Company Man

MODEL MAKER: (l-r) Mark Achbar, Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott.

Mark Achbar seeks out the corporation's nonexistent heart.

by Sam Adams

Mark Achbar is drinking something pink. In the stylish West Philly spot where we're knocking back a few, his choice of beverage would hardly call attention to itself, except that Achbar is also the co-director of The Corporation, a nearly two-and-a-half-hour documentary examining what it calls the most powerful institution of the 20th century.

Anti-corporate types, everyone knows, don't drink fancy drinks, and they don't wear swank sport jackets; it's thrift-store button-downs and soy lattes, or, if they happen also to be documentary filmmakers, a baseball cap and a large milkshake. But while The Corporation doesn't bother to camouflage its agenda, it, like Achbar, is not entirely what you'd expect. What makes the film surprising is how much time Achbar and co-director Jennifer Abbott give their ostensible foes, the most unapologetic of whom is undoubtedly economist Milton Friedman, who argues that for a corporation to act on anything other than pure profit is fundamentally "immoral." (Joel Bakan wrote the text and accompanying book.)

As Michael Moore, one of The Corporation's more cooperative interviews, likes to say, anti-business crusaders are in the unique position of fighting a war where their opponents' battle plans are published in the newspaper. Much of the The Corporation shock value comes from simply re-contextualizing rhetoric that might seem benign in the business section or the pages of a prospectus. "A lot of people sit there with their jaws open," Achbar says. "Sometimes it's just at the candor with which it's being revealed."

In legal precedent as in the popular imagination, corporations are people, too: They have rights and personalities, and, of course, they make mistakes. "Their whole shtick is to put a face on this legal fiction," Achbar says. "And so we have expectations of them — that they behave like us, that they're sorry when they do bad." But if corporations can be said to have personalities, The Corporation argues, via a standard psychological diagnostic, that they're psychopathic: self-interested, amoral and unconcerned with the consequences of their actions.

Though Achbar and Abbott didn't set out to make an objective documentary (Fahrenheit 9/11-bashers notwithstanding, the two terms are hardly synonymous), they did want to balance their exhaustive catalog of corporate malfeasance with an examination of the mindset that makes such behavior possible. Achbar found his CEO subjects surprisingly forthcoming, but he realized, "If you're a psychopathic corporation, who do you want as your frontman? The most charming, erudite, personable person you can put out there." Words to the wise, since anti-corporate types who assume all businessmen smell of sulfur leave themselves vulnerable to counterattack. Witness the group of protesters picketing the home of HSBC director and former Shell chairman Sir Mark Moody-Stewart as they become as docile as kittens when his wife emerges to serve them all tea. Sheep's clothing has nothing on a fresh, hot cuppa.

While so-called green corporations have begun to show signs of social consciousness (and reap the financial benefits thereof), Achbar is skeptical of real change coming from within. Social responsibility, he says, is "a tactic." And the idea that corporations have suddenly discovered the heart in their fictitious bodies leaves one elemental question unanswered: "If corporations are moral agents, then why does so much bad stuff happen?"

The Corporation is now playing at Ritz Bourse.