First love. Fyre Fest. New Coke. So many over-promoted things haven’t lived up to their hype. Add to that the recent “documentary” by Nathan Fielder, which is less a documentary than “Interview with a Vampire”—a no-holds-barred cinema verité account of Elizabeth Holmes last thirty days before prison, followed by rather creepy reenactments and gotcha-style ambushes of her paramour and Rasputin stand-in, Billy Evans.
So much was made in the run-up to the movie that I expected to be mesmerized, to exit the theatre with a newfound commitment to invest in Holmes’ and Evans’ latest con, Theranos 2. What I saw was different, but no less chilling. Here is a woman who might not fit the classic definition of a sociopath but has a profoundly different way of relating to the world, and people, than normal people do. Much of the footage revolved around her statement that her product “can diagnose countless conditions”, not just the ones she falsely claimed it could. Nathan digs into this, and it becomes apparent that it is not a question of semantics. In her mind, “can” means something so radically different than how you and I use the word that I firmly believe she, if she were polygraphed, if she were tortured even, she would continue to hew to that line. The creepiest part of the movie for me was the “Who’s on First” episode. At first I thought she was being coy and disingenuous, obfuscating even, when she pretended that she didn’t get the joke. Everybody gets the joke. But it was when Nathan asked her, casually, “What was the first baseman’s name?” and she responded. “I didn’t catch it” that her pathology became apparent. It was the moment in the movie when you realize the call is coming from inside the house. She really is different.
That difference is what made her manipulators, first Sunny Balwani, now Billy Evans, to seek her out. There are dozens of naïve young women in Stanford’s entry chemistry classes (I know, I graduated from Stanford with a BS in Chemistry.) What made Sonny seek her out, among the rest? The reason is that she had a superpower: the ability to lie so convincingly that she could extract millions of dollars from the wallets of elderly, besotted, rich white men. Could she have orchestrated a half-billion dollar con on her own? Very doubtful. But as a pretty young girl with the superpower, Sonny was able to manipulate her and execute his own con.
All superpowers carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. The ability to lie convincingly blinded her and left her vulnerable to the predation and manipulation by first Sunny, then Billy. In the movie, she is completely under his spell, and Evans quite literally owns her in every real sense. He has her children. He has a POA that lets him speak with her voice. He even has her voice and images—one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the movie is where her body is being scanned so that Billy had no need of the flesh-and-blood Holmes anymore. In the scene, tears are coursing down her cheeks. She hates what she is doing but is powerless to stop it. One wonders what use Evans will have for the human Holmes now that he has the Stepford version.
Her complete domination by Evans in the film is why she reminded me of Dustin Hoffman’s The Rain Man: a flawed individual with a powerful gift, used for nefarious purposes by others. Ultimately, the movie made me quite sympathetic toward her even though I think it is a good thing she is locked up, for now at least. But as her beauty fades, her ability to be used as a con-puppet will fade as well, and she will not be dangerous anymore. One wonders what will happen to her, and her children, when powerful men have no need of her anymore.