The Corporation

A Feature documentary by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan.

Based on the forthcoming book THE CORPORATION: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan.

When the corporation’s inner workings undergo analysis — bizarre operating principles are revealed.

THE CORPORATION engages us in a darkly amusing account of the institution’s birth as a legal “person” whose prime directive is to produce ever-increasing profit for it’s shareholders regardless of the cost to anyone, or anything else. This pathological nature wasn’t always written in stone. 150 years ago a corporation was merely an organized way of doing business. Today it is is a global power.

Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a “person” in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employees a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.

Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation’s operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

In this feature documentary we see the people who inhabit the corporate “person” explore, and expose, the implications of being part of an institution that is required by it’s own laws to place the pursuit of profit over people. Over concern for the environment. Over even the planet itself.

In production from the time of the loudest protests against globalization to the high-profile bankruptcies of companies like Enron, thefilmmakers make this huge and complex topic easy to follow and riveting to watch. Behind-the-scenes tensions and influences are revealed in corporate and anti-corporate dramas through jaw-dropping case studies and true confessions.

Featuring a multitude of interviews with CEO’s and top-level executives from some of the worlds largest corporations, representing a wide range of industries, including: oil (Shell), pharmaceuticals (Pfizer),computers (IBM), tires (Goodyear), carpets (Interface), public relations (Burson Marsteller), branding (Landor), and advertising (Initiative); as well as critical thinkers: Noam Chomsky, Peter Drucker, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, Mark Kingwell, Vandana Shiva, and muckraking filmmaker Michael Moore. Add to the mix a corporate spy, an undercover marketer, academics, pundits, historians and activists; deftly blend with newsreel footage, early TV advertisements, B movies, and corporate propaganda films and you have the fascinating, original portrait of an institution that is THE CORPORATION.

Is there a cure for this pathological pursuit of profit-at-any-cost? Or can we only apply restraints?

Will people regain control over the corporation?

With cautious optimism, we are invited to reconsider our relationship with the dominant institution of our time.