YMMV / Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Were Lay, Skilling, Fastow & Co. smart and energetic businessmen who fatally overreached themselves, or just monumentally arrogant and overconfident mediocrities who got briefly lucky?
  • Roger Ebert argues the Enron executives weren't smart, visionary, or even especially charismatic but just extremely successful con men who got away with what amounts to corporate terrorism.
• Funny Moments / Moment of Awesome: In light of Enron's falling stock price, Skilling's resignation, and a looming SEC investigation, Lay convenes a videotaped meeting of employees and insists everything will soon be back to normal. Lay then takes written questions from everyone in the room. The first one he pulls out of the box reads:
  "I would like to know if you are on crack. If so, that explains a lot. If not, then you might as well start, because it's going to be a long time before we trust you again."
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: "Weather derivatives" does sound like a funky financial instrument Enron would invent. But they are an actual financial tool used to reduce risk in the event of weather-related disasters.
• Catharsis Factor: After years of lying and defrauding the public, it's a bit rejuvenating to see Jeff Skilling lose his gourd as his web of lies comes undone.
• Harsher in Hindsight: When the movie came out in 2005, Enron was seen as the ultimate example of corporate mismanagement, if not outright fraud and deception. Then came the 2008 financial crisis, and the collapse of corporations like Lehman Brothers would surpass that of Enron.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The film shows the moment when Enron became actively engaged in fraud was after Fastow joined the ranks (to be fair, the list of suspects for the point when Enron crossed into criminality consists pretty much of just him and Skilling). The book and other written accounts say that the slippery slope into Enron becoming a fraudulent company began when COO Rich Kinder left and Jeffrey Skilling assumed his position.
  • Manufacturing the California Energy Crisis to bilk the state of eight billion dollars, shutting down power production to half their productivity is when most viewers consider Enron crosses into supervillain territory. In Real Life, this was the moment when the sheen wore off of Enron's public image and everyone began looking at the company with a more critical eye.
  • Skilling encouraging his employees to invest their retirement funds into Enron while knowing full well the company is collapsing (and after dumping his shares) is an unforgivable abuse of his employee's trust.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • A brief passage about Tim Belden, a trader at Enron, fades from a regular black-and-white photo of him to a Halloween party picture of him dressed as a devil—fake horns, face painted red, and his teeth bared in a Slasher Smile. It's quite jarring the first time you see it, and veers into creepier territory with Peter Coyote's narration tying it into the Milgram experiment.
  • A more mundane but still haunting example is Enron shutting off power to the state of California. Enron's traders can be heard laughing over the misery and chaos they've brought to California by manipulating the state's power grid.
  • Enron's employees show up to work...only to find out their company is minutes away from shutting down, and they have to vacate the building. When someone compared the situation to the Titanic, in which the ship sinks and the passengers don't have lifeboats, a trader objected to this comparison...thinking the sinking of the Lusitania, in which the passengers only had twenty minutes to abandon the ship, is a more accurate description of the events.
• Once Original, Now Common: In the wake of the 2008 financial collapse that saw multiple major hedge funds and banks collapse out of nowhere as well as the Bernie Madoff scandal, younger viewers may understand the gravity of the Enron scandal but not understand why it was the second-biggest news story of 2001 behind 9/11. Back in 2001, a major blue chip company that was ostensibly in good financial health suddenly vanishing into thin air was simply inconceivable.
  • Then 2022 saw FTX, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency trading firms, be exposed as a Ponzi scheme and collapse into bankruptcy, wiping out tens of billions of dollars worth of wealth in the span of a week in yet another corporate scandal that made Enron look quaint in comparison.
• Realism-Induced Horror: The story pulls no punches in explaining how a bunch of frauds were not only able to get away with tricking people out of billions but shutting down the power grid of an entire state.
• Vindicated by History: Disgraced former Governor of California Gray Davis tries to claim this trope in his on-screen interview, since it's now known that the 2000-01 California energy crisis was the result of Enron illegally manipulating the market in ways he was powerless to stop. While the electricity crisis is cited as the main reason why he was recalled in 2003, the people of California had other grievances with him regarding completely separate issues that was also driving the recall attempt (his handling of the budget shortfalls that came in the wake of the Dot-Com bubble bursting, his implementing a series of extremely unpopular DMV rate hikes and his sketchy fundraising methods during the 2002 election being among them).

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