Still mulling TheCorporation documentary we saw earlier this week in Toronto. First review would be: sensational, important, confused and misdirected.
The film raises critically important issues related to milk and media, seeds and CEOs, water and world trade. My concern, however, is the film’s intense focus on corporate structure, control and the indirect power held by shareholders and regulators. I think this sort of focus only strengthens our deep cultural belief in, reliance on, and surrender to these things… which necessarily undercuts our deepening of personal awareness, community conversation, individual responsibility, and direct, democratic exercise of personal power.
In taking this focus, I think the film ventures to play a game that it can never win, rather than boldly re-creating and re-bounding the entire field of play. Too often (though not exclusively) it tacitly accepts a popular view of the structure, the lawyers, the traders, the “corporation” as the enemy, the oppressor, the other. Too often, the film feeds on and feeds into the polarities, externalizations, disconnections, and objectifications that are the heart of the a “corporate” consciousness that is creating the conditions that the film seeks to change. It’s the polarities in our consciousness, not the structures of our corporations, that must be transformed and transcended. To focus on the fight, feeds only the fighting.
While the film offers a number of stories of ordinary people effectively claiming and collecting their own personal power to direct their own futures, by far the most prominent of these (in emotional and screen-minutes terms) is the story of South American peasants taking to the streets in violent protest against the corporate (Bechtel) purchase of the entire nation’s water rights. I don’t quarrel with the protest or its outcomes. I do question, however, the screen minutes given to this form of action and the scarcity of attention brought to other, more helpful and whole, ways of taking action. I’m looking for ways that all of us can feed this essential and global shift in our understanding and exercise of power and responsibility. We need to find and feed the peace, not the polarities.
I do hope lots of people see this film — because the stories are important. AND… I do hope there will be a sequel that will do more to cut through the confusion, polarities and disconnections that this first film has — for better or worse — embodied so well.