The Advocate

3 New Progressive Documentaries: The Corporation, Supersize Me & Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train

Reviewed by Tony Monchinski
From the student lounge on the fifth floor of the Graduate Center one gets a wonderful view of the top of the Empire State Building. To the best of my knowledge, it is the only view the windowless GC offers students unless one counts the bustle of 5th Avenue and 34th and 35th Streets visible from the Mina Rees library. When the Empire State building was constructed, the top was designed as a berth for blimps. After the fatal final flight of the Hindenburg, this dock for Zeppelins was never used. It now serves, in part, as antennae for radio station Z-100, which bills itself as the biggest, most listened-to radio station in the world.

Look around: corporations are everywhere. Corporate advertising from Hummer, Espirit and Citibank plasters the “sidewalk shed” surrounding the GC. Z-100 is owned by Clear Channel. Manhattan has the highest concentration of McDonalds “restaurants” anywhere in the world: four per square mile. What you might find interesting about the ubiquity of corporations is this: for all their immense wealth, power and privilege, corporations are legally individuals, just like you and me. Except they’re not quite like you and me, as evidenced in Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott’s documentary, The Corporation. Achbar, best known for his Noam Chomsky doc, Manufacturing Consent, revisits the MIT linguist in the film, along with Michael Moore, Howard Zinn and Naomi Klein, but also corporate executives and self-described “free market liberal,” Milton Friedman.

The documentary is based on Canadian law professor Joel Bakan’s book of the same name. In the film, as in the book, the case is made that corporations, if they are indeed considered to be individuals, must be considered mentally ill. Psychologist Dr. Robert Hare runs down a list of diagnostic symptoms for psychopathy from the DSM-V, and guess what? Corporations meet them all. Corporations are singularly self-interested, irresponsible, attempt to manipulate everything, exhibit grandiose ideation and asocial tendencies, lack empathy, and, besides refusing to accept responsibility for their actions, they feel no remorse. Hannibal Lector move over!

Achbar and Bakan spend some time pointing out that there are corporations that do appear to have a social conscience and do engage in good deeds. Pfizer senior vice president, Tom Kline, shows off improvements his company has made to its Williamsburg, Brooklyn neighborhood, from a subway station across the street from the plant that is equipped with an intercom which allows harried riders to summon Pfizer security, to a public school funded partially by Pfizer. But, the documentary makes clear, corporations exist for one purpose and one purpose alone: to serve shareholders by increasing profits.

If putting on a friendly face is good for business, allowing for greater profit returns and better public relations, corporations will engage in seemingly altruistic behavior. However, the moment corporations pursue altruistic and seemingly moral ends for their own sake, they are guilty, in the words of Milton Friedman, of “immorality”. When asked about CEOs who attempt to better the environment, Uncle Milty opines, “If he [the CEO] pursues those environmental interests in such a way as to run the corporation less effectively for its stockholders, then I think he is being immoral. He’s an employee of the stockholders… as such, he has a very strong moral responsibility to them.”

Corporations exist to make a profit. That is their métier. One way they maximize profits is to minimize responsibility by outsourcing “externalities”. Externalities are the effects on third parties of transactions that the third parties have neither agreed to nor are directly a part of. Bakan defines externalities as “other people’s problems.” So, for example, when Patricia Anderson and her four children are severely burned after their Chevy Malibu is rear-ended and the gas tank explodes, General Motors enters into cost/benefit analysis mode. And this is what they find out: to make the necessary alterations that would keep people from dying in rear-end collisions would cost GM $8.59 for every car they have on the road, whereas the company would only have to pay out $2.40 per car per fatality in compensation from legal cases. Leaving their cars the way they are saves GM $6.19 per vehicle. Patricia Anderson and her four young children never asked to be externalities; that’s what makes externalities externalities.

And externalities are what makes government regulation of corporations necessary. In 1927’s The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey argued that the state is formed to regulate the indirect consequences of actions. Today, corporations are fighting government regulation tooth and nail. Deregulation, Friedman and other conservatives assure us, will lead to the triumph of the market, an automatic society where market forces lead to a social equilibrium. As many critics say of communism, “capitalism is great in theory, but…” Joel Bakan explains, “No one would seriously suggest that individuals should regulate themselves, that laws against murder, assault, and theft are unnecessary because people are socially responsible. Yet oddly, we are asked to believe that corporate persons—institutional psychopaths who lack any sense of moral conviction and who have the power and motivation to cause harm and devastation in the world -- should be left free to govern themselves.”

The point is well-made. Just as few stand a chance as individuals versus the schoolyard bully, so citizens need to unite to face the corporate Goliath looming over us. Democratic government channels, as much as corporations try to pervert them with their inordinate pull, stand as a potential countermeasure to corporate excesses. What is necessary is that citizens work together through their governments to make the state more responsive to our needs and less the lap dog of its current corporate master.
The Corporation covers these topics and many more. Achbar’s latest is never dull, but at times it seems long. I preferred Bakan’s book, which I read afterwards and was pleased to find contained the same interviews with Chomsky, Friedman, et. al. as appear in the film (but not with Michael Moore).

One corporate individual that comes in for a supersized reaming is McDonalds. Morgan Spurlock’s documentary, Supersize Me!, now available on video, singles out Mickey D’s, but, as the filmmaker makes clear, his in an indictment of the whole fast food industry. Americans are getting fatter and fatter. Sure, some overweight Americans argue that they are happy just the way they are; yet medical science—and millions of dieters—posit that being overweight is unhealthy. Personally, I think it’s the utmost in chutzpah when Oprah’s sidekick, Dr. Phil, no skinny Minnie himself, has the audacity to go on television and give people diet advice. Uh… okay. And remind me again, how did Dr. Atkins die? Eating habits and lack of exercise are the double whammy that lead to our—literally—expanding America.

For one month, Spurlock ate nothing but McDonalds. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. If a McDonalds employee asked him if he wished to supersize his meal, he would say yes. He couldn’t eat anything if it wasn’t on the McDonalds menu (Fortunately, they do sell bottled water). Viewing the film, one feels a great deal of empathy for Spurlock’s girlfriend, a vegan chef who must bear witness to this month-long binge. Spurlock suffers, but of his own volition, and his camera captures every minute of it.
By the end of his 30 days, Spurlock is a mess. He has gained 25 pounds (which took him 14 months to shed afterwards). His liver is shot, with one of his three doctors telling him—at only three weeks in—that, if Spurlock was a drinker, he (the doctor) would have to advise him that he was drinking himself to death based on his liver enzyme test results. As time goes on, Spurlock is moody and irritable, somber and lethargic. The only time he is happy is when he is eating McDonalds.

One point raised in Supersize Me! is of especial interest. Why is it, one person Spurlock interviewed asks, that people feel fine dismissing smoking as a nasty, unhealthy, unattractive habit, yet it is bad taste to point out that being overweight is equally as unhealthy and—depending on your point of view—unattractive? The point is well taken: it’s not PC to disparage someone because of their excessive weight, but many people feel no problem scoffing at smokers. While a host of arguments can be raised to explain the discrepancy, both problems are unhealthy. Furthermore, many people find both unattractive, as evidenced by the US’s continued worship of emaciation in the form of Paris Hilton. While warning against excessive McDonalds indulgence, Morgan Spurlock offers us a different type of food for thought.

Hopefully we all recognize how bad McDonalds and the like are for us. I know, I know: but the fries taste so good! Sure they do. Still, you probably don’t want to eat them more than once in a while. We’re adults, but children are the target audience of the company’s ever more aggressive advertising. The Corporation covers children’s marketing, with the latest techniques of creating advertisements that will get young children without money to nag their parents to buy them things—like Happy Meals. Most children are easier to manipulate than adults, and Friedman’s amoral corporations know this.

At an hour shorter than The Corporation, Supersize Me! could have benefited from some fat-trimming itself. This documentary is good, but Spurlock could have made his point in less than 60 minutes. What then to say about the 75 minute Howard Zinn documentary, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train?

That depends on what you can say about Howard Zinn the man. If, like me, you’re a fan of Zinn’s work, you’ll be receptive to this film that details the life and development of this progressive thinker. If, on principal, you’re opposed to leftist hagiography, to a film that plays as “less documentary than infomercial” in the words of The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman, you’re gonna want to steer clear of this one.

Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller’s documentary follows Zinn from his working-class New York upbringing to his current status as Boston University professor and author the bestselling A People’s History of the United States. Unlike other progressive thinkers, Zinn knows firsthand what he criticizes. A bombardier during World War II, Zinn took part in the first bombing runs that used Napalm. After killing who knows how many German civilians and soldiers, Zinn turned to a life of non-violence and civil disobedience.

The documentary follows him from his days at Spellman College where his anti-Vietnam War activism led to his expulsion from the faculty, through his travels to Hanoi to secure the release of downed US airmen, and to the contemporary staging of his two successful plays based on the lives of Karl Marx and Emma Goldman. Along the way there are testimonials from Noam Chomsky, Daniel Berrigan, Frances Fox Piven, Alice Walker, Marian Wright Edelman, as well as narration by Matt Damon. All in all, Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, sheds some light on the still active octogenarian, but it will probably be best enjoyed by the already converted.

Tony Monchinski is a student in the PhD program in Political Science.