Because I am suffocated in a white guilt shithole every day, I don't need it online.
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“I guess my question is … can we even talk about the Boss Baby and the other employees of Baby Corp as babies?”Joshua Poole of UC Riverside, a psychiatry resident, had just wrapped up a 15-minute presentation on The Boss Baby, the 2017 DreamWorks film about a baby blessed with the mind, voice, and corporate fashion sense of Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. During the Q&A, another resident, Rennie Burke of San Mateo County Behavioral Health and Recovery Services, wanted to know if Poole had factored in Donald Winnicott’s field-defining research into developmental psychology.“I was nervous about bringing in Winnicott because he really complicates my argument,” Poole replied warmly, then ventured that his thesis — a deep medical dive into the Boss Baby’s psychotic orientation to the world — still held true. “Winnicott says that we can’t have any understanding of the point of view of the baby, but I’m looking at it from the point of view of the baby.”This was the unique magic of the first annual Boss Baby symposium. For nearly five hours on the afternoon of January 3, 12 panelists and 75 spectators gathered over Zoom for a day of reckoning with the meme-friendly children’s movie. The symposium was co-organized by two philosophy Ph.D. students, Jaime McCaffrey of the University of Kentucky and Tore Levander of Fordham University, who described the movie as an “interpretive nightmare” to the A.V. Club in 2021. In McCaffrey’s opening remarks, she quipped that the film’s singular vision is “thematically richer than the Bible and more confusing than Ulysses.”
The actual day dug into all things Boss Baby through seven 15-minute talks accompanied by ten-minute Q&As, which can be relived on YouTube. (There was no charge to attend, and all proceeds from the event’s merch store went toward the children’s legal-advocacy charity CASA.) The range of approaches was inspired, and the PowerPoint visuals were breathtaking. Catherine Clement of Northeastern University proposed that the Boss Baby actually has a lot in common with child leaders in ancient mythology, as proven by a slide juxtaposing the “attempted infanticides” of the Boss Baby and Astyanax. Elsewhere, Sam Warren-Miell and Georgie Newson-Errey, English students at the University of Cambridge, took a Marxist angle with their talk, “Lactic Capital in The Boss Baby.” They argued that you drain infant formula of parental warmth when you coldly ration it in break-room water bubblers. “Milk is more of a cipher for capitalism than a commodity,” I jotted dutifully in my notebook. Robin Pawlett-Howell, a philosophy Ph.D. candidate from the University of York, memorably situated The Boss Baby as a work of existentialism, suggesting that this little tyke’s identity as “Boss” prevents him from finding freedom from despair as a “Baby.”
This atmosphere of earnestness might seem odd for a film so tailor-made for shitposting, but that gets at one of the event’s central paradoxes. After posting the conference listing, McCaffrey and Levander were surprised to discover a considerable online response outside of academia. The reactions swirled around the apparent discord between topic and format: Were McCaffrey and Levander really serious, and if they were, what was it possible to glean from a day of Boss Baby scholarship? The clearest precedent for their symposium was actually organized by one of the presenters: Sam Summers, an associate lecturer in animation at the University of Middlesex and the author of a 2020 book about DreamWorks. (His Boss Baby paper, “Cookies Are for Closers,” counted pop-culture references in DreamWorks movies through a line graph punctuated by Shrek heads.) In November 2021, Summers held a media-studies conference about the lasting impact of Shrek, which covered everything from DreamWorks’ rivalry with Disney to the “Shrek Is Love, Shrek Is Life” meme.
A one-year-old Mongolian toddler who owns part of a major coal company in the Gobi Desert. An eleven-year-old Azerbaijani profiting from state contracts with Turkmenistan and China. A Russian teenager who counted investments in Canadian and Californian pension systems among her billions of dollars of assets.These are just a handful of the nearly 300 minors who owned or controlled significant stakes in Luxembourg companies as of 2020, an investigation as part of the OpenLux project has found.While it is not illegal for children to own companies in Luxembourg, some of the names identified by OCCRP and its partners should have raised red flags. They included minors whose parents are oligarchs, criminals, and people with close ties to politically influential figures. A quarter of them were even younger than the entities they owned.In 2019, Luxembourg published a register of “ultimate beneficial owners” — the true owners of companies, as opposed to proxies or nominees — for the first time, giving an unprecedented look into who has benefited from the country’s financial secrecy.At the time, authorities offered a three-year exemption to any owners considered to be at risk of fraud, abduction, blackmail, extortion, or harassment if their names were published. That means the tally of minors is likely to be an underestimate, since children could easily request such an exclusion. A further 290 Luxembourg company owners were just 18 or 19 years old when they were declared to the registry, making it possible that they were also minors when they took ownership.
Roman Borisovich, a transparency campaigner, told OCCRP that with inheritance plans you would expect to see trustees or others acting on a child’s behalf included in the registry.“One-year-olds are not making decisions and running these companies.,” he said. “t’s clearly smoke and mirrors [masking] the real owners.”
