MPI exists to bring the ideal of liberty to the silver screen--and, in so doing, to fill a gap in the American cinematic diet. As MPI's mission statement puts it, "MPI is founded on the premise that film, more effectively than any other medium, can bring the idea of freedom to life. It is our mission to ensure that film becomes a center of genuinely democratic art in the coming years. Our goal is to guarantee that film’s unique capacity to give shape to abstract principles—to make them move and breathe—is used to support and promote liberty."
Few have noticed the hole in American film where freedom should be. But there are occasional astute exception, and the Atlantic Monthly's Clive Crook is one of them. Here's an excerpt from his inspiring and groundbreaking March 2006 piece, "Capitalism: The Movie":
Crook goes on to parse where Hollywood gets its ideas about the market, and concludes with a thought experiment that he instantly dismisses as one we aren't presently prepared to conduct: "How about a movie in which a firm prospers under threat of competition by selling things that people want at an affordable price, paying its workers the market wage, and breaking no laws, thereby advancing the common good? Well, you see the problem." MPI does see the problem--and is working hard to ensure that this is one imaginative limitation we can all get past.
Seen a movie lately? Watched television or read a newspaper? The culture that speaks to Americans, and hence to the Western world, radiates suspicion of free enterprise--cordial and restrained, as a rule, but dubious nonetheless. Yes, the system does work, says this culture, and there appears to be no alternative. But what a shame this is, it continues, because capitalism rewards our worst and most selfish instincts. "Greed is good" may stock the shelves, but is somewhat less than inspiring.Popular culture understands that the market economy creates material prosperity, albeit for some more than others. It seeks out and worships business celebrities. But at the same time it sees the system as spiritually--and politically--corrupting. As viewed from Hollywood, workers are usually downtrodden, bosses are usually grasping, consumers are usually gulled, and shadowy global finance is always calling the geopolitical shots. We manage to prosper, most of us, but this system of ours is not very noble.
What is most striking, so far as the movies' treatment of capitalism goes, is not the hostility of films whose main purpose is actually to indict corporate wickedness (Wall Street, Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, The Insider, The Constant Gardener, and so forth). It is the idea of routine, reckless corporate immorality--maintained as though this premise were inoffensive, uncontroversial, and hardly worthy of comment--that drives movies whose principal interest lies elsewhere, whether in the human drama of contemporary geopolitics (Syriana, to cite a recent instance), knockabout comedy (Fun with Dick & Jane), children’s fantasy (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), star-crossed romance (In Good Company), or, classically, in some dystopian near or distant future (Alien, The Terminator, Blade Runner, Robocop, and many others).
The point is not that such movies, or the culture more generally, argue that capitalism is evil. Just the opposite: it is that they so often merely assume, innocently and expecting to arouse no skepticism, that capitalism is evil.
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