The recently released "Catwoman" features a cosmetics company that makes an addictive skin cream -- stop using it and your face deteriorates. Exposure to the company's toxic waste somehow metamorphoses Halle Berry into Catwoman, giving her superpowers not demonstrated by residents of, say, Love Canal.
On the other hand, Michael Moore's 1989 "Roger & Me" details the devastating consequences of General Motors' decision to pull a manufacturing plant out of Flint, Mich. No one accuses former GM chief executive Roger Smith of intending to turn Flint into an urban ruin where people eat rabbits to survive, yet it happened when the GM plant, and its 30,000 jobs, left.
An ongoing battle between surrogates for God and the devil rages at the heart of "The Hudsucker Proxy," the Coen brothers' 1994 homage to New York corporate life at the end of the Eisenhower era. Two aging Hudsucker janitors duke it out for the soul of Tim Robbins's main character as he plunges earthward from the Hudsucker tower. In a period detail, Hudsucker -- like many self-contained corporate giants of the time -- had its own in-house R&D, manufacturing, marketing, advertising and accounting departments. Today, many of those jobs would be in Bangalore.
Manchurian Global is the most ominous of firms, a vast and faceless U.S. conglomerate pulling unseen levers and wielding power with impunity, something smaller nations have grown grimly accustomed to. United Fruit, for instance, with its close ties to the Eisenhower administration and the CIA, was Guatemala's largest landowner and employer and its de facto government, writes David Halberstam in "The Fifties." Just last week, reports surfaced that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether four major U.S. oil companies bribed the dictator of Equatorial Guinea.
In many ways, today's corporations are more powerful than nations and much more modern. Corporations are borderless nation-states, many of which have higher economic output than most sovereign countries. Ethnic infighting and border hatreds rarely affect their ability to form alliances. They are not shackled by the history of the regions in which they operate.
They are low-drag creatures, less centralized than in the past, able to move instantly about the globe, adapting to political pressures to keep profits flowing. They usually have stockholders, but are not burdened with electorates; corporate rebellion rarely ousts leadership in the way that elections do.
Manchurian Global -- a defense contractor, among other ventures -- profits most from a world in constant chaos. Therefore, it creates a programmable president who will craft a foreign policy to keep U.S. armed forces engaged.
Even before Eisenhower gave a name to the military-industrial complex, it loomed as a menace in 20th-century film and literature. In "1984," Winston Smith reads in a forbidden tract that the ultimate aim of an authoritarian regime is continuous war, to ensure ceaseless industrial production -- enough to expend raw material but not raise the standard of living -- and justify a perpetual police state that suppresses individual rights in the name of wartime security.
Referencing the war in Iraq and White House ties to industry, if a company like Manchurian Global took over the government, joked Rosen, the Berkeley professor, "what would be different?"
Manchurian Global's ultimate aim -- government control -- was denounced by Marx, who wrote that the state is simply the executive committee of the ruling class. A tension between the government and corporate world is of value to both sides, said Scranton, of Rutgers.
"If we go one way, we've got communism, and that didn't work out so well," he said. "The other side is corporate-managed public policy, which would be equally unsuccessful. What makes me nervous about this sort of [movie] is that it shows it's in the interest of the corporation to take over the state. Smart people who run corporations know that is not true."
