Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

The documentary does a good job in portraying and highlighting the company’s fraud through irony. It stresses the negligence of financial critics in not foreseeing such an immense fraud. This is done through the use of satire and irony. Reporters Mc Lean and Elkind use particular music choices, such as No Doubt’s Say That You Love Me when referring to the company’s deception in the stock market, and even Enron’s own hypocritical commercial (“always ask why”) to magnify the effect of their fraud. The effect of their documentary is satiric, yet it eloquently conveys the magnitude of Enron’s massive corruption and fraud. They truly convinced America they were the smartest guys in the room.

Enron’s hypocritical motto was to always ask why. This is something financial analysts did not do in evaluating the company’s profits. Analysts would just call Jeff Skilling, believed everything Enron told them. They did not do their job.

The documentary also refers to a journalistic inefficiency on behalf of Fortune magazine who named Enron the most innovative company in America. It was not until reporter Bethany Mc Lean posed the question “how exactly does Enron make its money?” that any journalist truly did his or her job in investigating the company. She took a risk in questioning the company. Even though their numbers did not seem right, she couldn’t pin point there was a fraud. Fastow, their financial advisor, truly made it seem that money was flowing into the company through its transactions with companies he fabricated. To discover the company’s treachery was a true challenge.

The satiric nature of the documentary shifts into a nostalgic tone in the end, as it portrays the downfalls of all of Enron’s executives. As Mc Leans says “they became victims of the their own hubris, victims of their own greed.” Enron asked of their employers to always ask why, yet they never did and ended up losing everything they had.