Documentaries with a liberal agenda are admirable in one respect, that is, in challenging the status quo and trying to shake their audience into action. However, I wonder what point there is, exactly, in foisting a socialist view of modern civilization on an audience that inevitably will consist of people who already want to believe in it. I mean, unless you're trying to get into that wide-eyed 19-year-old liberal arts major's underpanties, who are you going to impress by rigorously dissecting the horrors of corporate America? And while I'm thinking about it, I'm always for listening to Howard Zinn and/or Noam Chomsky apply their razor-sharp minds to breaking down the implications of corporate monstrosity, but I wonder: for all of the luscious, kinky, sexually adventurous, bespectacled coeds who cream their cutoff shorts at those guys' ideas, I wonder how many groupies they have? Do these girls hang around backstage waiting for a shot at blowing Noam Chomsky? It's like my theory that while every college girl in the world loves Bob Marley, not one ever, then or now, would want to fuck him. But all that is probably more about my observance of summer-break coeds walking around in skimpy clothing than my opinion of The Corporation. But sex sells, right?!??! RIGHT?!?!?!?!?!? Hm, apparently I've long since supplanted my liberal ideals with second-rate fantasies that will never be realized. I mean, now that I'm old and lame, all I can get is the occasional desperate 45-year-old, or the frequent helpless 8-year-old. Anyway, The Corporation traces the degeneration of society from its egalitarian hunter-gatherer beginnings to the onset of feudal property ownership and on to our current age, when corporations are the oligarchs to which we all bow down. There are plenty of eye-opening exposés, most of them focusing on stuff like how our milk contains toxic hormones and/or how big business is only about the bottom line. Which we all know already. To its credit, The Corporation presents a remarkably balanced view of the human element within corporations, allowing rich-white-guy Masters of the Universe to speak as dudes, as opposed to shills for whatever sham of a business they represent. Many of the talking heads featured in the film present a completely likeable side, reinforcing the notion that it's not the CEOs, personally, who are the problem, but the structure of corporations themselves. Which is probably of little consolation to Michael Moore, who has built his career on haranguing CEOs to accept personal responsibility for the crimes committed on their watch. Moore is featured, and for the most part he's lower-key and more straightforward than usual, though when he gets to talking about himself, look out! He even, at one point, subtly dismisses the film for which he's being interviewed as some kind of insignificant blip compared with the giant impact he's made on the liberal consciousness. Or, perhaps more accurately, the giant impact he's made on his oversized toilet, which he breaks thrice weekly with his gluttonous, Wendy's-fed shitstorms. I suppose all of these remarks, grounded in nothing but a vague distate for my own naivety, suggest that I didn't like The Corporation. Quite untrue; I enjoyed it and found it insightful. But as with a lot of well-intended liberal rhetoric, there was a paucity of solutions amid all the problems illustrated. When a small town is celebrated for rejecting "big box stores," one of the main proponents reasons that if this has a negative impact on the town's economy, they'll "figure it out." It's precisely this lack of concrete reasoning that makes me enjoy talking with conservatives (with whom I disagree almost entirely) far more than liberals (with whom I ought to identify, but actually wish would shut up and have a Starbucks). All these non-points made, The Corporation is entirely worth watching, especially for anyone who has had little exposure to the socialist-populist take on history and wants to figure out where they ought direct their heretofore-unnamed animus. It would have been a transformative experience for me to take in The Corporation when I was 19; nowadays, it's a comparable exercise in futility to trying to get anyone to see why "Robot Chicken" isn't funny. The world has passed me by; I cede defeat; you can find me at the Starbucks on Elba, wirelessly reading TMZ on a tablet the population of Laos could never afford, shaking my head in resignation at the world's follies, and my own.
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