Saturday Evening Movie Post [moviegique]: You Can See Everything

I had no real knowledge of Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos going into this movie. Just a vague sense that she had scammed people with a ridiculous medical device that purported to do all kinds of things and didn't.

Do I know any more now? 

I don't know.

"Why would I deceive you?"

I do think this an exceptional documentary that earns its 175 minute runtime and is a fascinating look at some complex characters. In some ways, it's a documentary about Nathan Fielder. What I think is especially commendable is that, for all its staged elements—which are overtly staged, with an Amanda Seyfried filling in for Elizabeth Holmes—I think it is actually a documentary, as opposed to a narrative that Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim want us to believe.

It's not that there's not a point-of-view, it's that the point-of-view is very clear and guileless. Or "guileless appearing" as it's kind of hard to come out of this movie without wondering if everything is manipulation and performative.

I mean, not just in the movie, but everywhere.

I have my own take, of course, but let's start with the basics: Fielder is selected by Holmes and her husband Billy Evans to do the documentary because Fielder thinks "outside the box". Holmes is not really aware of Fielder's work, nor of Abbot and Costello and their "Who's on First?" routine, a sketch she doesn't understand when they watch it. She laughs, but because of the confusion, not because she understands the grammatical roots of the humor.

Holmes, you see, is weird. 

As it turns out, "weird" is a pretty big club.

We don't know all the ways that she is weird, but one way is an affect where she smiles and makes a lot of direct eye contact with whomever she's talking to. She's a distaff hide-the-pain-Harold, essentially, and this affect makes her very easy to make snap judgements about. 

And what I had heard about this documentary was that it was akin to In Cold Blood, where we learned (decades later) that Truman Capote had a thing for one of his cold-blooded killers and so altered the facts to protect his love interest. The suggestion has been made that Fielder fell under Holmes' spell like so many others and therefore is hiding something damaging about her. In fact, Seyfried herself makes this suggestion toward the end of the movie.

But this is remarkably shallow, and shallowness is a kind of through-line of the documentary.

Holmes invites Fielder to actually live with them for the last few weeks before she starts her eleven year sentence, and after a while he takes her up on that, and we do, in fact, see a whole lot. Too much, at times. Probably the number one thing you hear about the movie, besides the clip of Holmes where she says "Why would I deceive you?" with her affect in full flower, is that there is nudity in the film, and it's Evans and his whangdoodle.

This was his idea, apparently. But it's not particularly revealing. (Is that irony?) He's an odd character, for sure, but he's also in the oddest of situations. The couple and their two kids (Holmes has had a baby a month prior) are trying to max family time before she goes away, which creates some friction for Fielder & Co., especially with Evans, who comes across as overbearing at times, and brittle.

But then he's staring down a decade of being a single dad, essentially, to two young children. The peril of the same sort of shallow snap judgement applies here.

Most "documentaries" are fine with this. They give you villains, heroes, etc., etc., etc., to tell the story they want to tell. Here we see bits and pieces of things that allow multiple narratives to be built, and it feels more honest for that. We don't see "the mask drop," which is what you'd expect if Holmes were a sociopath. Evans and Holmes are devoted to each other, but they lack unctuous presentation of, e.g., the stereotypical Christian evangelist who presents himself as devoted and turns out to be a bully who's banging hookers on the side. 

Holmes is devoted to her children, and the smiling affect she has goes away when she's experiencing grief or worry or regret—and less so when she's afraid. The affect—the thing she's most called out for, that people call a red flag—works against her, I think. Her natural charm, such as it is, overcomes that affect rather than being a feature of it, or helped in any way by it.

In fact, to me, it looks like PTSD. (And looking it up now, apparently that was part of her unsuccessful legal defense.)  To me, also, she looked increasingly like a woman who abdicated responsibility to the man in her life, and in ways that are only unusual in their extremity. 

I was unable to find a picture of Seyfried in this film, so enjoy this picture of her in her low-budget Oscar-bid musical flop, "The Testament of Ann Lee".

They watch "The Dropout," a Hulu series where Amanda Seyfried plays "a character based on Holmes", which is the actress' dodge for the slander that results in abuse for Holmes once she's in prison. Fielder brings Seyfried in to re-enact scenes that happened before the cameras, and the jail scenes, and begins by showing her how devastated Holmes is by the series.

Throughout the doc, Seyfried goes through a series of interesting reactions. At first, she comes off like she's an inch deep, blowing off the idea that anything she did might have a real effect on Holmes, and besides she deserves it. Then she acts out a series of deeper examinations—only to come back around to it's just television and besides, Holmes deserves it.

There's a scene early on where Evans takes eggs away that Holmes is scrambling to scramble them properly. (Seriously, I was watching this and thinking "That's no way to scramble eggs!") Holmes doesn't seem to mind, but Seyfried latches on to this to decide that Evans is controlling and destructive. Then the actress meets with Evans and the two are particularly antagonistic.

Seyfried opens with attacks on his sexual prowess. The situation itself seems more than a little contrived. The two walk into Evans place, and Evans says he hasn't had sex for 899 days. (He's counting!) Fielder asks him if he's good at it, and Evans response with something like "I'm great at it." This is a weird conversation, just for starters.

But then Seyfried seeks to humiliate him by claiming she lied to every man she ever slept with. This dovetails nicely with the whole premise of whether one knows when someone is lying to you, but is meant to highlight Evans supposed narcissism. 

On the other hand, it reminded me of the idea that you can tell someone is stupid when you say something like "Men are generally taller than women" and they respond with "My sister is taller than my brother," as if that were a rebuttal. This is almost the inverse: "I'm good at sex" gets rebutted with "I've never had good sex."

Also, holy cow. How dysfunctional is that? A Wall Street Journal article's headline claims that Seyfried is the only trustworthy character in the film, which is a bold claim since she's apparently lied to every man she's ever been intimate with. (I won't dignify the article by reading it, which leaves me free to speculate that this either goes unaddressed or is brushed aside with "Everyone lies about sex." Remember that chestnut?)

For his part, Evans antagonizes Seyfried over her unkind comments in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination.

At this point, Evans has been raising his kids for two years on his own. He's also been using his Power of Attorney to do things like post to Holmes' Twitter account. Seyfried finds it appalling that he should have the Power of Attorney, but given that Holmes is in jail, it seems reasonable to me. Both Fielder and Seyfried are alarmed at how Evans claims that he and Holmes are essentially of one mind, and he doesn't even have to talk to her to know what she would want.

Sounds sinister, right? Then at the end of the movie, Holmes says the same thing: That she knows Evans' mind and doesn't even need to talk to him to know what he thinks about things. She has whole conversations with him alone in her cell.

Seyfried says she would break the two up if she could. This is the inch-deep thing re-surfacing. She says this even as we're all aware that Evans has relocated his house to Texas to be near her, so he can take the kids every weekend, and does daily calls to whatever the limit is.

Seyfried also acted very impressed by this seaside rental, which I didn't quite understand.

Speaking of inch-deep: Holmes understanding of the device she is credited with being in charge of is less than mine, and I'm only going on what she said during the movie. That is, she describes the device not like a software engineer, not like a chemical engineer, but like a pamphlet trying to sell the device to someone who is not very smart. I got the principle—how such a thing could theoretically work, and what it would take to make it work, and what kind of device it would have to be—and I wouldn't need to say a word about "the cloud". 

Some people say this is all part of the ruse to which I say, it's a very convincing ruse. And of course, "the ruse" often becomes "the thing" after a while. Politics is composed almost entirely of people playing dumb, to the extent that they eventually are no longer playing.

In a way, everyone in the movie is doing what Holmes did: Using the abilities they have to get attention, acclaim, money, allies—while brushing aside responsibilities they don't want to deal with. In Holmes case, this may well be the financial stuff that got her into trouble, and the engineering stuff that got her into trouble, and the marketing stuff that got her into trouble. 

For Seyfried, it's "It's just fucking television" and witch hunting.

I think Fielder came in wanting to expose Holmes, but he didn't find much to expose. I think he toyed with the "controlled by men" thing, but he doesn't dig into Holmes' older lover who guided her through the Theranos project (and is serving even more time). And while it's clear he finds aspects of Holmes relationship with Evans weird, he also says he sees genuine love and a real family unit. 

The result, I think, is something more honest than the usual documentary. It doesn't tell you what to think because I don't think Fielder himself is sold on any of the easy narratives. 

Meanwhile, quite a few things charged my tinfoil hat. The media machine is in full swing in every aspect of this case, like it's a gremlin on the wing of the airplane and I'm William Shatner. The media creates this character, the media hypes the company, and it's not even a question of whether or not they'll turn on a dime and destroy the character. It's all grist for the media mill. If Theranos was on to something, and the pharmaceutical companies decided it needed to die so they could steal all the patents, would the media then fall into line and destroy what they created? 

That's a rhetorical question, of course, independent of whether Theranos was on to anything.

I'm reminded, for some reason of Wilhelm Reich, a mid-century quack who developed a theory of life-force called "orgones" which I presume is complete nonsense, and which the FDA—inspired by libel printed in The New Republic—responded by cracking down on him with utter savagery, including destroying much of his written work—well out of scope of their already unconstitutional charter.

I also thought of Martha Stewart, thrown into jail not because of insider trading, which is the smear that attaches to her, but because somebody wanted her in jail.

There is an object lesson in this film, I think, but I'm not sure anyone involved in making it knew what it was.

She had children! This is totally a manipulation tactic and not a woman in love looking at what's probably her last chance!

posted by Open Blogger at 07:32 PM

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