In the penultimate episode of the Laura Dern/Mike White show Enlightened, the main character Amy scores a meeting with the CEO of Abbadon—the beauty products company where she’s held a job for 15 years.
Even though Amy is leading a scheme to expose the CEO’s secret payoffs to government officials, she still accepts this meeting, framed around the foolish hope that he may offer her a long-sought-after job of “internal corporate watchdog.”
The meeting—which takes place on the rarefied grounds of an L.A. country club—is awkward.
My favorite moment is a question that the CEO asks Amy about her intent with the offered position. I’ll paraphrase:
Do you want this position because you want to do good or because you feel powerless?
Amy says that it’s both.
And that’s a fair answer, no matter the CEO’s desire to limit her to a single intent. People are more complex than that—it’s possible to do good for self-interested reasons. That doesn’t remove the good from the equation. Amy can both seek power for herself and do good.
Taylor Coe 