i had written for a mag a review that wasn't used about
The corporation
There's something very satisfying about watching a good documentary : that you're not just having a good time, you're also having a useful time. And if at the end of its 2h25, you'd still welcome some more, then you know the combination was a success.
This Canadian documentary from 2003 talks about, congratulations, you've guessed... corporations. They are a dominant institution of our modern world, and they are everywhere : up, down, left, right, they are here, Eeat, sleep, play, read... they sold it to you. This documentary gives us a pretty complete picture of their origin, advantages, flaws, function, and more. It was first planned to be shown in a different format on the Fox channel. But as one of the corporations rightfully attacked in the documentary threatened to sue them, Fox, thinking money rather than information, just fired the 3 employees in charge of the show since they refused to edit the footage (read: lie to their public). So the documentary was independently produced over the next years, which allowed the directors to call a spade a spade. It features a selection from a hundred hours of interviews and four times as much of archive footage, arranged in a very pleasant way, far from the severe style that we may still unconsciously associate with documentaries.
It starts off rather calmly, and you may believe that it will only expose things that you could have guessed on your own, but it quickly reveals many surprises. Because although most people already have the vague notion that big companies don't exactly go hand in hand with human rights and ecology, this intuition may often fall a bit short of elaborated arguments. And that's where The Corporation is a mine of clearly expounded information, full of specific facts and examples that are largely unknown to the public.
It tackles all themes, from the absurdity of laws, which make the bosses personally unaccountable for the damage done by their corporation, to the treatment of employees, paid $0.03 for a shirt that is sold $14.99, to the patterning of life forms or the systematic neglect of their activity's consequences on the consumer's health and on the environment. And you may very well feel a lump in your throat when presented some of the madness that our society has come to because of the greed of a small "elite" only concerned by short-term results.
But even as puzzling is the fact that although these wrongs are sometimes caused by a wilful process (such as falsifying the results of studies that would endanger the sell of a product), they are often just the result of the culprits' ignorance of the situation they have created, or of a discharge of their responsibility to an hypothetic "somebody else".
However, aside from the impeccable report of these facts, the most brilliant feat of the documentary is to show these criticisms come out of the very mouths of some corporations' chief executive officers : the corporations' big bosses.
Information is power; and such a documentary can raise passions, because apart from relating things that are really happening today, behind ours backs, it doesn't just narrate some sorry facts of our society, but also passes a message and tries to trigger a reaction in the viewer. So hopefully, it should cure away any upsurge of pro-wild-capitalism we may have, and as the end credits come down, the word "boycott" may echo in our head.
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