Monsters

 Like the rest of the world, I too saw that Elizabeth Holmes documentary over the weekend. I found it a completely riveting yet ultimately unsatisfying and strange piece of work. 

The directors make the odd choice never to review in depth the factual background of Theranos and Holmes's career. For this reason, the film never bothers to re-indict her for fraud or to convince the viewership that she really did lie to investors and cheat the public. 

Noah Smith, in his review published this morning, says this is because the court case and the extensive journalistic coverage of Holmes already made this case, and the public doesn't need to be reminded of it. 

Maybe so, but I'd certainly forgotten most of it, and I was as well informed on the case as most likely viewers. I listened to that whole Bad Blood book on Audible back when it came out. But that doesn't mean I remember it. I have a terrible memory for narrative details. 

And so, when Holmes says she never lied to investors, I can't instantly retrieve a specific example from my inner data banks in which she did. ("Wasn't there something where they bought equipment from Siemens and..." but that was about as far as my brain could carry that thought.*)

The only example Fielder confronts Holmes with in the film is a time she told a journalist that her machine "can" run any lab test. She explains that the machine was intended to be a "platform" to run multiple tests that still had to be designed and pre-loaded. 

In other words, when she said it "can" run any test, the statement was equivalent in her telling to the designer of a 1970s mainframe computer saying that the device "can" run any punch-card. It wouldn't mean the manufacturer of the computer was claiming to already possess all possible punchcards.

And suddenly, I found myself agreeing with her. "Wait a minute," I thought, "that makes sense. That is one way to interpret that sentence, and not a wholly unreasonable one."

People with longer memories and better heads for narrative than me (people like Noah Smith, e.g.) have assured me, since I watched the film, that there are many much more blatant examples in which Holmes was caught lying to people. 

But if so, the filmmakers' choice to leave out these examples and only concentrate on one instance which proves, upon examination, to actually be pretty ambiguous, is deeply strange. 

Likewise, the film tees up a mystery about whether Holmes or a New York Times journalist was telling the truth about an attributed quote in a news story that Holmes denies ever saying. 

Ultimately, though (and here, in case it's not obvious yet, I must insert a *spoiler alert*), the film does not solve the puzzle; neither side furnishes the evidence we would need to be certain whether Holmes did or did not say these words. 

Noah Smith insists that the film doesn't need these details, because it reveals Holmes to be a sociopath and a manipulator in a much more subtle and convincing way than any mere confrontation with the facts of her case could accomplish. Smith writes:

Whereas many filmmakers would have regarded Holmes as a subject to be studied, Fielder seems to see her as an opponent to be challenged and beaten. If he can shoot what Holmes wants him to shoot, but ultimately seize control of the narrative, then he’s the more powerful storyteller. This, I think, is why he doesn’t bring in outside evidence to show what a well-documented liar Holmes is. That would be cheating. Instead, he has to venture into the monster’s lair alone, and defeat her in single combat.

If that was the goal, however, the film apparently didn't work on me. Holmes didn't come across to me—a person who had forgotten all the details of her criminal case—as what Smith calls a "monster[...] of deception and manipulation." 

Instead, she struck me as someone strangely unsophisticated**—a credulous product of Silicon Valley hype culture who engages in roughly the same type of puffery and flim-flam that Elon Musk does on a daily basis—except with less malice. 

She comes across as someone whose brain is made up of motivational posters, and who believes so much in the power of positive thinking that she herself has lost any ability to distinguish in her own mind between reality and aspiration. 

Maybe there is a lot more evidence out there to suggest that she was deliberately and consciously manipulating people all along. Smith lays out some of it at the top of his review. But if the point of the film really was to convince me that she was a "monster" simply through showing her own thoughts and words, rather than through introducing extrinsic evidence, it certainly didn't work on me. 

If anything, the film's arc seems to validate many of her claims. It ends up portraying her as a loving mother and spouse who cannot be proved to have any real financial motive for her actions. 

If anyone comes across as manipulative and deceiving, it is the filmmakers. They admit half-way through the film that, in order to secure the participation of Holmes and her husband, they promised them a share in the profits it would make in theaters. 

Fielder portrays this on camera as the result of Holmes's husband driving a hard bargain when she was not in the room. He admits it makes the film seem skeezy and less credible, and he says it almost made him walk away from the project... but... he didn't. 

At the close of the film, the end titles say that Holmes's husband ultimately waived his right to any profit from the film. 

But now, it has made a lot of money and become an instant cult classic since its release. Is the husband going to stick to that resolution? It sounds like a voluntary revision of the contract that lacked any new consideration from the other party, and therefore might not be enforceable. 

I suddenly found myself trying to think back to what we learned about the "preexisting duty rule" in law school. But then I was like: maybe that is irrelevant—would this be covered by the Uniform Commercial Code? Or wait, no, because it's a contract for services, so it would be common law? Or wait, haven't most jurisdictions narrowed that rule?...

But apparently, my memory for the bar exam is as much Swiss cheese as my memory of the details of Elizabeth Holmes's criminal trial, so I have no idea whether Holmes's family would actually be able to come back and reclaim their contract right to profit off the film if they so chose. 

Either way, if they do not profit from this endeavor, it will be because of their own voluntary rescission, not because the filmmakers had too much integrity to let the subject personally profit from what was supposed to be independent journalism. 

And that puts the whole film in a different and far less trustworthy light. It also felt like a bait and switch to me, as an audience member, since I had gone into the theater expecting a legitimate documentary, not an infomercial. 

In the end, then, I'm left with no idea whom to trust more than anyone else in this hall of mirrors. But certainly Holmes does not come across—taking this film in isolation, and lacking (as I do) any ready recollection of the other facts of her case—as the worst person in the room. 

If the intention really was to make us see that she is a "monster," as Smith puts it, the film is a failure. It proves nothing about any alleged misdeeds on her part, and leads to no satisfying resolution, and if anything left me with a more positive view of Holmes than I had going in. 

But then, I always fall for the monsters. I even felt sorry for that girl they made the Netflix documentary about—the one who was accused of killing her boyfriend and friends in that car crash, like a scene out of John Hawkes's novella Travesty—and who is now in prison for life for a crime she allegedly committed as a minor.

Here as elsewhere, Robert Lowell's words are a kind of mantra to me: 

Pity the monsters!

Pity the monsters!

Perhaps, one always took the wrong side –

Ah, to have known, to have loved

too many David and Judiths!

My heart bleeds for the monster.

__

*For some reason, I only ever retain images and ideas from books, never events, at least not in any order. My experience reading most narrative works is like that of a character in Kingsley Amis's Ending Up: "Shorty was doing his best to read a paperback book that told, it seemed to him, of some men on a wartime mission to blow something up. His state of mind, normal for him at this time of day, lent the narrative an air of deep mystery. New characters kept on making unceremonious appearances, or, more exactly, he would find that he had been in a sense following their activities for several pages without having noticed their arrival, or, more exactly still, they would turn out, on consultation of the first couple of chapters, to have been about the place from the start. The prose style was tortuous, elliptic, allusive, full of strange poeticisms; the dialogue, after the same fashion, was stuffed with obscurities and non-sequiturs and, like the story itself, constantly referred to people, events, places and the rest that had never come up before, or, once again, had come up eight or eighty pages earlier."

** She has this eerily and naïvely childlike way of talking about her "inventions" that makes her sound like she just stepped out of a third grade class session on Thomas Edison.