IB English: Enron themes

machismo

• Throughout the play, Prebble explores how a culture of competitive machismo was at the heart of Enron's practises.

• Fastow and Skilling's conversations about their ideas create a sense of masculine superiority - "f*** it, two guys in a room. You want my help?" - the financial entities that hid the company's failings for so long are introduced in a kick-it-and-see kind of way, pointing to an attitude of bravado and recklessness.

• The traders particularly emphasize the macho culture: their sparring, finding each other's misfortune hilarious, excited by Skilling's 'death weekends', making sexually explicit comments about the deregulation of California's energy markets ("r*** this muthaf***er"), and continuous moments of hyper-aggression

• Prebble consistently explores how a particular version of machismo and power led towards people high up at Enron feeling somewhat invincible

• Claudia Roe, one of the only women in a position of power at the company, consistently finds herself overshadowed by Skilling, and her confidence is undermined when her sector is consistently cut off and losing employees, and is forced to undergo bullying and nicknames by the male employees.

• Skilling's "Darwinian principles" - increasing a sense of competitiveness and aggression towards other employees

machismo quotes

• Skilling: I believe I may have seen her in vogue". Roe: "that was cropped from a profile in Forbes." pg 55

• Skilling: "you know, maybe every extraordinary thing that's ever happened was conceived by a man alone in a room at four in the morning." Roe: "I think most acts of depravity too." pg 61

• "Other traders mock and physically berate [Fastow]. one shows him his penis" pg 73

• "Trader 1 is delighted, sweating, filled with testosterone and joy." pg 73

• "There's something primal. closest thing there is to hunting. closest thing there is to sex." for a man, that is." pg 74

• "I'm setting you free in California, fellas, bring it on home." pg 121

• "Ricochet! Fat boy! Burn out! Death star!" pg 122

• "By rights you should be out. I got this company running on Darwinian principles.

arrogance and risk

• This interest in winning, power, and an arrogant over-confidence becomes part of both Skilling and the company's fatal flaw

• Prebble suggests that the supreme assurance of Enron's executives was a combination of their own characters and of the context of the nineties (corporate boardrooms becoming more powerful than governments.)

• As the deregulation and monetarism of the eighties shifted globalization into top gear, the shifting power balance contributed to the overall picture of the global economy.

• The attitudes of the characters towards risk differs: Fastow believes that 'risk is life basically', perhaps himself justifying his lack of fear of the consequences of his shady actions, he embraces the risk of business and debt

• Whilst life is full of risks and uncertainty: we lose things, or fear that we will lose things, risk is more of a complex and specific idea than Fastow suggests.

• Skilling's attitude to risk is shown with his conversation with the traders: a trader relays losing millions of dollars and fears for his job, until Skilling says "Only people prepared to lose are ever gonna win" (and he slaps me on the back and leaves), and his analogy of poker saying "doesn't matter how you win - as long as you win!"

• Skilling's desire for less structure, less regulation, and supposed freedom for his company to innovate and take risks, tips from the confident and the visionary into much more ethically blurred territory.

arrogance and risk (2)

• The arrogance of Skilling is coupled with his developing erratic tendencies and paranoia, each heightens the other.

• With the deregulation of California, it is evident that Skilling sees the world they work in as a game to be won. Skilling's assumption that anyone who's "smart enough" will want to work in particular, high-earning, high-flying jobs in the private sector reveals a lot about his own ethics and character: his world view is entirely skewed towards profit (or the appearance of profit), accumulation, and speculation.

• Skilling's lawyer suggesting he took advantage of California causes him to anger: the recurrence of the equation of cleverness with business acumen and with being able to spot an opportunity becomes, through its reputation and as the business starts to unravel, more suspect.

arrogance and risk quotes

• "there's a feeling that the people who are gonna change things aren't in parliaments or palaces, but in corporate boardrooms all over the United States." pg 58

• "By rights you should be out. I got this company running on Darwinian principles." pg 76

• "Ha! I'm Enron."

• "I believe in God, I believe in democracy, and I believe in the company." - pg 63, Ken Lay

• "we are doing the right thing in California. I mean, people are saying we shouldn't trade electricity - do you really believe that?" pg 123

• "why should we look at the lazy f***ing regulations they've put in place by the committee and go 'yeah, you suck at your jobs, fine, we'll ignore that and just suck at ours too."

• "the weakest, most ignorant, most drunken f***ing incompetents went to work for the US government, because they weren't smart enough for the private sector"

• "in business, you buy something at one price, you sell it at a higher one and what's in between, that's your advantage. That's how the world works. [...] the only difference between me and the people judging me is they weren't smart enough to do what we did."

faith and belief

• throughout the play, Skilling never seems to be able to comprehend any other way of thinking about the world beyond the assumption that anyone who wasn't behaving like him was stupid

• Lay's description of the company as a self-protecting family and, for all his seeming religious faith, the central unit in his view of the world is the company, is shown in his behaviour throughout the play as a benign father figure, holding onto his faith with deliberately blinkered vision.

• contrastingly, Skilling has his faith entirely in the market, although he co-opts religious language in order to persuade Lay that his vision for the company is the way forward.

• Prebble stage instructions cast Skilling, by the end of act one, as "Messiah-like", at the heart of something like "a religious cult".

• discussing his traders manipulating California's energy markets, Skilling claims to be "on the side of angels"

• Prebble explores the way in which faith in capitalism's mirages and promises can end with the company, and belief in Skilling, tumbling down.

• Prebble casts belief as the key alchemical agent within the citadels of global capital, and replaces the cathedral with the corporation as the center of fervent belief.

• it is not the company's practices that throw it into crisis, but the faltering of belief, and the bursting of Enron's bubble, leading to the seismic collapse of the company

• Skilling maintains his confidence in the market throughout and with increasingly weakening zeal. in his final monologue, he maintains defiance, positioning himself as a man who "just wanted to change the world"

• the tension between Skilling's assertion and his situation, and the gap between his last Biblical sentiment and his own belief, draws parallels between the economy and the social, political, and environmental world

faith and belief quotes

• "in the past, folks thought that the basic unit of society would be the state, or the church, or Lord help us, the political party. But now we know it's The Company. And the family. And those two things should be the same."

• "I believe in God, I believe in democracy, and I believe in the Company." (63)

• "My father was a valves salesman. I didn't want to grow up to sell valves. Tiny pieces of something bigger he never saw. There's a dignity to holding something, Ken. But your daddy was a Baptist preacher. There's a dignity to giving people something they can't touch." (66)

• 'messiah-like' 'a religious cult' (stage directions) (103)

• "we're on the side of angels" (123)

• "all humanity is here. There's greed, there's fear, joy, faith... Hope... and the greatest of these... is money." (151)

• "When I write down everything that can possibly go wrong, as a formula. A formula I control. Nothing seems scary anymore." (88) Fastow

• "if you're invested in the company you work for you are literally investing in yourself - it is an act of belief in yourself. Which you should all have. Because, I believe in you."

• "imagine if the belief that the plane could fly was all that was keeping it in the air. It'd be fine. If everybody believed. If nobody got scared. As long as people didn't ask stupid questions." (stock analyst Sloman 140)

responsibility

• enron asks questions about beliefs, behaviour, and consequences. although the play scrutinizes skilling, fastow, and lay, the play also questions how such a massive corporate fraud could have gone apparently unnoticed for so long

• employees attend the 'mark to market' party 'for the champagne', the caricatures of lawyers, accountants, and investment banks consistently pass the responsibility and trust to one another, or follow each other's lead. the security officer trusts skilling to know what he's doing, lay remains purposefully oblivious to the fraud

• these examples emphasize both the individual and systemic responsibility

• prebble as a writer avoided having a whistleblower/heroic figure to expand its questions of culpability and responsibility out into the audience, and to paint the complexity of both the system and the human behaviour within it

• future responsibility: skilling's daughter/the next generation will have to deal with everything this former generation has done corporately, economically, and environmentally

responsibility quotes

• Employees at the mark-to-market party 'just for the champagne' rather than because they understand or are interested in the new accounting system

• The caricatures of lawyers, accountants, and investment banks consistently pass the buck to one another or follow each other's lead.

• "we all trust you up here, sir." (130)

• Lay is 'deliberately oblivious to the strange, exaggerated world of LJM' (121)

• Prebble doesn't include a whistleblower or a heroic 'good' character to side with - to paint the complexity of both the system and of the human behaviour within it.

• "they want to use Enron as one of the business models they teach" (84)

• "I leave my office, the whole world falls apart" (102)

• "I am not a bad man ... I just wanted to change the world. ... they will realise they were banishing something of themselves along with me. I believe that"

• "I have to check the stock price." "Why?" "because that's how daddy knows how much he's worth."

perception and reality

• the central issue of the enron scandal is defined by perception vs reality: the gap between the stock price (the perception of the company's value) and the massive debts and failures at the heart of the company (the reality), making the collapse particularly catastrophic

• the plot of the play details Skilling and Fastow's peaks and troughs with risk, near disaster, aversion, and diversion, as they try to cover up 'the gap between the perception and the reality', convinced that another risk might be enough to solve the situation

• staging: the lack of naturalism in the production reflects the unreality of enron itself, part hall of mirrors, part precarious house of cards vulnerable to the faintest nudge of healthy skepticism

• Skilling's enron: all glass, transparency and openness, is a huge irony. skilling envisioned, created, and promoted the image of a deregulated industry, and innovative company of the brightest people. however, this became a confident front for a very different reality.

• skilling's physical pain whenever he enters fastow's office: shows the strain on him to find the money to keep the pretense up

• at the end of the play, skilling still has the perception of himself as an innocent man trying to develop in the business world, whereas people no longer see him as a messiah or anti-hero, just an 'ordinary crook'.

• prebble describes wanting to show the 'theatricality of business and the illusions on which it thrives" - skilling's interest in virtuality and fastow's sci-fi fandom show how for enron, business became a form of show business

• the play embraces showmanship as a way to explain the enron story, and to explore the ways in which illusoriness is neither dishonest nor unethical: skilling and fastow use illusion and theatricality to conceal, whereas prebble uses them to reveal

perception and reality quotes

• "I told my daughter I was innocent. I believe I'm innocent." - Skilling. "None of that makes you innocent." - Roe (148)

• "you got a perception here, a reality here. You just need something for this to lean on whilst we being this up." (92)

• "The really smart person would assume that most other people are doing the same thing and so they would try to choose the woman that most other people would think was most other people's idea of the most beautiful woman. And who actually is the most beautiful woman in the room... is irrelevant." (111)

• "I don't care what they say about the company, as long as they don't make me look bad." (135, Fastow)

• 'lights of commodity prices over the faces of all the traders, a sea of figures.' (74) the stock price 'represented by a light somewhere on stage' (79) - using light instead of physical objects heightens the abstract, hard to get a hold of, sense of value and exchange in the play.

• (Skilling is having some pain) "these shoes... they're not broken in." pg 91

• "skilling seems to be in pain, his stomach." "i haven't been sleeping. people need to get paid." pg 119

• "what if they look and they see that underneath there's nothing actually there" pg 133

• "the stock is not going to fall. that is not going to happen. you're running this show, jeff" "this is just a confidence thing" pg 134

• "i think i said i was a hero and i believed i was a hero in the context of enron's culture" fastow pg 145

• "you- you failed me. you didn't believe enough. don't you see? this is my life!" skilling pg 147

• "you are an ordinary crook. doesn't matter how you dress it up. nothing special about it. took a lot of people down is all." pg 149