Mission Week kicked off on Friday night with a showing of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" and a question and answer session afterwards with the director of the film, Alex Gibney.,”

Mission Week kicked off Friday night with a showing of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" and a question and answer session afterward with the writer, director and producer of the film, Alex Gibney.

Gibney said he was interested in this story because it was not a story about numbers, but a story about people – ordinarily good people "gone horribly wrong."

"I thought (it) had these very dramatic qualities that would be useful in looking at what went wrong and seem to be going wrong in our culture," Gibney said.

Caitlin Madden, a College of Arts & Sciences senior, said she thought the director really portrayed the idea that this can happen to anyone and how "no one is ethically perfect."

Amy Mikutowski, a College of Arts & Sciences sophomore, said another shock in the documentary was how Enron employees were able to shut down power plants across California, causing rolling blackouts in the state and driving up the energy prices to benefit Enron.

Gibney said Enron regularly taped conversations between the traders in case a dispute arose later and proof was needed about what deals and settlements were made. He was able to persuade the people who found the tapes to allow his crew to pore through them.

"(What was) interesting to me was that the more you learned about some of these traders, off the job they were alarmingly socially minded citizens," he said. "They were not the killers you hear in these tapes."

Gibney showed the scenes from the famous Milgram experiment in the documentary because he said it helped explain why ordinary people could do horrible things.

During the experiment, according to StanleyMilgram.com, "65 percent of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment. The victim was, in reality, a good actor who did not actually receive shocks."

Gibney said the dials go up incrementally in the experiment, which shows how people's actions can snowball out of control. He said the further along in the voltage increase, the less people could account for their actions.

"At Enron, it didn't happen overnight, it happened bit by bit," he said. "Slowly, people made themselves comfortable with what was going on there until they didn't realize how far they've gone."

In the experiment, Gibney said there were a number of people very early on who said they weren't going to do it. Similarly, in the Enron conflict, there were a number of people who were uncomfortable. He believes the key characteristic for avoiding this slippery slope is a determination to ask tough questions and to not be willing to settle for an easy answer that puts concerns to rest.

Gibney said he felt the Enron story has universal applications, because everyone is presented with dilemmas that make them uncomfortable. He also saw it as an emblematic of a larger cultural problem. He hopes the movie helps people see the problem with a bottom line ethic in society and culture, which translates into the belief that if it makes money, then it is good.

"It's not just as simple as to leave your ethics at the door of the corporation and say (you're) in business now so it's ok to do anything," he said.

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