“The Corporation,” a film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, is a fascinating film presenting convincing and realistic perceptions on the origin, nature, emergence and impacts of the modern corporate institutions, which are dominating the economical, political culture and the social life of many people, while also presenting people and organizations fighting against corporate dominance.
The film interviews CEO’s, top-level executives, a corporate spy, academicians, critics, historians and thinkers. ‘The corporation’ re-sounds a requiem for the perception that an entity’s social responsibility is met by optimizing wealth for its shareholders.
The documentary begins with an intriguing synopsis of the recent culmination of corporate scandals, and then it proceeds to ridicule the overriding media’s analysis of this scandal “crisis” as the consequence of many “bad apples” as seen in the fit Corporate Americas. “The documentary breaks down this “bad apple” metaphor, often showing how the “rotting” of corporate “apples” is just a piece of the growing evil inside these corporations which groomed it.”
Theoretically, this documentary is based mainly on the concept of “externalities,” that is, the outward impacts of a firm’s transaction between two parties without considering the third parties who are often affected adversely.
However, the film shows the demoralizing onslaught of such “unintended corporate” intrusions on the community, public dynamics, and information asymmetry. While often showing how those who orchestrate these invasions as themselves “individually” against them, that is, their acts as slaves to the corporation’s objective disagree with their values as private citizens.
However, one central question highlighted in the film is that, “since the law defines a corporation as an actual “person”, what kind of person would a corporation be?” ‘The Corporation’ is organized like a business presentation and it takes a closer examination on corporations’ personality.
It is argued that if a corporation is likened to individuals its innate characters would make them outright psychopaths. A corporation has no guilty conscience, not concerned with others, no moral obligations and more worse characters.
Initially, corporations were created to deliver public services and when the undertaking was accomplished, the entity was dissolved. But the corporation is nowadays a main establishment, amassing a lot of wealth and causing danger. They are formed to make profits at all costs may it be from destructing the environment, the use of harmful chemicals, moral indecency, a fact that has led the loss and threat of lives and unethical practices and other problems.
The film argues that excessive power that has been conferred on practically “unaccountable, private tyrannies”, as Noam Chomsky describes them, expected by the laws to act in a way that disgrace democracy and the most basic civil liberties, endangering man’s survival.
The institution is likened more to slavery that made slave masters to act harshly and inhumanely. However, the Liberal Elites argue that the masses are too ignorant to understand what they exactly need, although it is somehow ridiculous that these assumptions are never made in third world nations where individuals die of starvation.
In conclusion, it can be held that the film argues that there is political impotence of reconstruction to the prevailing issue of corporate dominance. Although the documentary does not give a definite conclusion on what the situation would result to, it is clear that globally people are in dire need for a polity praxis, which is dedicated to unearth all about the “bad” corporation.
Comparing “The Corporation” film to Fahrenheit 9/11, it presents a more “superficial demonization of bad corporations” in terms of historical, operational and institutional examination of corporation’s makeup and personality.