Corporations take an onscreen beating

Over the years, American cinema has played host to a variety of bad guys. From tomahawk-wielding Indians to goose-stepping Nazis, Cold War communists, Italian mobsters and Japanese fighters, celluloid public enemies have tended to reflect and define chapters of our nation’s history.

In recent times, a climate of political correctness has made movie enemies harder to come by. Communists no longer generate much of a fear factor. Japanese fighters have become the heroes of martial-arts pictures. Nazis are still reliably evil, as they were most recently in “Hellboy,” but stereotypical images of Native Americans, Asians, Italians, Arabs, Muslims and other ethnic, religious or political groups open filmmakers to charges of cultural insensitivity.

It seems no wonder then that screenwriters are capitalizing on the growing dimensions and horrors of a new favorite bad guy, one familiar from daily headlines and news stories and mostly safe from charges of political incorrectness. In films from Jonathan Demme’s remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” to “I, Robot,” “The Bourne Supremacy,” “Spider-Man 2” and even “Catwoman,” the movie industry’s new villain is, to varying degrees, the corporation.

In Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man 2,” Tobey Maguire’s web-slinging Spidey must save New York from the foul creation of a scientific research corporation. Pitof’s “Catwoman” finds Halle Berry’s feline battling representatives of a cosmetics company that plans to introduce a new beauty cream despite evidence it is toxic. In Paul Greengrass’ “The Bourne Supremacy,” Matt Damon’s amnesiac Jason Bourne finds himself up against the murderous machinations of a Russian oil oligarch, a budding capitalist with ties deep inside the U.S. government. In “I, Robot,” Will Smith’s Det. Spooner discovers that the giant U.S. Robotics Corp. is suppressing information about mutant machines in advance of the largest robot rollout in the company’s history. And in Demme’s “The Manchurian Candidate,” Denzel Washington’s Army officer, Ben Marco, finds himself in the middle of a corporate conspiracy to take control of the highest office in U.S. government.

Narrative films aren’t the only ones laying out the downside of a corporatized society. Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore in “Fahrenheit 9/11” explores ties linking the Bush administration to Halliburton, Unocal and Saudi oil interests. In the documentary “The Corporation,” filmmakers Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan delve into the concept of the corporation itself -- how it came to be roughly 150 years ago, how it has become the dominant social institution of our time and why that may be hazardous to the health of free societies.

The current cycle of corporation-bashing films follows earlier ones including 1983’s “Silkwood,” 1989’s “Roger & Me,” 1998’s “A Civil Action,” 1999’s “The Insider” and 2000’s “Erin Brockovich,” all of which are based on true stories and dramatize the dangers to individuals in a society dominated by corporate profit margins.

Whether narrative or documentary, the celluloid portrait of the corporation is uniformly unflattering. Today’s corporations are depicted as outsized, solely profit-driven, unprincipled and potentially murderous, all of which makes Big Business the perfect Public Enemy No. 1.

The gleaming windowed tower in “I, Robot” or the sleek high-rise offices of the Hedare Corp. of “Catwoman” are edifices where executives may commit immoral acts in the name of profit. The coldblooded lawyers who represent Beatrice Food Corp. and W.R. Grace in “A Civil Action” and Pacific Gas & Electric Co. in “Erin Brockovich” are the faces of remote, well-cushioned impenetrability. Likewise the tobacco CEOs who perjure themselves before Congress to protect profits in “The Insider.”

The common denominator in corporation-as-enemy films is the idea that nothing counts except the bottom line. In “Roger & Me,” General Motors Corp.’s loyalty to the town of Flint, Mich., its history there and its citizens matter nothing when profits can be increased by moving auto plants to Mexico. The health and safety of employees and consumers are secondary to profits in “Silkwood,” “Erin Brockovich,” “A Civil Action” and “The Insider,” and fictionalized in films including “Catwoman.” The principles of a democratic government are pushed aside in favor of corporate profiteering in “Fahrenheit 9/11” and the fictional “Manchurian Candidate.” Toxic water supplies, poisoned air, workplace contamination, carcinogenic products and possibly murder are all side effects of corporate skulduggery.

But no film about corporate evil is more chilling than Demme’s “Manchurian Candidate,” perhaps because the horror it dramatizes is the end of our democratic system. While the original, 1962 film seized on Red Scare fears and defined the enemy as communists and one very disturbed senator’s wife (Angela Lansbury), Demme’s remake points the finger squarely at Manchurian Global, a fictional American corporation with a profile that seems deliberately to match that of Halliburton Co., formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. In the film, it is Manchurian Global executives who pay for the brainwashing of a handful of U.S. soldiers, one of whom is poised, years later, to become the nation’s vice president.

Manchurian has accomplished its goals by steadily buying influence in Washington through campaign contributions. And it wholly owns the twisted Eleanor Shaw (Meryl Streep), a senator whose ambitions are far greater than her love for her only son, Liev Schreiber’s doomed Raymond Shaw.

Without naming President Bush, Cheney, Halliburton or Unocal, Demme’s “Manchurian” creates a scenario familiar from liberals’ nightmares in which corporate interests devise a way to put a puppet in the White House, one whose own political agenda can be overruled by virtue of a microchip implant. As farfetched as the implant may be, it is hardly necessary in a political system slave to corporate contributions and corporate influence in both parties. The film’s tag line, “Everything is under control,” leaves no doubt about who and what is running things.

Getting a corporation to own up to what it has done and to accept social responsibility is the driving narrative force in the bulk of today’s anti-Big Business features. Hollywood has always functioned as a dream factory, and right now, Americans seem to be dreaming that corporate hegemony can be brought to its knees.

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Deborah Hornblow is film critic at the Hartford Courant, a Tribune company.