Julia Sirmons
“It’s the fucking coolest thing I’ve done in a long time,” says a trader for the doomed energy company Enron in Alex Gibey’s incisive, infuriating documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, released 20 years ago this week This fucking cool thing is literally leaving people in the dark. During the 2001 California energy crisis, Enron diverted electricity outside of the California grid, only to sell it back once blackouts set the prices soaring. It’s perhaps the most sickening, but far from the only, outrage perpetrated by this rotten corporation, which Gibney ably draws as a microcosm of the ills of capitalism.
The Enron scandal is on one level quite complicated — involving abuse of specific accounting practices and the shifting of Nigerian barges. On another, it’s extremely simple: Enron executives kept reporting profits that didn’t exist, and got massive bonuses for their trouble. To tell the story well, you need to work on both of these levels. It requires both a clear exposition of the many things that went wrong and a rigorous repetition of the central fact of continuous, unrepentant fraud.
Gibney hits these marks neatly. Enron… is adapted from a book of the same title by reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind; both appear as talking heads. They are eloquent subjects, but Gibney doesn’t lean too heavily on them. He assembles a wide swath of various financial experts to spell out the finer points of Enron’s chicanery. Lucid voice-over narration, read by the actor Peter Coyote, ties the story together.
It is the moral duty of documentaries about corporate malfeasance to incite outrage. Gibney manages this through a looping structure that shows Enron doing the same damn thing, over and over again. As the company hurtles to its unavoidable end, Gibney circles back to the familiar pattern: an obviously stupid or dishonest scheme (run by this guy with his dirt bikes, or this one with his strippers), predictably massive failure, inevitable bonus. Remarkably, Gibney brings the hammer down on Enron through C-SPAN coverage of Congressional hearings, tightly edited to keep the showboating down to a minimum. Through careful questioning, politicians (notably former senators Carl Levin and Barabara Boxer) nail the suits down, making them squirm as they offer mealy-mouthed denials in a public airing of their misdeeds.
Gibney is not as slick a stylist as the other great documentarian of our age, Errol Morris. He’s more interested in exposition, and rooting out the systems of power that govern our lives and limit the possibilities of our existence. Nevertheless, he finds images—motorcyclists free-falling into canyons, bros bro-ing their way off of corporate jets, old-timey magicians pulling rabbits out of hats—that propel our sense of injustice and the flippancy with which corporate America views their responsibilities. Ironic musical cues sharpen these experiences of outrage.
But Gibney’s primary interest (which would carry through to his Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side and his series on Scientology) is the relationship between the individual, the group, and society. “Was Enron the work of a few bad men,” he asks, “or the dark shadow of the American Dream?” He probes the question from a variety of angles. Looking at the psyches of the head honchos, particularly founder Ken Lay and CEO Jeff Skilling, there are not great depths to mine. Both men have an absolute allergy to the notion that anyone else might make a profit from their brilliance. Skilling seems a typical nerd who lost weight and got hair plugs. A pathological performance of “extreme” (in a 90s sense of the term) masculinity trickled down from the top. We see endless footage of company-wide meetings where Lay and Skilling put on the razzle-dazzle about the stock price and the limitless potential of the company. It’s a vibe that’s been replicated in scams like WeWork and Theranos, where a corporate culture defined by winning causes a stunning lack of either morality or curiosity.
It’s typical, when revisiting film treatments of scandals of the past, for everything to seem all too quaint in retrospect. It is a testament to both the colossal scale of the Enron fiasco, and to Gibney’s talents, that Enron… feels fresh and compelling. It’s a great yarn on its own terms. But its deeper questions still feel urgent.
Gibney hits on deregulation as the heart of the Enron story. Early on, he plays footage of one of Ronald Reagan’s speeches where, with steely conviction, the former president insists, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Deregulation was the credo of Lay and Skilling, and what brought them close to influential politicians like the Bush family. For Enron, however, there seemed to be little difference between deregulation and outright stealing.
This raping and pillaging, which went unchallenged by the most respectable banks and accounting firms, raises questions whether there can be such a thing as ethical capitalism. Enron… is full of convincing wonks and whistleblowers who are true believers in the principles of the system; Mark Cuban was one of the executive producers. Yet Gibney’s dissection (and subsequent events) prove how many sins hide beneath the guise of the “free market.” Now that a new generation of bros think that depriving citizens of basic resources as “fucking cool,” Gibney’s warning that Enrons are the features, not the bugs, of capitalism is well worth heeding.
“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” is streaming on Plex, Kanopy and Hoopla, and available for digital rental or purchase.
