Corporate invasions, barbarian invasions [The corporation] [The Barbarian invasion]
111.1Abstract (summary)
Alain's conjuring of a mighty wave of Muslim terrorist "barbarians" has the feel of yet another fad. In the hospital, Remy's furious exchanges with Sebastien contrast to a Middle Eastern family's harmonious shared dinner. That's civilization. When narcotics officer Gilles Levac (Roy Dupuis) describes the society of drug dealers - Iranian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Turkish - he explains that it's fruitless to arrest them. "There's too much of a demand" from the "civilized" locals. Muslim terrorists are not among Arcand's barbarians.
Despite her religion ("Embrace the mystery and you'll be saved"), Sister Constance helps Remy. She persuades him to acknowledge his son's dedication; she advises Sebastien to tell Remy he loves him and to "touch him." The latter scene is immediately followed by Nathalie, in her own way "touched" by Remy, starting on methadone to kick her habit. In Decline, Dominique told Alain: "Never mind what I say, just touch me." Sister Constance's best counsel comes from outside her religious parameters, as Sebastien circumvents the "civilized" structures of hospital, labour union, and drug squad.
Sebastien and Remy together prompt Nathalie's redemption. While Nathalie gives Remy heroin, he in turn provokes her new respect for life. As he warns, "young people make the best martyrs," but "life grows on you." Nathalie here recovers from her childhood as limned in Decline - in which Diane lied to her 12-year-old daughter about the whip marks on her back, slept with her (for the comfort of a warm body), and let Nathalie drive Remy away when she found him in bed with her mother. In Invasion, when Diane phones her daughter, her message reveals a deep alienation: "It's Mom. It's Diane." After seeing Remy off, Nathalie finally accepts her mother's embrace. In the aftermath of their mission of mercy, Sebastien allows Nathalie to stay in Remy's flat, for a fresh start. After impulsively kissing him, she pushes him out. Nathalie and Sebastien - barbarians of drugs and capitalism - have the will to avert their cultured parents' folly.
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And in this corner... The two most acclaimed Canadian films of the past year come out swinging from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Denys Arcand revisits 1960s leftist idealism as it collides with present-day statist red tape and bureaucratic cruelty. His jaded hedonists take a hard look at the society they helped to create, and the capitalist offspring they have somehow sired. In contrast, the makers of The Corporation argue that street-storming, culture-jamming activism has never been so important - since the modern multinational is nothing less than humanity's ultimate doomsday machine. And these two stories are as contrasting as their styles.
A documentary takes the form of an objective record, though it encourages the assertion of the filmmaker's defined position, while fiction is more open to circumnavigating a problem to explore uncertainties. The Corporation, the award-winning (Sundance, inter alia) documentary by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan of Vancouver, is an amiably illustrated 145-minute sermon against corporate connivance - and our governments' abdication of their responsibilities. Clearly this is a compelling subject for our times. This film has carefully arranged its research and is passionate, clever - even vital. It should be seen, debated, and acted upon. But it may work even better when its source, UBC law professor Bakan's book of the same title, is published, or when the film is sliced into a three-program television series. Then its points will be more amenable to investigation and analysis - for the cinema version leaves one feeling simply clobbered... but involved.
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The pre-title spray of corporate logos sets the tone. These objects of desire now become targets. The film itself is a montage of talking heads, old industrial and newsreel film and TV clips, and ads, with biting wit and bitter conclusions. The film's stated intention is to examine "the nature, evolution, impacts and possible futures of the modern business corporation." For global corporations have escaped government control and ethical accountability. Though some grey flannel types are presented to mouth the corporate line, the dominant thrust is more like this: "A corporation is an externalizing machine in the same way as a shark is a killing machine." And "We've created a doom machine. In our search for wealth and prosperity, we've created something that's going to destroy us." Another assertion: "Every living system of earth is in decline." This is strong stuff, and to the filmmakers' credit we don't turn away.
What chance reform? Kathie Lee Gifford, for one, is shocked to hear about a 13-year-old girl who churns out Kathie Lee handbags for her Wal-Mart line for starvation wages in a sweatshop. Of course, Kathie Lee's label promises a portion of the proceeds will go to children's charities - but these do not seem to be making it to the factory. And after the nationwide scandal subsides? The little girls still sweat and starve for their three cents an hour.
The subject is so crucial and the film so powerful that one wishes it had been slightly tempered, with some reservations, a bit of modest doubt, perhaps, some sense that no one conviction can quite corner the market on truth. As it is, the project is weakened by its very strength of conviction. For the left is not necessarily closer to unerring wisdom than the right, even when it unleashes the likes of Maude Barlow, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and the self-promoting Michael Moore. That Moore is given pride of place points to the film's main problem. It provides one entrenched perspective, with no room for circumspection or alternatives. Moore even repeats here the widely discredited claim from his Bowling for Columbine documentary that Columbine's Lockheed-Martin factory builds weaponry. Why let a fact impede a good line?
Another witness, a stock broker, remarks that after 9/11 his colleagues' first thought was the price of gold. When it doubled, all his clients made money: "In devastation there is opportunity," he concludes. Well, so there is in affluence, too (I have been told). But in fact, this did not happen. Gold nudged up a shade (10 percent, max) then subsided. The shock was so great that the mad reflex flight to gold didn't happen this time.
From their own experience, viewers may spot other untruths here, but any one misrepresentation undermines the project's credibility. One lie makes us suspect all the truths. It's not just the corporation that can be declared psychopathic for its callousness, fickleness, carelessness, guiltlessness, deceit, and violation of societal norms. Any zealot of more certainty than sense can fall into the same place too. An idealist can be as "off-the-wall false, demonstrably false" as the villain corporation or politician. In a clash of lies, how can we figure out our truth? Now, as an old leftie I don't want to find myself agreeing with Terence Corcoran... so don't drive me off with distortions.
Or shifty editing - in one scene of a demonstration being violently suppressed, there's a shot through a riflescope. Suddenly we're the brute soldier targeting an idealist. Okay, this trick does neatly counter our habitual "disconnect" between the world system we support - through the corporations we patronize, work for, and invest in - and that system's often lethal effects. We are responsible for what is done or allowed in our name. But this same shot shows that the filmmakers have no qualms about intruding themselves into ostensibly objective found footage. Then how can we be sure, for example, that in the scene of a WWII internment camp the soldiers are spraying the Japanese-Americans with DDT, as the edit implies, and not, say, Shalimar?
The film would be strong enough without ratcheting up the rage by blaming IBM for the Nazis' efficiency at genocide. Fine and enough to title the advertising expose "Triumph of the Shill." In fact, compared to their support of the Nazis in the 1930s the multinational corporations' current malfeasance can seem tolerable. Such overkill suggests an ill-considered certitude that accelerates on its own momentum, rather than with just cause. Here credibility crumbles into either despair or righteousness.
The film's undoubted truth-teller is Ray Anderson, CEO of the American carpet maker Interface. He's credible because he includes himself among the globe's "plunderers." Amid over-heated rhetoric, what price self-deprecation? He has the most effective lines: "The typical company of the twentieth century - extracting, wasteful, abusive, linear, in all its processes.... We're leaving a terrible legacy of poison and diminishment of the environment for our grandchildren's grandchildren." Anderson's highest vision is an industrial revolution "doing no harm."
Perhaps the film's most eloquent metaphor is the phrase that jolted this CEO into conscience: "the death of birth." This refers to our industrial extinction of species but extends to the absurd science of "terminator seeds" to supplant self-regeneration - making natural fertility planned obsolescence - and the Florida TV news team's killed warning about the dangers of Monsanto milk-production enhancers.
From Ray Anderson's exceptional example the film moves to some positive alternatives. Flying in the face of our debilitating politicians, the film argues for government regulation. As economist Milton Friedman points out, social responsibility is not a corporation's duty or expertise. All corporate benefaction is dismissed as empty tactic. In Bolivia and India, citizens rally against the privatization of their water, while companies scamper to patent genes and the air. A crawl under the end credits lists possible actions and pertinent websites.
But this important film's crucial messages are weakened by its certainty. Overstatement and misinformation prevent the respectful debate that the subject deserves. When Achbar and Bakan accepted their Best Documentary award at Sundance, they reportedly lost their audience when they railed against one of the festival's major sponsors, Coca-Cola (whom the film condemns for supplying the Nazis with Orange Fanta) - shades of patron saint Michael Moore using his Oscar platform to assail his president for, in effect, saving the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein. If we turn down the heat, maybe we'll let in some light.
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FOR CIRCUMSPECTION we turn to Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions (Les invasions barbares, 2003), where he revives the company of Quebec intellectuals he created and satirized in The Decline of the American Empire (Le declin de l'empire americain, 1986). Where his first film builds to the disintegration of history professor Remy's (Remy Girard) marriage, the sequel documents his death. His ex-wife Louise (Dorothee Berryman) summons home his alienated son Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau), who has never had much in common with his socialist, libertine father. At Louise's request, Sebastien assembles Remy's old friends - and, with naked capitalist bribery, he begins to bulldoze through the red tape of socialized medicine to secure his father's comfort. He contracts a junkie - his childhood playmate Nathalie (Marie-Josee Croze) - to provide heroin to soothe his father's pain, and to administer his final dose when Remy decides that it's time to let go. And with all the poignant conversation taking place, we soon forget that this film has something to do with barbarians. In fact, it's about alternative forms of barbarism.
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In Decline, Arcand's passionate hedonists squander their intellect in the freedom of post-Duplessis Quebec. In the pre-title scene, Diane (Louise Portal) interviews historian Dominique (Dominique Michel) about her new book, Variations on the Theme of Happiness. Dominique's thesis - that a nation weakens its civilization when it serves individual instant gratification - would fit nicely if expressed in The Corporation. "The decline of civilization is as inevitable as the process of aging." But, for Arcand's crowd of malcontents, principle is more posture than practice. Diane is involved in a sado-masochistic affair with the brutish Mario (Gabriel Arcand), while Dominique seduces a young graduate student, Alain (Daniel Briere).
In Invasions, Alain returns as a TV talking head, recalling the argument of his "old profs" that the "[American] empire managed to keep the barbarians outside its gates" in past wars (such as Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War) - until the destruction of the World Trade Center. But Alain seems destined to be as wrongheaded as his professors, who now sit on the lakeside porch and blush at the memory of their various philosophical fads. "Is there an -ism we haven't worshipped?" asks Claude (Yves Jacques). "Cretinism," Pierre (Pierre Curzi) suggests. But Remy claims to have embraced even that - having wooed an abused Chinese beauty by praising Mao's Cultural Revolution.
Alain's conjuring of a mighty wave of Muslim terrorist "barbarians" has the feel of yet another fad. In the hospital, Remy's furious exchanges with Sebastien contrast to a Middle Eastern family's harmonious shared dinner. That's civilization. When narcotics officer Gilles Levac (Roy Dupuis) describes the society of drug dealers - Iranian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Turkish - he explains that it's fruitless to arrest them. "There's too much of a demand" from the "civilized" locals. Muslim terrorists are not among Arcand's barbarians.
Nor are the Americans. As Sebastien reminds Remy, American hospitals allow patients the comfort of music, like other "civilized countries." Montreal's crammed corridors don't allow such small consolations. When Sebastien takes his father to an American clinic to secure the latest medical technology, the strains of "America the Beautiful" and a festoon of Old Glories satirize not America, but the mirror egotisms of American chauvinism and Canadians' reflexive anti-Americanism.
Arcand's real barbarians are the sophisticates who converge on Remy's hospital room. Most of his problems stem from the society he helped to create. "I voted for Medicare, so I should pay the price for it now," he insists. As a result of the political movement he has supported, the medical system has been keeping a whole floor empty for two years while beds fill the hallways. There's a six-month wait for the diagnostic machine, and Sebastien's specialist friend has fled to an American clinic.
Remy's generation empowered the labour unions that now throttle Quebec's institutions and protect their own ranks even when they are incompetents and thieves. Like two circling predators, Sebastien and union chief Ronald (Jean-Marc Parent) negotiate for Remy's private room. Embracing this "barbarian," director Arcand does a cameo as the union henchman who returns Sebastien's stolen laptop.
Initially, Remy considers Sebastien a barbarian because he never reads a book and earns more in a month than Remy does in a year. Nothing like envy to breed moral superiority. But Sebastien serves his father by slicing through the statist crust his father's generation created, recovering whatever humanity is to be found in these same institutions. In a collision of dishonesties, Sebastien bribes the hospital director, who has thus far been able to provide little except a recitation of bureaucratese. But Sebastien's dishonesty is the more humane, as he persuades one reluctant nurse to give Remy his overdue heroin fix and another to bring his intravenous support to the lakeside cottage.
Though fear of the barbarian press prevents the drug cop from helping Sebastien get his father the opiates that make his last weeks tolerable, Levac sneaks out "rumours widely circulated in the media." Even when Sebastien's "corruption" transcends the civilized/legal boundaries, the "barbarian" seems, if anything, morally superior. Where Remy's domestic risks caused great pain to his family, Sebastien's success and skill as a financial (and moral) risk manager improve everyone's lot. By the time Remy calls his son "prince... [of] the barbarians everywhere tomorrow," they are reconciled. The cultured/barbarian father embraces his barbarian/cultured son.
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The humanity of Arcand's barbarians transcends traditional culture. When the old friends gather under blankets around a campfire at Pierre's cottage, they strike a tribal image. Louise laughs along with Remy's old mistresses - in contrast to her long-ago shock (at the end of Decline) when she learned of her husband's affairs. At the dinner table in Decline, Pierre declared these friends his true family, closer than his blood relatives. In Invasion, he leaves his airhead wife to join Remy. Arcand's "family" is exuberantly primitive.
This tribe contrasts to the church. When Sebastien's fiancee, Gaelle (Marina Hands), appraises a warehouse full of Catholic artifacts, she speaks to the religious works' "great value for people here, for the collective memory." The market-driven priest (Gilles Pelletier) calls them "completely worthless." Which is the real barbarian? So, too, Remy's running debate with the nurse, Sister Constance (Johanne-Marie Tremblay). In response to Remy's view, "The history of mankind is a history of horrors," she considers God a necessary forgiver.
Despite her religion ("Embrace the mystery and you'll be saved"), Sister Constance helps Remy. She persuades him to acknowledge his son's dedication; she advises Sebastien to tell Remy he loves him and to "touch him." The latter scene is immediately followed by Nathalie, in her own way "touched" by Remy, starting on methadone to kick her habit. In Decline, Dominique told Alain: "Never mind what I say, just touch me." Sister Constance's best counsel comes from outside her religious parameters, as Sebastien circumvents the "civilized" structures of hospital, labour union, and drug squad.
Sebastien and Remy together prompt Nathalie's redemption. While Nathalie gives Remy heroin, he in turn provokes her new respect for life. As he warns, "young people make the best martyrs," but "life grows on you." Nathalie here recovers from her childhood as limned in Decline - in which Diane lied to her 12-year-old daughter about the whip marks on her back, slept with her (for the comfort of a warm body), and let Nathalie drive Remy away when she found him in bed with her mother. In Invasion, when Diane phones her daughter, her message reveals a deep alienation: "It's Mom. It's Diane." After seeing Remy off, Nathalie finally accepts her mother's embrace. In the aftermath of their mission of mercy, Sebastien allows Nathalie to stay in Remy's flat, for a fresh start. After impulsively kissing him, she pushes him out. Nathalie and Sebastien - barbarians of drugs and capitalism - have the will to avert their cultured parents' folly.
So the generation Remy calls "barbarian" is superior to his own. Hence, too, Pierre's surprise when three students visit Remy: "For illiterates, they're very sweet." In fact Sebastien is paying them $40 each to come, although one (Rose-Maite Erkoreka) is so moved she declines the payment. Again, the capitalist's bribe prompts a humane gesture. As if to confirm his embrace of the next generation, director Arcand dedicates Invasion to his daughter. The director is more optimistic than his diptych's titles suggest. Perhaps everyone is a barbarian from someone else's perspective.
IN APPRECIATING the ambivalence of human nature and the complexity of moral issues, Arcand anticipates one of Noam Chomsky's observations in The Corporation: "Every one of us under some circumstances could be a gas chamber attendant and a saint." But Chomsky's point serves the argument that an institution's monstrousness outweighs its members' decency. Arcand's sympathy for his cultivated hedonists suggests he would embrace that "barbaric" Other. But then, Arcand has moved from his early, aggressive documentaries into fiction. Now he focuses on thoughtful lives and the ethics of relationships, not the larger arena of corporations despoiling the globe. Perhaps it's easier to respect ambivalence and complexity in fiction than in documentary. For if "a little learning is a dangerous thing," what can we say about a mess of absolute conviction?
Word count: 2875
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Spring 2004
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