on the psychiatrist’s couch.

Using a standard checklist for personality disorders and an FBI profiler, the documentary reveals the corporate mindset matches that of a classic psychopath: amoral, deceitful, manipulative and completely self-interested. In newsreels and cinéma-vérité episodes, the film captures how the conflict between bottom-line value and social good makes for high drama.

Some examples: Bolivia, where Bechtel’s government-backed attempt to privatize the country’s water system prompted massive public protests. Nigeria, where environmental activists were hanged for opposing Royal Dutch Shell’s egregious record of pollution. Central America, where corporate thugs tried to intimidate investigators looking into child-labor abuses and the sweatshops producing a Kathy Lee Gifford clothing line for Wal-Mart (a line that prides itself on corporate donations to children’s charities).

The film’s pre-production unofficially started when Mark Achbar and Joel Bakan met at a funeral, a memorial for a mutual friend’s sister: two fellow mourners munching egg salad and chatting. Bakan is a man of accomplishments: Rhodes Scholar, clerk for the chief justice of the Canadian Supreme Court, professor of law at the University of British Columbia, author, citizen activist and coach of his son’s hockey team.

“I had seen [the award-winning documentary] ‘Manufacturing Consent’ a few years earlier and was just blown away by it,” says Bakan, recalling his first meeting with Achbar. “When I realized that the person I was talking to was one of the creators of that film, I told him about my ideas for a book on the corporation. He said he wanted to do a film on globalization. We continued e-mailing after we met, and eventually he said, ‘Why don’t I make a film about your book?’ The only problem was the book didn’t exist.”

So Bakan got busy banging out film treatments and drafts of the book at the same time.

“What happened with this project is that each of the media informed the other,” said Bakan. “The book is more story-driven and emotional than a business book might otherwise be. And the film has greater intellectual and analytical rigor than it might otherwise have had.”

A Canadian bestseller

Published last March, “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power” has become a bestseller in Canada. In 1997, Achbar and Bakan set off on a funding odyssey. Even with Achbar’s credentials as a successful filmmaker, it was not an easy sell. Remember: This was years before Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and ImClone had made corporations synonymous with scandal.

Pitching prospects one by one, they gradually cobbled together a consortium of backers, mostly public sources such as TV Ontario, taxpayer-supported public television. Three years later, a new millennium dawned, and anti-globalization protests erupted at the famed World Trade Organization meeting here in Seattle. Achbar and crew were there, filming.

By then, Jennifer Abbott had come aboard. An accomplished filmmaker in her own right, she had produced, directed and edited the award-winning feature documentary, “A Cow at My Table.” Abbott’s film examined the battle between animal rights activists and the meat industry and, as she puts it, “the way we put barriers between ourselves and who we eat.”

“The Corporation” opens with a portentous and chilling voiceover: “One hundred fifty years ago the business corporation was a relatively insignificant institution. Today, it is all-pervasive. Like the church, the monarchy and the Communist party in other times and places, the corporation is today’s dominant institution. What has allowed today’s corporation to achieve such extraordinary power and influence over our lives?”

The evolution of the modern corporation began with an obscure legal ruling in 1886. Citing Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, lawyers for business interests successfully argued that private corporations should enjoy the same rights as living, breathing people. Today, a corporation can buy and sell property. It can borrow money. It can sue and be sued. But there’s a crucial distinction. Unlike you and me, the institutional “person” has limited liability. Limited liability was a master key to attracting investors. Then, Bakan says, the middle class asked, “Why should I put my money into a company and then have the managers use my money for their ends?” That’s why the law created the “best-interests” rule, which says that the managers always have to act in the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders.

Mass appeal

It is understandable why the film has attracted law school students and business school grads, but what accounts for its enthusiastic reception by a wider audience? A Hollywood tout might put it this way: Great cast of characters, heroes, heavies, a psycho, dynamite stories, a bit of nasty, some laughs and a little uplift at the end. What’s not to like?

Achbar assembled a wonderful cast of 40 CEOs, a punky corporate spy, whistleblowers, economists and social critics including Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Vandana Shiva, Howard Zinn and Jeremy Rifkin. The CEOs are a revelation for their candor.

In the course of the film, an unlikely hero emerges from the corporate elite. Ray C. Anderson is the CEO of Atlanta-based Interface, the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer. Anderson came to Achbar’s attention through a newspaper article in which Anderson said that, in the future, people who run businesses the way he does will be put in jail.

“I thought that was a stunning admission or prediction for a CEO of a billion-dollar-plus corporation,” says Achbar. For 21 years, Anderson had been blithely, perhaps willfully, unaware of what his company was taking from the earth or doing to the earth in making its products. Then came the day when he read Paul Hawken’s book “The Ecology of Commerce,” and he had an epiphany.

In one jaw-dropping scene, “The Corporation” shows Anderson giving a speech to civic and business leaders at North Carolina State University. His ferocity was tempered only by the courtly cadences of his Southern drawl:

“Do I know you well enough to call you fellow plunderers?” he begins. “There is not an industrial company on Earth, not an institution of any kind, not mine, not yours, not anyone’s, that is sustainable. I stand convicted by me, myself alone, not by our civilization’s definition. By our civilization’s definition, I’m a captain of industry in the eyes of many, a kind of modern-day hero. But really, really, the first Industrial Revolution is flawed, it is not working. It is unsustainable. It is a mistake, and we must move on to another and better industrial revolution. And get it right this time.”

A Rave in the Woods

The success of “The Corporation” in Canada — and its anticipated popularity in the U.S. — is a measure of how effectively activists and sympathizers in the alternative community can start and spread the buzz. “The film’s first public screening,” Achbar recalls, “was in an old-growth forest at a rave on Squamish Nation territory off the west coast of British Columbia.” A screen stretched between two huge cedar trees next to a glacial mountain and river under a star-packed sky.

The event was inspired by Tribal Harmonics, a group in Vancouver that evolved out of the rave community.

“It’s becoming some kind of music-based intentional community with sustainable values,” explains Achbar. “This was at a gathering called ‘Reconvergence of the Tribes.’ “

Achbar says the screening was “my gift to that community for all that it had done for me.”

“I think the film is a bit of a Rorschach test in terms of what resonates with each viewer,” says Achbar. “It plays for the rave, for people in dreads sitting in sleeping bags at midnight in the middle of an old-growth forest. And it is going to play [business schools] for a bunch of MBA students.”

Bakan says the film is reaching people because “there’s a certain truth to what we’re saying about the corporation. It always struck me that lawyers and economists had this secret pact. It was almost like a Masonic secret. You ask any lawyer, any economist (including Milton Friedman, who says it in the film) what a corporation is programmed to do.

“I mean let’s cut to the chase. Forget all the nice PR and all the advertisements with pristine landscapes for oil companies. The courts have ruled it is legally required to produce wealth for its shareholders at whatever the cost to other interests, be it the environment, be it the public interest, be it its own workers’ health and safety. Everything has to be justified to serve that end.”

Asked if it is hard to imagine a world without corporations, Achbar, laughing, says, “Not for me. It’s hard to imagine all the detail of what a society would look like. I don’t think any of us are smart enough to do that. The alternative can only emerge through democratic discussion and process.

That’s partly why this film is not prescriptive.

“Social change is incremental,” says Achbar. “Most people are not quite ready for a revolution.”

Achbar pauses.

“Even though some of us might be.”

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