Recent events may have pulled the curtain back on one of Hollywood’s favorite bogeymen, the evil corporation.  Often portrayed as unscrupulous and unfettered, it seems impossible that such a caricature could be accurate given recent events, notes R. J. MacReady.

Warren Beatty’s Bulworth started out as a simple enough premise, what if a politician just started telling the truth.  Faced with the possibility of loosing his job in the United States Senate and a lifetime of compromise on his most deeply-held liberal beliefs, Jay Billington Bulworth decides to have himself assassinated for the insurance money.  But a funny thing happens, liberated from his job, Bulworth starts to speak the truth, or at least, Warren Beatty’s version of the truth, to his constituents.  His campaign is re-energized, and he decides to run for president.

Then a representative of an insurance corporation assassinates him over fears that he might institute socialized medicine.

Justin Quayle, played by Ralph Fiennes, moves from apathy to radicalism as he tries to uncover the mystery behind the death of his activist wife in The Constant Gardner.  The deeper Quayle digs the more he realizes that a massive pharmaceutical company was behind it all.  Seems they had been doing unapproved drug trials on the impoverished in Africa.  We even find out that the company behind it all actually keeps spies on the payroll for just this type of dirty business.

These are just two examples of how Hollywood likes to use corporations as villains.  I have my suspicious that this is all some therapy for baby boomers to work out conspiracy fears having lived through Watergate and the Kennedy assassination.  Maybe its because writers have to work so hard to "make it", that they are inherently distrustful of large entities with unfettered control over their lives.  But putting aside any ill motives, choosing a corporate villain can also make writing a whole lot easier. 

If you want your audience to feel menaced, your villain had better be cold, ruthless, omnipresent, and mostly faceless.  The best villains are the ones that find a way to let the audience walk the line between understanding the villain’s motivation at the same time that they are alienated by it.  But not everyone can be Hans Grueber, Hannibal Lecter, or Agent Smith, so Hollywood cheats and picks on corporations because the market can sometimes be cold, ruthless, omnipresent, and faceless.  The struggling writer may have a good idea for a hero or a great set piece, and he needs to turn around a draft quickly so he falls back on what has become a comfortable Hollywood cliché, the corporate scandal.

However, recent events may make it harder for moviegoers to continue to suspend that disbelief.  The current president is about as anti-business as a president can get.  Moreover, he pretty much ran as an anti-business candidate.  What’s more, he’s currently doing a whirlwind tour hawking his plan for socialized medicine with an hour-long special scheduled for next Wednesday on ABC.  So, if these insurance and drug companies are so all-powerful, how in the world did this guy get elected?

As Bill and Ted might say, "Dude, our album covers totally lied to us." 

Hollywood has taken the easy way out for so long with their corporate villains.  It’s gotten to the point where you watch a movie like Taken and you expect to find out that Liam Neeson’s daughter was taken as part of a conspiracy involving her rich stepfather.  The fact that the movie was such a smashing success even without that angle gives me some hope that maybe writers will drop the conspiracy theories, or at least expose them as ludicrous. 

Dennis Miller has a great quip as a response to charges of governmental conspiracies:  "The government can’t even deliver the mail."  Corporations can do a lot of bad things and ruin a lot of lives.  But the level of group cohesion required to pull off some of the conspiracies that Hollywood sends our way defies experience.  Just look at the news, those kinds of bad guys only live in the movies.