Pink Ribbons, Inc.

Featuring: Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Love, Nancy Brinker

Directed by: Lea Pool

Parental advisory: adult themes

Running time: 97 minutes

Rating: Four stars

To millions of people around the world, it’s a way of fighting breast cancer, or of honouring those who died from it: walking for the cure, jumping horses for the cure, dragon-boat racing for the cure, skydiving for it. They wear pink T-shirts and pink hats and pink ribbons, the symbols of their cause.

But to a few others, it’s a sham, a marketing opportunity for big businesses, a demonstration of corporate hypocrisy and an insult.

They’re people like Barbara Ehrenreich, an author (and cancer survivor) who remembers reading a newspaper during an endless series of mammograms and seeing an ad for a pink teddy bear to comfort a cancer victim. “It offends my sense of dignity,” Ehrenreich recalls. “I’m sorry. I’m not six years old.”

Or like a Texas woman with Stage 4 cancer who objects to the message that cancer is a “battle,” as if those who die just didn’t fight hard enough.

Or Dr. Samantha King, a Queen’s University professor who says women with cancer feel alienated by the overly optimistic approach of the pink-ribbon marches — with their chants, balloons and free samples of products from the many companies wanting to align themselves with the fight. “The tyranny of cheerfulness,” she calls it.

King’s book on the subject, Pink Ribbons, Inc., has been turned into a documentary that attacks the warm and fuzzy pink-ribbon culture, and the corporate culture around it, and injects some hard anger in its place. “If people actually knew what was happening, they would be really pissed off,” says activist Barbara Brenner.

Directed by Lea Pool, Pink Ribbons, Inc. says the message promoted by many events — not just the walks, but gestures like illuminating public monuments and buildings in pink lights — create a false veneer. They raise millions (the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation alone has raised $1.9 billion) but don’t account for where the money goes.

What is known is that not much research is conducted on how to prevent cancer in the first place, nor to find what might be causing it.

Those numbers are ugly. The film says a woman’s chances of getting breast cancer in 1940 was one in 22; today it’s one in eight. Only about a quarter of these woman have high-risk factors, so something else is at play, and the movie hints at many environmental factors, including plastics in the ecosystem, insecticides on our vegetables, and pollution in the air.

Oddly — in a phenomenon it calls “pinkwashing” — many companies that are behind Pink Ribbon events are those associated with such risks. The movie points out that Yoplait yogurt, which asked users to send in lids to raise money, was putting recombinant bovine-growth hormone into its product until a public protest made it stop. Cosmetics companies such as Estee Lauder, which are major Pink Ribbon sponsors, have chemicals linked to cancer in some of their products. Pool includes commercials, such as one for a car dealership, where a woman says that, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, the first thing she wanted to do was drive away in her Ford Mustang. There are also scenes from an ill-fated KFC campaign that offered to donate money from its “pink buckets” of chicken to cancer research.

Pink Ribbons Inc. moves from interviews with angry activists to scenes of marches by women whose reasons for taking part — “you want to do something,” says one — seem both laudable and lost in the complex politics of cancer and research. The anti-Pink Ribbon spokeswomen don’t say these participants are wrong, but that they have been distracted from more useful tasks: writing to corporations about their environmental records, for instance, or demanding co-ordinated research.

As the film says, it’s not a conspiracy, because that would be easy to expose. It’s just business as usual.

jstonepostmedia.com

canada.com/stonereport