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A debate was being threaded through
posted messages on the Independent Media
web
site, a wire service for anti-globalization
activists, progressive journalists
and liberally minded thinkers. The debate centered on the use of corporations as bad
guys in film. Position
A went something like this: “Representing corporations as bad
guys in movies
legitimizes our cause! Power to the people!” Position B sounded a
little
like: “Representing corporations as the bad guys in movies de-legitimizes
our cause! Power to the people!” Position C is reflected as follows: “Hey,
they’re movies—don’t waste our time. Power to the people!”
For my
own part, at the time of that debate, I had a sociopolitical column
called “System X”
(system as in “the system” and X as in a variable within
“the system”). I had a cyber
cool pseudonym to go with it: Syn-X—as in
”cynics” but keeping with the whole
variable theme. I had a fedora and a
trench coat and a small robo-dog equipped with
state-of-the-art surveillance
equipment as a sidekick. I was a sci-fi journalist for
the resistance, and to
this day I still credit science fiction with predisposing me
to social and
political issues.
Ridley Scott’s all-too-visionary,
all-too-frightening, and
all-too-possible dystopic futuristic nightmare, Blade
Runner, portrays a
world where the environment has been desecrated beyond repair;
machines have
robbed us of humanity, becoming “more human that human,” and economic
imperialism has become the dominant political system. In short, a future
without
a future. Blade Runner became a cult classic and set the standard for the techno
noir
genre: as pessimistic as any detective variant of the genre, but with lots
of gadgetry—resulting in an often-replicated science fiction look with the
mega-corporations as the bad guys. Ironically, even computer-generated
corporate
cola poster boy Max Headroom swindled the look for a TV show where
Headroom’s human
counterpart worked as a journalist in a
television-dependent society that placed
precedent of the small screen over
food.
In an era of WTO protests,
Enron, and WorldCom scandals, corporate bad guys
are becoming far more common in
other genres as well—a cardboard cutout
bad guy as ruthless as the cliché drug dealer
villain inspired by the drug
war. Lara Croft in Tomb Raider: The
Cradle of Life takes on a corporate villain who makes his
trade by selling
biological weaponry to the highest bidder and chases after the
mythical Pandora’s
Box in a plot to rid the world of stupid people—a plot
more ridiculous than most of
Croft’s action sequences. Even James Bond
himself in Tomorrow Never Dies
takes on a multi-media mogul, inspired by real-life Randolph Hearst in the same way Bond
was inspired by series
creator Ian Fleming (as in not at
all).
Meanwhile, real-event-inspired dramas like Civil Action and
Erin Brockovich, along with real-theme-inspired thrillers like Rainmaker
and Runaway Jury, feature corporate malfeasance with serious gravity. Herein lies
the difference between the generics and the legits, as well as the resolution to that
threaded message debate—the films that work, even when dramatized, are based on real
world issues. The bottom line, as they say in corporate-ese, is that the “movement” is
not about taking corporations down—it’s about making them accountable for individual
actions and addressing individual
issues and film can achieve this.
Power to the people!
