I recently watched Alien: Romulus in theaters. I won’t spoil the movie here, but I will say that I enjoyed it much more than the more recent entries in the franchise like Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. The original Alien and its sequel Aliens were among my favorite movies growing up – and Romulus is very successful at capturing the spirit and feel of those films. But the movie also made me wonder about something – why is Hollywood so bad at writing stories about corporations that are believably evil?
The story of Alien: Romulus centers around the efforts of the Weyland-Yutani corporation to capture and somehow “harness” the xenomorphs for criminally under-specified reasons. (No, this is not a spoiler – this is the plot of basically every movie in the Alien franchise.) The first Alien vs Predator movie is set in the modern day, whereas the original movies are set hundreds of years in the future. This means that Weyland-Yutani has spent literally centuries attempting this task with a 100% failure rate. The xenomorph is an incredibly dangerous creature that unstoppably murders everyone in the vicinity and reproduces by harvesting humans as hosts, killing them in the process. Every time the company has attempted this project, the end result is “basically everyone dies and pretty much everything gets destroyed.” The company has endured massive costs in lost personnel and lost equipment while getting nothing valuable in exchange, but they never stop attempting the same thing over and over again.
Nor is this movie series unique. RoboCop was also among my childhood favorite movies, and this movie series also centers their plots around the actions of evil, greedy corporations. Indeed, the first RoboCop movie in particular has often been hailed as a brilliant form of social commentary on corporate greed. But just like the fictional Weyland-Yutani from the Alien franchise, the evil corporation of the RoboCop movies, Omni Consumer Products, is depicted as doing nothing but making a string of catastrophically stupid, highly expensive decisions that make no business sense at all, and are virtually guaranteed to cost massive amounts of money and resources while providing the company with nothing valuable. In the second RoboCop movie, OCP decides to make another RoboCop, but instead of using a recently deceased, highly dedicated law enforcement professional as in the first movie, they decide it’s a good idea for their new RoboCop to be built around a highly dangerous drug lord, cult leader, and career criminal. In addition to making this person into a near-indestructible walking tank, they also decide it’s a good idea to have him operating on a supply of mind-altering drugs at the same time. Shockingly, this plan somehow backfires! But this seems less like something someone would be driven to do because it seems like a feasible money-making strategy, and more like something they’d do out of a sheer commitment to make the most cartoonishly evil decisions possible, profits be damned.
One more example – the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner. Again, I love this movie, but the “evil greedy corporation” angle of this movie just makes no sense at all. The Tyrell Corporation sells “replicants,” which are essentially vat-grown humans to be used for short term labor. Short term, because replicants are programmed with a four-year lifespan. And replicants also feel pain, emotion, and have independent wills, leading them to frequently go on the run. This happens so often that there is an entire segment of the police force, the titular Blade Runners, dedicated solely to tracking down runaway replicants. This is a terrible business model. If I offered you a chance to invest in a business of mine selling tractors, but I also told you every tractor I produced was guaranteed to break down in a few years, could actually feel pain and emotions (including resentment of the people operating them), were capable of running a way and frequently did so, and could blend in to society so well that it would take an entire department of highly trained specialists to find and identify them, I bet you’d turn down this investment opportunity. The greedier you are, the less likely you’d be to want to be part of such a fantastically terrible business strategy.
In all of these films, it seems like the only thing that prevents these companies from self-destructing due to their incompetent business choices is that The Screenwriter Wants to Make a Point, and these companies somehow remain profitable despite their ineptitude because The Screenwriter’s Point Requires It. I’m not opposed to using fiction to make points of real-world relevance, but if your point requires jettisoning even a smidgen of verisimilitude to be made, perhaps that’s a sign that your point isn’t as strong as you think it is.
Of course, not all of my childhood was spent watching hyper-violent movies primarily aimed at adults. I did also watch things that were actually aimed at kids, such as the show Captain Planet. I absolutely loved that show when I was in grade school. But looking back, again, the villains of that show just made no sense. Captain Planet depicts pollution not as an inevitable side-effect of the productive activity that both enables modern human civilization and greatly expands the length and quality of the human lifespan. Instead, in Captain Planet, pollution occurs because morally evil people with names like “Looten Plunder” or “Hoggishly Greedy” (or toxic radioactive sludge monsters like “Duke Nukem”) decide to take oil tankers and deliberately crash them into the beach for…the sheer joy of watching baby seals suffer, I guess?
It’s not as though writing characters with believable motivations is an impossible feat. For example, I once wrote about how the show House, M.D. featured a realistic depiction of Bryan Caplan’s model of rational irrationality. And part of what made it compelling was the believable motivations of the characters involved:
As with all good fiction, this is a totally believable bit of writing. Nobody who watches this episode will think “The way Foreman is acting is so unrealistic.” We all can see how that kind of behavior makes sense, and how we’d almost certainly do the same thing if we were in a similar position.
This is why I find it so curious that the films that are often held up as providing scathing critiques of corporate greed fail so badly at writing stories where greed is actually a believable basis for the actions the corporation takes. Instead, these corporations seem motivated by the directive “be as evil as possible, no matter how wasteful, expensive, and unprofitable it becomes.”
READER COMMENTS
John Smith
Sep 17 2024 at 12:50pm
That is because corporations are almost never evil in the sense that Hollywood typically means. Such blatantly “evil” acts would most likely be against the law, regardless of the specific setting of the movie.
And considering the scale of the crime necessary to turn a decent profit for such mega-corps, the chances of being caught by law enforcement is incredible. What sensible corporations would do something so dumb? And what sensible CEOs or COOs would take on such personal legal liability?
It is much more logical to commit mundane finanical white-collar crimes, that are wayyy too boring to be in a Hollywood film.
Mactoul
Sep 17 2024 at 9:41pm
Won’t an evil corporation just going to buy the law?
Plenty of non-evil corporations engage in the same buying so this scenario isn’t unlikely.
Also, under anarcho-capitalism there may not be the law at all Or the corporation may be the law itself.
Monte
Sep 17 2024 at 4:59pm
One exception being the sci-fi/horror flick, Daybreakers, featuring a futuristic world overrun by vampires and centered around a corporation which sets out to capture and farm the remaining humans while researching a substitute for human blood (in the interest of preserving some remnant of humanity). The premise is rife with externalities and opportunities for a Coasian bargain.
Just imagine what vampires could do for us economically in exchange for blood donations! Even if the corporation developed a suitable substitute, the real thing would remain a valuable commodity for voluntary exchange.
Monte
Sep 17 2024 at 10:02pm
Keep in mind that it’s important for movie makers to depict corps, their CEOs, and capitalism as villains. This fits nicely with the liberal/progressive narrative of the power brokers in Washington who expect this sort of quid pro quo from their Hollywood counterparts.
Daniel B.
Sep 17 2024 at 10:40pm
I’ve heard two things that I think explain the prevalence of evil businessmen and evil corporations in fiction.
If I recall the book Tyler Cowen wrote about Big Business correctly, he said that because most people are not businessmen and instead work for them, that naturally makes them identify more with employees than employers. I believe this is correct. Of course people will buy books and watch movies where they see that the bosses and managers and CEOs are bad. They get to have power over their bosses and “stick it to them” vicariously.
Borrowing and paraphrasing a point from Thomas Sowell, ideas in fiction do not actually have to be realistic. They only have to sound good and seem plausible. The test a successful movie or novel has to pass to be successful, is that enough people like it, not that its ideas would actually work out in real life or that its depictions are accurate or realistic. So of course movies or novels will have unrealistic assumptions or ideas. They simply don’t have to have realistic assumptions or ideas to be successful. Movie directors making films about evil greedy businessmen do not face an external test of those ideas, the way (for example) an engineer’s test is whether his bridge collapses or not – something that cannot be talked away. The test they face is whether people like the ideas. And of course, because of rational ignorance and rational irrationality they will like strange or inaccurate political ideas.
Giorgio Castiglia
Sep 18 2024 at 12:04pm
Kevin, excellent discussion. I too love the Alien movies and actually enjoyed the direction that Prometheus tried to go in and thought it might actually provide a more realistic representation of human motivation – an eccentric billionaire trying to find the secret to escaping death. My gripe with the movies (including the new Alien, which I enjoyed) is exactly what you outline. Perhaps we need more economists writing movie scripts. Russ Roberts does a good job of tackling this propensity in the entertainment industry in his book “The Invisible Heart” which has its own twist. Highly recommended if its not already familiar to you.
Kevin Corcoran
Sep 18 2024 at 3:38pm
I have indeed read The Invisible Heart (along with his other two novels) and the subplot you’re referencing was in the back of my mind as I wrote this. Of course, being spoiler-adverse as I am, I won’t say any more about it here, in case anyone reading the comments here is curious and wants to read that book for themselves.
(Which you should totally do, hypothetical person reading this comment!)
Robert EV
Sep 18 2024 at 12:45pm
The real answer is: Movies based on real world like corporate villainy either go straight to TV (they aren’t blockbuster material), or are based on huge current issues such as The Social Network. As Daniel B. stabs at, people like escapism and larger than life in their movies. Even the Hallmark seasonal romance movies are completely inaccurate portrayals of romance.
Though I think the first Avatar movie made a pretty good case for real world corporate crimes, given what we’ve seen with either paramilitary or state-backed military exploitation by corporations in the past (most notable the East Indies companies, but also including the famous banana wars and less famous rebellion against Bougainville Copper Ltd.).
Robert EV
Sep 19 2024 at 3:10am
I’ll defend Blade Runner a bit here. The replicants went through multiple iterations. The limited lifespan was designed, in part, to limit emotional development. And from what I gather their primary use case, in a world without AI-drive or remote controlled robots, is for remote use on newly opened colony planets with few humans around.
Companies, and individuals, have historically used slaves or cheap labor in conditions that severely limited expected lifespan. Though not to that extreme, people still think that construction in the US is a particularly dangerous job today thanks to memories and stories of the early 20th century and the 19th century.
Phil H
Sep 19 2024 at 8:50am
I like the thought, but it’s not exactly like we lack for examples of all of these things being done by corporations!
“The company has endured massive costs in lost personnel and lost equipment while getting nothing valuable in exchange…”
I mean, Truth Social is sitting right there (as is the artist formerly known as Twitter). Neither of these involve so much death, of course, but look back to the East India Company, or lots of other colonial ventures, and similar stories do emerge. Or you could look at extreme tourism – the sub that imploded down at the Titanic, for example. People keep doing it, even though everyone dies on a fairly regular basis.
“In the second RoboCop movie…a highly dangerous drug lord, cult leader, and career criminal… into a near-indestructible walking tank…mind-altering drugs at the same time.”
Not an exact analogy, but you could make the argument about Grok. Elon looked at a technology that has been cited as a possible catastrophic threat to the race, and thought, you know what? My political sympathies mean that the most important thing is that we take the guardrails off this thing.
“Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner…a terrible business model…very tractor I produced was guaranteed to break down in a few years, could actually feel pain and emotions (including resentment of the people operating them)…”
Slavery.
“…were capable of running a way and frequently did so…”
Slavery.
“…and could blend in to society so well that it would take an entire department of highly trained specialists to find and identify them, I bet you’d turn down this investment opportunity.”
I would, but half of America didn’t. The US has been sublimating its efforts to deal with the psychological guilt of slavery for decades, and this is part of it.
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