The Counter-deception Blog

Examples of deceptions and descriptions of techniques to detect them. This Blog encourages the awareness of deception in daily life and discussion of practical means to spot probable deceptions. Send your examples of deception and counter-deception to colonel_stech@yahoo.com.

Thursday, April 28, 2005

 

Deception in the Arts: ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM

How smart? They built "a house of cards built over a pool of gasoline."

April 22, 2005 NYTimes.com

MOVIE REVIEW | 'ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM'

Those You Love to Hate: A Look at the Mighty Laid Low

By A. O. SCOTT

If you are looking for a good dose of outrage at a theater near you, you won't find a better bargain than "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," a new documentary directed by Alex Gibney. Documentaries have recently been making up for a shortfall in genuine movie heroes - those plucky child orthographers in "Spellbound" and the gritty wheelchair jocks of "Murderball" come to mind - and Mr. Gibney's film is the latest evidence that nonfiction cinema can supply worthy, hissable villains as well.

Anyone who might be in the jury pool for the coming trials of Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, the top Enron executives who have yet to face justice, should probably stay away, since the movie makes the case against them with prosecutorial vigor. Based on the best-selling book by the Fortune magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, "Enron" is a tight, fascinating chronicle of arrogance and greed. Interweaving Peter Coyote's sober, ever-so-slightly sarcastic voice-over narration with interviews and video clips (as well as one ill-advised and unnecessary re-enactment) and accompanied by an anthology of well-chosen pop songs, it manages to be both informative and entertaining.

Much of the entertainment value comes from the undeniable pleasure of feeling morally superior to many of the people on screen, a nice antidote to the envy they might have inspired when they were riding high. Mr. Gibney uses video from Congressional hearings and financial chat-show appearances to damning effect; in the era before CSPAN and CNBC, the case against Enron might have been much harder to make.

He has also obtained in-house video from company meetings, in which Mr. Skilling and Mr. Lay, in their very different styles, strut and brag through the company's boom years. Mr. Lay is a bit like a classic Texas football coach - gruff, tough but also possessing a measure of courtly charm. Mr. Skilling is more tightly wound, supremely confident of his intellect and abilities, with a chillier demeanor than his boss. When their enterprise starts to collapse, Mr. Skilling, expressing no remorse and accepting no responsibility, abruptly quits. Mr. Lay, rallying his troops, indulges in one of the most dismaying appropriations of the Sept. 11 attacks ever recorded, declaring to employees in the autumn of 2001 that, just like America, Enron is under attack.

Among its tormentors were members of Congress from both parties, and also Mr. Elkind and Ms. McLean, who had the temerity, in the spring of 2001, to write a gently skeptical article called "Is Enron Overvalued?" What eventually became clear was that the company had been concocting value out of thin air, thanks not to the trading strategies it promoted as visionary but to financial games that turned a once-solid natural-gas distributor into the most notorious debacle in the era of corporate scandals. At times, the movie's explanation of Enron's business practices is hard to follow - and the practices themselves seem to have been deliberately made complex to the point of opacity - but the gist is clear enough.
When boilerplate fails, many of the film's interview subjects resort to metaphor. The Titanic comes up more than once. Jonestown, the Lusitania and earthquakes are also mentioned. A Houston minister whose congregation includes many former Enron employees likens the company to "a house of cards built over a pool of gasoline." Appropriately enough, Mr. Gibney's quick, fluid editing gives his film the suspenseful, queasy fascination of a disaster flick, even - or perhaps especially - because you know exactly where it's headed. As the story moves forward, keep your eye on the bottom of the screen, where the stock price is periodically shown. Watch it soar, and then watch it plummet.

Of course, the consequences of Enron's foray into funny money were quite serious, and "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" does not forget the real costs of this catastrophe. While it notes the friendship between Mr. Lay and the Bush family, and details Enron's role in the California energy crisis and the political destruction of Gray Davis, the film is for the most part too journalistically scrupulous to indulge in anything that might smack of conspiracy theorizing.

Which is not to say that its scope is narrow or the implications of its story confined to one reckless Texas company. While the audience's contempt for Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling feels good and is duly earned, Mr. Gibney does not encourage undue smugness. Without spelling too much out, "Enron" suggests a widespread moral deficit underlying Enron's eventual bankruptcy. Accountants held no one to account, governments abandoned their regulatory functions, the media turned cheaters into stars and a culture of self-righteous mendacity was allowed to flourish as long as the stock prices were high.
The smart guys at Enron were clever - and amoral - enough to profit from those circumstances. In all likelihood, they regard themselves as scapegoats, even as the public views them as villains. It's not impossible that they are, to some extent, both.

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