Planet in Focus 2020: The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel

It might feel appropriate watching the documentary The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel during Halloween season, since the horrors on display are certainly vivid and frightening, from footage of the Deepwater Horizon disaster to our current global pandemic. A return to the subject of their 2003 documentary The Corporation, in which they delve into the increasing power of corporate business entities in our world, the filmmakers Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott ask the question: if corporations are granted the legal status of persons, what kind of persons are they? The answer they come to is: psychopaths. Seventeen years later, as the subtitle of their sequel documentary makes clear, the question of what role corporations play in our world and what, if anything, has changed in the intervening two decades is more than worth revisiting.

For folks pursuing liberal arts degrees in 2003, as the build-up to and launch of the Iraq War loomed heavily and George W. Bush was the demagogue of the day (remember when ol’ Dubya was the “worst president ever” and not a lauded member of the #Resistance?), The Corporation was a kind of touchstone text for young people in the process of developing a left-leaning political consciousness. Along with books like Naomi Klein’s No Logo and the invocation of Noam Chomsky, The Corporation was part of the curriculum of what was to eventually feed nascent left-wing millennial culture as well as anarchist book fairs country-wide. As one of those people who saw the film in 2003 and was genuinely shocked and mostly convinced by what Abbott and Bakan’s film suggested, yet whose age and experience left me without the language to describe my emerging political beliefs, The Corporation was helpful and instilled a kind of righteous anger at the culture that had wrought the Enron scandal and was polluting the environment.

I think that film, for all its overly-simplistic framing device—a DSM checklist for diagnosing psychopathy, with the behaviour of corporations compared point-by-point against the behaviours associated with the diagnosis—was a landmark of activist filmmaking and Canadian independent documentary. But clearly after the economic crisis of 2008, the Obama and now Trump administrations in the USA, and current global coronavirus pandemic raging on and the associated economic devastation, the material was ripe for revisiting and revising. What would they say about today’s corporation? Had anything meaningfully changed?

If it’s not already, it becomes clear that, if anything, our civilization is even more deeply entwined with the fate of the corporation as both an economic and political agent than it was in 2003. The New Corporation begins by expanding the scope of its lens with the question: “What did the Enlightenment promise?” Its answer is that the core promise was “freedom,” but instead of freedom, we have gotten “markets.” It’s an interesting way to frame the film’s explorations, and I think that beginning with that question rather than a more obviously political one, the film tries to make the case that it is of broader interest than just to those who identify with the political left. If we actually examine the world we have and what it promises, which by extension means, what corporations promise us, what is the verdict? And ultimately, where do we go from here?

One of the best parts of The New Corporation is its exploration of the concept of “Corporate Social Responsibility,” which they describe as emerging in the mid-2000s as people became more aware of the abuses testified to in the original film, such as the Enron scandal. Early on the filmmakers feature an interview with Unilever VP, John Coyne, who says that “The cult of shareholder value has seen its day as the narrow construct for how companies operate in society.” While expressing incredulity at Coyne’s statement, the film goes on to point out that this is the essence of a narrative that corporations tell both the public and themselves: making profit is no longer their main goal, rather doing good is intrinsic to their reason for being. This leads to an extended look at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where everyone from Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a ghoulishly grinning Tony Blair preach the gospel of benevolent capitalism. Interviews with, among others, WEF founder Klaus Schwab and Lord John Browne, former CEO of British Petroleum, let the ruling class speak on their own behalf.

It’s not always convincing. Browne claims that under his watch, BP dealt with massive issues of public safety, particularly after an explosion at a Texas City Refinery in 2005 that killed 17 people. But as the film points out, this supposed increasing valuation of public and worker safety that Browne oversaw, also coincided with massive cuts to company spending to boost shareholder value. And very shortly after his tenure as the head of BP ended, the Deepwater Horizon disaster occurred. This would seem to be a major contradiction, but the film frames this as par for the course for corporations who want to portray themselves as pursuing noble ends while abetting horrific practices around the planet.

The New Corporation reframes the psychopathic assessment from the first film accordingly, introducing a new behaviour of psychopaths: the “use of seduction, charm, glibness, or ingratiation to achieve one's ends.” The result is to suggest that the corporate “playbook” is like the seduction manual of a manipulative monster, and the film goes to show how through their political power, corporations follow a process of strangling and starving industries, only to swoop and pose themselves as the solution to the very problems they have facilitated.

The film presents the viewer with plenty of interesting statistics that leave one aghast, from the environmental abuses of the fossil fuel industry to the way that private schools work hand-in-hand with local governments to replace cash-strapped public schools with for-profit education. Mostly a series of interviews with figures from Anand Giridharadas to Chris Hedges (interviews shift in the second-half from in-studio framed against a black backdrop to the now ubiquitous video chat of the pandemic era) the film does a good job of making the case against the current corporate power structure. 

Where the film isn’t quite as convincing is in its concluding portion, where Abbott and Bakan want to leave the viewer with some hope and a playbook of their own involving the robust renewal of both public organizing and electoral politics. The most compelling story is that of the Sunrise Movement and their work with the Wagan and Jagalingou in Queensland, Australia to stop the development of the massive Adani Carmichael coal mine project. But to a significant degree, the filmmakers water down their own argument by straying too far from the analysis of corporate behaviour and the question of what values should guide our society, and spending a great deal of time on the limited successes of anti-corporate politicians around the globe from AOC and Seattle’s Kshama Sawant to the activist mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau. Of particular interest is Chris Barrett, featured in the original film as one of the “corporate-sponsored” college kids, for whom the viewing of the resulting film awoke a desire to run for office as a left-wing candidate.

While any of these people make interesting stories in and of themselves, the political beatings taken by the left in recent years, from the failure of Corbynism to form a government to the second Bernie campaign (though Chomsky’s note that the success of Bernie was in shifting the discourse if not the seat of actual political power is well-taken) make the prospect of truly challenging the immense seat of power outlined in the film’s first portions seem not only daunting, but hopeless. Ultimately, so much of it seems merely as symbolic a challenge to power as toppling the statues of racists in the footage from this past summer, leaving the power structures intact.

I do believe that Abbott and Bakan’s sequel was, as its subtitle says, “unfortunately necessary.” I feel like the perspective that the filmmakers take shows both the growth of their sophistication as both filmmakers and political thinkers in the years since the first film. But if the nascent anarchism of the first film has given way to a more articulate and fully-formed political program in the second film, what they lose by the end is the pointedness and urgency of the first film that carries through and is even better developed in the first half of this documentary.

On a narrative and informational level, The New Corporation rates as successful and useful viewing for anyone interested in these issues (which at this point might be nearly anyone who has read the news in the last few years). In its scope and relentless exposition, it has a more clearly formed view of the larger problems that we face even when compared with a recent social issue documentary like Netflix’s The Social Dilemma. By actually providing the viewer with opportunities to hear the justifications of corporate pitch people and CEOs themselves, along with a range of significant critiques, the film generates a productive dialogue that places the role of the corporation into context on moral and political grounds.

If I’m less than satisfied with where the film ends, it’s that the rhetorical and narrative gambits don’t quite work for me when I feel like they really need to. I feel that in striving to offer hope and a way forward The New Corporation doesn’t quite land the punch that it wants to; I can’t help but wonder if forcing the audience to face the naked horror of our situation might prompt a greater response in some way. Either way, it's certainly necessary to think through and confront the narratives our society is based on.

7 out of 10

The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel (2020, Canada)
Directed by Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan; written by Joel Bakan, based on The Corporation by Joel Bakan.