Movies such as "The Manchurian Candidate," "The Corporation" and, to a degree, "Fahrenheit 9/11" tap into American ambivalence toward capitalism, Rosen said.
"There is this idea that came out of the Reagan years and the defeat of communism that the free market is the cure-all for everything, yet there is a fear of one big gigantic company running everything," she said. "We have a paradox -- we celebrate the free market but fear big companies."
Humans have a lot of practice fearing multinational conglomerates.
Think of the first global corporation -- the Catholic church -- with its offices in many countries (monasteries and churches), language peculiar to the institution (Latin), aggressive takeover methods (the Crusades), vigorous marketing campaign (missionaries) and competition-killing strategy (the Inquisition). It took 1,500 years and Martin Luther's entrepreneurial spirit to create a viable alternative for consumers.
From the Catholic church sprang the Knights Templar, the Crusades' elite soldiers and the world's first international banking system, as the knights transmitted money along the pilgrims' path from Europe to the Holy Land. As such, they had the power that went with wealth, and were viewed with such suspicion and envy as to be eradicated by France's Philip IV, something of a medieval trust-buster.
And of course there were the Freemasons, who grew from a guild of medieval craftsmen to become a secret society of Western world leaders, celebrities and industrialists, including George Washington and LBJ, Ben Franklin and Frederick the Great, Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford, Buzz Aldrin and Booker T. Washington.
Omnipotent organizations form in power vacuums. For those who think Rupert Murdoch is too powerful, look back to the end of the 19th century, when the federal government's regulatory authority was so small it would be unrecognizable to us. In those times, sprawling, self-interested corporations filled the void. And they weren't just depicted in the media -- they often were the media.
Powerful press lords -- Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst -- essentially exercised their own foreign policy through their newspapers, goading the populace and Congress into war in a fashion that would be impossible now.
In 1941's "Citizen Kane," Orson Welles's Charles Foster Kane, a thinly veiled Hearst, bellows at his wife when she questions his megalomania:
"But Charles, people will think . . ." she begins.
"What I tell them to think!" Kane thunders, a phrase that presaged "1984" by eight years.
Other industry captains have served as models for plutocratic movie villains. South African gold magnate Charles Engelhard was the template for Auric Goldfinger, laser-wielding gold-hoarder in the 1964 James Bond thriller.
Yet those big-screen corporate titans are solitary madman billionaires or heads of vast crime syndicates. It's hard to imagine in this era of media saturation that such a person could exist; presumably it would have come to light by now if, say, Microsoft were just a cover for a diabolical software genius who actually spends his time stroking a long-haired white cat while plotting global extortion. (Aside from rolling out new versions of Windows, that is.)
Are corporations good or evil? Or are they amoral and pragmatic? In some film depictions, corporations are actively malevolent. In others, they are merely suffocating in their omnipresence, rolling over the rest of the world with indifference.
