7. The Corporation Mark Achbar and Joel Bakan
A documentary befitting the Robert Harris thriller The Fear index, The Corporation charts the rise of the corporation from its 19th Century roots up to its modern day, legal status as a person, without a conscience. The documentary then posits the central question; just what kind of person is it? The film hardly sits on the fence in offering its answer. For rather than delicately balancing left and right wing views in equilibrium; the film concludes fairly assuredly that the corporation is a psychopath. They have, so the film suggests, become Patrick Bateman-esque entities that are waiting to pounce on lesser victims. The Corporation is an excellent documentary based on an excellent book. Well-researched, well-edited and well worth a watch- its conclusions that the corporation has an inherently psychopathic, viral nature is highly subjective to say the least. Also, the film argues that the corporation can be nothing other than this psychopath, that no other outcomes where possible since its birth, when clearly that is too pessimistic a viewpoint. The modern-day corporation is not only a shark which cannot stop swimming or it drowns. Not all corporations have profit-maximisation exclusively as their goal, nor do all corporations exist exclusively for their shareholder wealth. And here lies the central problem of The Corporation film- that it offers one diagnosis for all the corporations complex problems; that of psychopathic greed. But a clinical, neurological diagnosis for all the combined sins of the business world is far too simplistic. All corporations are merged into The Corporation in this film which is inherently problematic. Since the film has a checklist criteria for the markings of a psychopath; lack of emotion, recklessness, greed, lack of social conscience etc., it then goes about finding examples of this in the corporate world. But it cherry picks these things amongst a large spread of corporations. To see if someone was truly psychopathic you would need to check for all the criteria in a single patient, not a spread of patients-a real shortcoming to the narrative of the film. Does any one corporation completely fit the psychopathic bill? Even if they do, then you still only have one, not all, corporations as psychopathic.