The New York Times > Movie Review | 'The Corporation': Giving Corporations the Psychoanalytic Treatment

The New York Times > Movies > Movie Review | 'The Corporation': Giving Corporations the Psychoanalytic Treatment: "Since a corporation is legally defined as a person, it makes some sense to ask what kind of person a corporation might be. The answer offered by 'The Corporation,' a smart, brooding documentary directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, is: not a very nice one.
The film, which opens at Film Forum today, half-mockingly offers a psychiatric diagnosis based on a list of abuses that arise from the relentless pursuit of profit. The point is not that individual companies pollute the environment, hurt animals, exploit workers and commit accounting fraud, but that such outrages are a result of the essential personality traits of the corporate life form. These behaviors are symptoms arising from a list of pathologies that includes 'disregard for the well-being of others,' 'inability to form lasting relationships' and 'deceitfulness.' A psychiatrist who has advised the F.B.I. declares that the corporation has 'all the characteristics of a prototypical psychopath.'"


By A. O. SCOTT
The New York Times