This month is Power of Conscience month, where most of the website’s content is dedicated to those who are justice seekers. They believe they know best what is right or wrong, and will go as far as they have to do ensure that wrong is punished or set right.

Today we’re looking at Whistleblowers. These are the men and women who call out injustice and conspiracy for the good of the people. In the real world, we have recent examples like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, who were forced into exile for exposing Government wrongdoing.

Whilst it may have broken the law, sometimes laws are outdated and no longer work to protect the people. When this is the case, sometimes, you need to go outside the law in order to do what it right. This is exactly what any Power of Conscience character would do.

There are also Whistleblowers who don’t break the law but are suppressed and finally risk everything to do what is right. Most recently we saw Rose McGowan, among others, who drove the momentum after the accusations came out against Harvey Weinstein.

The movement became bigger than one predator because of Whistleblowers like Rose McGowan who were bullied into silence but spoke out because it was the right thing to do. Whistleblowers are always Power of Conscience characters.

An excellent example of a fictional Whistleblower is Captain America (Chris Evans), in the 2014 movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Captain America is frozen in time after WW2 and defrosted in the present day. A soldier with a boy scout mentality has his morality severely tested when he discovers that SHIELD, the espionage organization he works for, has been infiltrated by HYDRA, the villains he thought he defeated back in the 1940s, since the beginning. He has been working for the bad guys and decides to reveal this information to the public.

This action destabilizes national security and leaves the espionage community, and government, in chaos.

He may not have been a Whistleblower if he wasn’t a Power of Conscience character. He always does the right thing, even if it may have catastrophic results in the long term.

In this case, he was right to do so, but in the 2016 sequel he goes the other way and keeps information from his friends, and violates international law because he believes it is the right thing to do. Captain America is every bit as much as Power of Conscience character as Manning, Snowden, and McGowan.

This key speech from the film perfectly sums up Captain America’s motivations:

“The Price of Freedom is high, and it’s a price I’m willing to pay.”

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I found the fevered unraveling of Matt Damon’s character and his deceptions and lies fascinating to watch.  There are no big actions sequences, no shoot-outs and no chase scenes.  If you come to the theater looking for an action-packed thriller like the Bourne series or the sharp witty seriousness of whistler-blower  Erin Brockovich you will be disappointed.  SEE THE TRAILER IN VIDEOS

This is a meticulous character study about the bland banality of corporate greed, the endless self-justification of scheming executives and the deluded self-seeking that’s eating away at the American Dream.   The upbeat jangle of Marvin Hamlisch’s insistently perky elevator music underscores Whitacre’s deluded optimism.  Steven Soderbergh deliciously deadpan comedy is a brilliant, subtle and painfully funny expose of the empty calories (literally and metaphorically) that’s been making America both overfed and undernourished at the same time.

Damon’s character is biochemist and ADM Division President, Mark Whitacre, the highest-ranking corporate official in U.S. history to expose wrong-doing in his own company.  Whitacre sets off a massive FBI investigation into a global price-fixing conspiracy filled with secret meetings, concealed taping, wire taps, pay-offs and laundered money in Swiss and Bermuda off-shore accounts.

The object of all this intrigue is lysine, a sweet corn-based food additive, that is in nearly everything we eat or drink.  As the movie opens, Whitacer glowingly describes the many lucrative uses of  his company’s products (“corn goes in one end, profit comes out the other”).  When a virus derails the company’s production of  lysine, Whitacere is forced to come up with a solution fast.

He lies and tells management there’s a mole in the company, a corporate saboteur from a Japanese rival who wants a payoff to stop injecting the virus into the production line. Whitacre is shocked when the company calls in the FBI. Special Agents Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) and Bob Herndon (Joel McHale), catch Whitacre in the lie about the mole and the fun begins as Whitacre spins an even bigger story.  He accuses ADM of fixing prices and divvying up the market for the corn-based food additive by ADM and other international corporate giants.

Whitacre begins an increasingly bizarre journey where lie enfolds lie.  The dorky but puppy dog charming scientist with the floppy pompadour toupee likens his situation in ADM to Tom Cruise in The Firm.  It’s an apt, if over-weaning, comparison to another Power of Ambition character.  An even closer movie comparison would be to Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley, a movie that also explores dark and twisted side of the Power of Ambition character.

Like Ripley, Mark Whitacre is a bland but eager to please guy who is obsessed with being liked and inflating his own importance.  Whitacre believes he should be running ADM and uses the price-fixing conspiracy to oust his superiors. He is obsessed with assessing the relative friendliness of everyone he meets.  Despite his double-dealings, greed and moral transgressions he believes that he is one of the “good guys” and his many “good friends” at ADM will welcome him into the top spot after he has taken most of the company management down.  He lies about a key biographical fact because of a study about personal likeablity. He justifies every twisted manipulation of the truth or of others with an incessant internal dialogue filled with odd facts, off-kilter observations and self-promoting rationalizations.

Like all Power of Ambition characters Whitacre is exceptionally adept at self-justification and at distracting himself from his own crimes and ethical short-comings.   Always the eternal optimist Whitacre enthuses, “There are so many really nice people in the world.” even as his web of deception is unraveling around him and one last lie earns him three times the prison sentence the other executives face.

A character driven by the Power of Ambition is a staple of American movies.  This Character Type can be a hardworking, eager, charming optimist with a “can-do” spirit (Tom Cruise as the title character in Jerry Maguire)—or a lying, manipulative, backstabbing striver who will do anything to get ahead in life (Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington in All About Eve).  Jim Carrey in Liar Liar is another comedic version of the type.

Power of Ambition characters can be aspirational characters who want to rise from a lowly station to a more exalted one. Or they can be prostitutes, frauds, fakers or con artists, always on the hustle. In either case, their personal vanity, status, popularity and social importance is key to these characters sense of self.

SEE THE TRAILER IN VIDEOS