inamerrata

“Brilliant! Hilarious and chilling!” – San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Coolheaded and incisive!” – San Francisco Chronicle
“Ambitious…Epic…Riveting!” – Los Angeles Times

Spot the pattern.

Since I’ve already commented on this movie on spec, I figured I should watch it when it came out. Various comments around the place had led me to think it was interestingly balanced — sure, it has Chomsky and Moore, but it’s also meant to have Milton Friedman and various CEOs presenting their cases. That wasn’t the case though, Friedman gets a few moments to define some terms, Chomsky and Moore get the whole film to advocate their positions; the CEOs bring up problems, the lefty intellectuals tell you what to think about them. So apparently the movie’s leftward lean isn’t limited to the geography of United States. And apparently I’m old now, since the Bolivian revolutionary’s “reflection, rage and rebellion” slogan seems to me like little more than a good one for angsty teenagers to grow out of.

The movie’s initial theme is about the legal fiction that treats corporations as a “person”, and then analysing their traits to come up with a psychopathic profile. It’s a clever and catchy idea; psychopaths are bad, the traits that identify psychopaths are bad, and if they’re evidenced in corporations in any way, that’s bad too. And all the complicated problems can get conveniently bundled up in a memorable three word slogan: “corporations are psychopathic”. That seems worthwhile to me, and seems like a good way of chunking a whole bunch of problems with corporate governance and externalities into something you can actually work with.

(No, I’m not ending every paragraph in a preposition deliberately. I guess there’s some odd grammatical malady going round that HUMBUG-related aj’s are suffering from.)

Anyway, the movie doesn’t really do its thesis justice, to my mind. It’s possible that’s a failing of the medium — movies are definitely good at manipulating emotions, but are they actually any good at making persuasive arguments based on reason? Presumably you could find out the answer to that by comparing and contrasting with writer/co-creator Joel’s book “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power” (am I the only one imagining Daffy Duck being a fan?) Whatever, I don’t care that much.

One way in which the thesis is let down is by an over-reliance on a gut reaction against considering a corporation a person. Which is fair; they aren’t. But the shareholders, directors and employees are, and it’s important that their rights — as protected by the 14th Amendment or any other — aren’t curtailed unreasonably just because they’re exercised through an incorporated organisation. That it’s convenient to treat corporations as people under law isn’t really very interesting; what is interesting is whether the limited liability that corporations have should be, or even needs to be, accompanied by limited rights too. But that question just isn’t raised at all.

The psychopathic personality aspect is almost glossed over, it seems. They have a checklist, come up with an example that seems to fit it, and tick it off. The logical error of generalising from “this rose is red” to “all roses are read” doesn’t even rate a casual handwave. They’re so eager to tick off the “Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships” box that they leap right into it as soon as they hear that some companies who set up cheap factories in the third world are inclined to set up a new factory if their current location starts getting expensive.

One of the “psychopath” checkboxes was “callous unconcern for the feelings of others”; and as far as it goes there was a nice example in the form of a broker whose first thought on hearing about the World Trade Center on September 11, was “How much has gold gone up?” But then we didn’t need a new movie to tell us financiers are psychopaths, right?

Although, perhaps one shouldn’t be quite so quick to judge; here‘s Billy Martin who’s a comedian in the Saturday Night Live vein:

I was watching the Today Show when the second plane hit. So I wrote: “Two planes crash into the World Trade Center, something, something Halle Berry.”

Perhaps it would be fairer to include his explanation as well: “This is embarrassing, but, in hindsight, I was in shock because my reflex reaction was to keep doing my job.” Jumping to the conclusion that someone is a psychopath just because they demonstrated a trait in a few instances isn’t reasonable; let alone jumping to the conclusion that everyone is.

Especially weird was that the “psychopath” angle was pretty much wrapped up in the first third of the movie. I’d expected this was going to be the structure on which they’d hang the movie, but apparently not. As it turned out, we didn’t get a structure, just a theme: corporations do bad things. Which is true enough, and the examples are interesting, but I don’t see why they ignored the opportunity to tie it together a little more strongly. I left finding it hard to remember most of the topics it covered, and completely failing to figure out any point or moral or lesson, mostly for wont of a better narrative. Obviously I’m meant to be worrying about something, but what exactly? Should I be avoiding dealing with corporations at all? Particular corporations? If I want to form my own company, should I not incorporate, or should I have some special measures to make sure my company doesn’t turn bad? On the upside, the website has a summary of the movie in written form though, which is helpful.

Interesting theory: anything that’s created to inspire worry should also provide an effective and realistic focus for addressing that worry. Most documentaries don’t bother making you worry — “ooo, look aren’t monkeys clever”, eg; I think it’s reasonable to expect documentaries that take an “ooo, look, we’re all doomed” tack to at least try adding a plausible “unless…”.

Another point in the “movies suck at essays” column is that they’re just so linear — you start at the beginning and you travel to the end at exactly the speed the directors set. No breaks. No pausing. No reviewing confusing bits. No putting in a bookmark. No highlighting sections. No looking up supporting or conflicting data on the web. Which is great if your aim is to persuade people long enough that their faith doesn’t waiver as they wax lyrical over lattes following your film, but, well, doesn’t really do it for me. As an example, we have at one point Milton Friedman (I think) saying that he wouldn’t want corporate executives to be deciding how to handle the environment, because they’re not knowledgable about those issues; and (I presume) someone else saying that that’s government’s place, not private industry. Which is plausible (though I imagine Friedman’s view is more along the lines of the “privatise everything” guy) — but how does that view contrast with the latter discussion of IBM helping Hitler gas the jews? Shouldn’t we consider the possibility that government can be the root cause of problems as well as corporations, and that granting too much power even to elected officials might put us in a worse situation than the one we’ve got now?

Indeed, the very first example in the film (I think) was that of a Monsanto growth hormone to produce more milk; in spite of the fact that there’s already an overproduction of milk due to the fact that governments pay for it even when there’s no demand. And hey — if the government’s going to buy it anyway, why not produce more if you can?

The libertarian, anti-government, pro-capitalism viewpoint’s an important one on this topic; it’s disappointing that it doesn’t really get represented in the movie, even with Milton Friedman popping up occassionally. It should have been fairly straight forward to give some examples where sweatshop labour in the third world actually does do some good, rather than undercutting the claim when it’s made with a segue to child labour. Third world sweatshops are a basic example of the concept of “competitive advantage” — sure, Americans could probably make the shoes at a lower cost, but there’s also other things they can do that’re more productive and there’s not so much that the third worlders can do. Pay them just enough so they’ll do the work voluntarily (ie, no government thugs allowed) rather than crawl through trash heaps or forage, and it’s all good.

Watch this for a segue. Cool website from the movie: EBaby!

How do we get to limited liability from sweatshops? Via child labour, past the baby trade, and through the aforementioned EBaby to potentially offensive joke Internet sites like say, Bonsai Kitten. One thing risque sites like that have to worry about it, well, risk: if you’re potentially offending people you want to make sure you don’t get sued and lose your house and your retirement savings. People who make money by providing a service, like, say, hosting such sites have particular cause to be concerned: money can be a magnet for lawsuits, all the suer needs to think up is a plausible excuse. And how do we uphold free speech and ribald humour in a litiguous age?

Enter (to the sound of trumpets!) the concept of “limited liability”.

Sadly, for a “documentary” trying to expose the problems of corporations, that’s all you actually get in the movie: the words, the sound of trumpets, and a sense that you’re meant to be feeling ironically detached and a bit cynical. “Limited liability” is pretty much the key concept of incorporation. Other than that, a company is just a bunch of people, and any problems you still end up with are innate to any grouping of people. But hey, we were talking about the movie, so that’s getting off topic. Oh well.

Ignoring that elephant, there’s a more fundamental hypocrisy in this movie’s criticism of corporations; one which is touched upon at the end of the movie, in an irritatingly superficial manner. Fundamentally, without corporations we wouldn’t be getting that movie, or many like it. Even ignoring the movie theatre, the distribution company, the production company, the writers themselves have a company: in this case “Big Picture Media Corporation MMIII”, incorporated in Vancouver, Canada. Mike Moore has “Dog Eat Dog Films”, a Delaware corporation. Apparently though it’s “undergrad to sketch [Mark] Achbar as a hypocrite because without corporations almost no film would be made or distributed”. But, well, there’s a reason why that’s the case: limited liability is helpful when you’re doing anything risky.

But if you’re willing to accept that risk, you don’t have to set yourself up as a corporation: Chomsky seems to get by without one of his own, eg. If we’re trying to understand corporations, it’s important to recognise their benefits and the drawbacks of the alternatives, especially when they’re staring you in the face like this, not just hand wave them away and call such criticism “undergrad” — whatever that means.

No segue this time, just a note for the Harry Potter fans: the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs is Pierre Pettigrew! Unsurprisingly, he comes across as a bit of a rat in the movie.

Some other notes. They give the example of courageous reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson fighting the evil corporate behemoth Fox so that they can actual show a report they did about the dangers of the aforementioned Monsato growth hormone. (Apparently they’re married, though the film seemed to neglect to mention this) It’s a really good example of corporations gone wrong: executives trying to mislead their employees and customers, and (perhaps more importantly) being unwilling to undertake reasonable risks involved in doing their core job well. Unfortunately the movie gets distracted by the point that it’s not actually illegal for “news” providers to lie, and doesn’t really demonstrate how its the corporate structure that’s the problem here — you don’t need a corporate structure to want to stop people saying bad things about you, and you don’t need a corporate structure to get scared about doing the right thing.

And, frankly, it being legal to lie is a good thing; drawing the line between lies, misleading information, and accurate information that can’t be fully justified isn’t possible, and throwing them all out would be horrible. And of course, Mr Moore, for example, has his own problems with honesty:

Westside Productions lawyer Devereux Chatillon acknowledged that Moore was two weeks off on the date of the headline, which read: “Latest Florida recount shows Gore won election.”

But the mistake did not make a difference to the editorial point…and was in no way detrimental to (The Pantagraph), the New York-based attorney wrote in a letter to the paper.

Unsurprisingly, the paper’s of a different opinion.

Jumping off elsewhere, we also have mention of a supposed attempted coup in the United States in 1934. Captains of industry trying to recruit a retired general and lead half a million veterans to the capital to reinstate the Gold Standard — the stuff of libertarian wet dreams presumably. But there doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence in support of the allegations — the general testified before Congress, the supposed plotters formed a lobby group, and nothing much happened — no assassination attempts, no arrests. A guy died of pneumonia, conspicuously unsuspiciously. There’s apparently some corroboration though, and reports that the Congressional hearing eventually concluded there was substance to the allegations. Interesting, but all in all it miserably fails the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” rule, and it seems like most of the sources — both first and second hand — have a plausible agenda to discredit the supposed conspirators. Oh well. Just so you don’t leave disappointed, for a real attempted US coup, try reading about the the Newburgh Address. We aim to please.

But even if there was an attempted coup, it doesn’t seem that it had anything to do with the concept of incorporation — it was just a case of powerful people unhappy with government policy trying to get their way by force. The only real linkage between this story and the rest of the movie seems to have been the general’s generalisation of the “war for oil” refrain, portraying the US armed forces as the military wing of various American companies.

I’m getting bored at this point, and I’m almost done anyway, so I’ll only comment briefly on Arcata: Hippies create committee that bans Krispy Kreme.

But the most disturbing part of the movie was at the end. People clapped. Last time I saw people clap at a screen was at a showing of Pitch Black in America (although, as I recall, the applause may have been a bit sparse). Surely the folks doing the clapping don’t want to assume the role of dumb Americans at an action/thriller, and the writers and producers of documentaries don’t want to see their film compared to a Vin Diesel vehicle — look what you’re making me do, people! I mean, I could forgive if it were opening night, and I could completely understand if there were any of the cast or crew around to take a bow, but come on, clapping at an impassive screen is just another way of proving you’re a tosser.

And if you really want to do that, you ought to just set up a blog and be done with it.