A Not-Particularly-Charismatic Scammer

So this weekend I went to see You Can See Everything, as mentioned last week.

It is, yes, a lot of fascinating footage of one of the greatest grifters of the 21st century, captured by two directors at the top of their game. It’s worth seeing in theaters just for the experience of staring deeply into Elizabeth Holmes’ deeply uncanny[^uncanny] eyes.

But… I was a little disappointed, and moreover, I think the film was a little irresponsible.

At some point during the film, Nathan Fielder says (to paraphrase) “I have nothing else to go on. I just have to look at her and decide if I trust her.” Which, yes, is generally speaking true if you’ve just met somebody. But it is very, very not true in the case of Theranos! As Liz Lopato writes in The Verge, there was literally a four-month-long trial with hundreds of hours of deposition and literal pounds of documents attesting to the not-just-alleged fact that Holmes lied, extensively, for years, over the course of Theranos. It’s just not really even in question!

I share the frustration of Tyler Schultz, one of the principal whistleblowers, who argues that the film should have ended with a brief rundown of the extensive documentation of fraud, as a clever “you just got hoodwinked” moment11 A bit like Orson Welles’ F For Fake, which is now, I suppose, thoroughly spoiled for you. Oops. Still, F for Fake is a classic and well worth watching. . For instance, at one point Holmes shows off “the device” that almost-but-not-quite worked, and Fielder nods on, impressed but not quite believing. Except, of course, if you did your homework and read Bad Blood, you know that “the device” was never more than an in-house prototype (which didn’t, er, do much), and the large-scale deployment to Walgreens was based on running tests on third-party machines. But Fielder and Oppenheim don’t point that out. Oops!

I call it irresponsible because Holmes and her new partner Billy Evans are trying to do it again. There’s plenty of footage of Evans rambling about how this time they’re going to do blood testing with lasers and artificial intelligence, and while the intent is clearly to portray him as a not-particularly-charismatic scammer, the film takes his obviously ridiculous idea just a little too seriously. Some of the folks I went with who were less read up on the Theranos story even admitted they had a moment of “well, maybe she really wasn’t lying, that much.” Someday when Holmes and Evans begin her rehabilitation, most people will probably name You Can See Everything as the start. And that doesn’t feel great!

Anyway, otherwise, I found it slightly disappointing because the “completely wild, mind-blowing” second half was, mostly, just not that interesting. After Holmes goes off to prison, Fielder gets hung up on a meeting he and the other producers had with Evans and Holmes when they were negotiating the terms of the documentary. According to Fielder, Holmes casually left to check on the kids, at which point Evans (against standard practice for documentaries) demanded a cut of the proceeds. But later, Holmes claimed, apparently completely earnestly, that she clearly has nothing to hide because she doesn’t have a financial stake in the production. Fielder begins to obsess over the question of whether Holmes knew Evans was asking for money (and thus is a truly master liar) or not (and thus really is a dupe). And the back half of this (very, very long) documentary mostly revolves around Fielder attempting to set up a meeting with her to hash it out, with the help of Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed Holmes on The Dropout.

And… I’m sorry, but… I just don’t find that question very interesting? I am almost certain the answer is a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation, in which she perhaps knew Evans would ask for some kind of renumeration, but intentionally avoided knowing any details, and convinced herself that whatever was worked out genuinely didn’t count as a financial stake. I mean, did she know literally everything going wrong at Theranos, or all of the things Sunny Balwani did? I’m gonna bet… no? Absolutely not? In a slightly crazy analogy, do you think Stalin knew all the details of the gulag system? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t morally culpable.

Anyway, this is probably less interesting to me specifically because many years ago I was friends with someone who was definitely narcissist-adjacent, at least, and one time I spent something like an hour trying to convince them that they had hurt someone’s feelings. And they just, really, bone-deep, did not understand. It wasn’t lying; they just genuinely lived in an emotional world where it didn’t make sense that their actions could cause harm. And pretty much every moment of Holmes in this film feels exactly like that. I believe Holmes isn’t lying, because she has really convinced herself that nothing she does is wrong. She claims not to understand the concept of a white lie! And I actually believe her.

So I think one more interesting version of this documentary could ask the question of how exactly someone could delude themselves to such an extent that, despite the well-documented fraud, they genuinely believe they did nothing wrong. This movie touches on that occasionally, but it’s not really the focus.

Another thread that is brushed against but not explored is the involvement of Amanda Seyfried. Throughout the documentary, Seyfried comes across as extremely down-to-earth, likable, charming, as basically the only person (including the directors) who has their head on straight22 One of the best scenes is when Evans casually reveals that he has power of attorney over Holmes, and Seyfriend, looking genuinely alarmed, shouts “How the FUCK do you have power of attorney?!” and sees through the bullshit. But, as one of my coviewers pointed out, of course she seems down-to-earth, likable, and charming. She’s a professional actress! And the film is edited! How do you know what you see is, in fact, the “real” Seyfried? Is there a real Seyfried at all? And, of course, she has her biases, including a very strong intuition that Evans is the problem, not Holmes. So why do you trust her more than Holmes?

That’s not a thread the film pushes on, other than my favorite scene, in which Seyfried watches Holmes watching Seyfriend play Holmes on The Dropout, with Seyfried growing increasingly uncomfortable as Holmes breaks down in tears over the portrayal. Afterwards, Fielder reads her the rather snippy message Holmes sent about insensitively portraying a real person, and Seyfried gives a slightly clumsy answer about how she and the writers weren’t really thinking of Holmes as a real person, but instead as a character — which, fair enough, but that is stretching the truth when The Dropout is literally based on and named after a non-fiction podcast. It’s quite an interesting moment, but the film moves on and mostly leaves the question of Seyfried’s portrayal of Holmes to one side, even as Fielder asks her to reenact the rest of his interactions with Holmes.

So, anyway. It could have been a much more interesting film, and I’m worried about its long-term impacts, but in the meantime it is a fascinating document and one well worth watching, if only to take part in the Discourse. I would just caution anyone considering it to not go in blind, but instead take the time to read Bad Blood. Please. Elizabeth Holmes did actually literally harm people. Don’t let that go.

[^uncanny] Fun fact: over Halloween I met a woman at a hacker house party who was, apparently, a photojournalist that often covers tech culture. She explained that she actually knows a number of the people involved in the Theranos saga, and specifically that Billy Evans ran in her social circle, so a post-Theranos-pre-prison Holmes was in her orbit as well for a while. And, she said, she genuinely doesn’t understand why anybody was taken in, because in real life Holmes really does have that utterly unnerving stare, like she’s about to go for your neck.