Even the most diehard fiscal
conservative couldn’t deny that the corporate presence is more pervasive and
all-encompassing today than in any other period in history.
This is the basic point at which The
Corporation begins. Filmmakers Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar (Manufacturing Consent) sidestep overt
political partisanship. They immediately begin to build a case based on
essential human costs and let the facts speak for themselves. The film’s main
structural device is to take the legal principle that a corporation is
considered a person in the eyes of the law and then turn it loose on itself: if
corporations are actually people, then how have they behaved?
The film measures case after case of
corporate behavior against the Manual of
Mental Health Disorders (or DSM-IV), institutional standard for the World
Health Organization and the world’s medical community as a whole. And some of
the film’s interviewees agree: corporations act like psychopaths.
Abbott and Achbar display an
even-temperedness that might keep them from alienating conservative or
commercially minded viewers, but Corporation
has a number of flaws that nonetheless weaken its impact. Like Manufacturing Consent, this film takes
way too long to get to its most compelling arguments — and in the process
leaves out too much background about the history of corporate power.
Once it gets going, though, the film is
unstoppable. Some truly loathsome real-life villains appear, but overall Abbott
and Achbar do an admirable job of showing the human face of the modern CEO. By
far the film’s most useful testimony comes from Ray Anderson, a sober and
logical former CEO of the world’s largest carpet manufacturer who experienced
an epiphany. He now speaks out against industry’s unsustainability. “Every
ecosystem on the planet,” he says, “is in decline. Surely the day must come
when this is illegal.”
The Corporation documents big
business’ race to “own” the DNA coding for human life — very real, and
already under way. In this context, Ghost in the Shell 2seems less like
science fiction and more like believable drama. The sequel to the watershed
anime classic is set in the mid-21st century, in a world where corporations can
own people’s minds, upload them onto a massive computer network, and transplant
them into robot “shells.”
Where its predecessor was a
breathtakingly transcendent meditation on the meaning of life, Ghost 2 unfortunately fails to live up
in almost every way — most disappointingly, the animation is vastly inferior.
This time, obvious CGI stands in for the first film’s untouchable aesthetic
grace, a shock considering that Mamoru Oshii is once again at the helm.
The characters, most of whom annoyingly
spout classic poetry instead of really speaking to one another, way overplay
the film’s metaphysical hand. The only exception comes when a forensics
specialist lectures the two law-enforcement protagonists, both returnees from
the first film, on why robots “commit suicide” rather than “self-destruct.”
The plot itself isn’t the problem;
getting lost in it is, and it’s hard to imagine how the writers strayed so far
afield of such a fertile premise. By the time you get to the provocative and
rather rewarding punchline, you’ll just be too exhausted. Still, fans might not
be able to resist finding out what’s happened to the first film’s main
character. Prepare to be disappointed — but, at the very least, this time
Oshii offers us a much harsher glimpse into a harrowing technological world, a
place that now doesn’t seem far off at all.
Both The Corporation and Ghost in
the Shell 2 are at the Little Theatre for two more days only, through
Thursday, November 4.
— Saby Reyes-Kulkarni
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2004.
