The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley

3/4

Not Rated (probable PG-13 for Brief Language)

So the question remains: just how did a Stanford dropout manage to create a company that, within 10 years, grew to a $10 billion value, only to have it come crashing down a few years later?  It's an interesting question, and the story of Theranos is so fascinating and so bizarre that it's difficult to accept any answer as satisfactory.  Acclaimed documentarian Alex Gibney argues that it was the need to be a part of something extraordinary and a culture where deception was not frowned upon, but rewarded.

Indulge me for a minute.  You remember going to the beach with your beloved uncle.  Laughing and having a great time.  Then you remember that your uncle gets sick with skin cancer.  The cancer spreads to his brain and he dies.  What would you do to prevent that from happening again?  Elizabeth Holmes found a way.  With just a tiny drop of blood, you can get all the information you need to catch disease early before it robs someone of their life.

It sounds too good to be true.  But what if it could be?  Think of the lives that will be saved.  Think of how it will revolutionize healthcare.  And, if you're an investor, think about how much money there is to be made in such a machine.  And if the medical industry says it's not possible, well, Silicon Valley is the place where rules are broken.

Yet, it was not physically possible to do what Holmes promised.  So how could she have acquired so much money and kept the fantasy alive for so long with no data to back it up?  She sold a fantasy, and did anything to keep it alive.  The mantra in Silicon Valley is "fake it until you make it."  In other words, make the promise first, then figure out how you're going to achieve it.  But there's a dark side to this.  It's one thing to make a promise that your website is going to replace Facebook.  It's another to do it when people's lives are in the balance.  She was playing the same game with different rules.

One interesting thing that the film raises is the need to believe in something extraordinary.  Holmes had an uncanny ability to convince people that she was on the verge of greatness.  People have an innate need to believe that they can change the world, and she gave them that.  In a way, it was very similar to Trumpism.  People needed to believe that he could reopen the old factories, bring back the economic prosperity from the 50s, restore the US as a "Christian Nation" and so on.  It wasn't possible, and Trump never did it, but that's irrelevant.  Give someone that hope and tell them that the promises will be fulfilled soon, and that's all you need.

The problem with something like this is that, sooner or later, you're going to have to deliver.  And Holmes couldn't.  She could stall, she could threaten and use all the legal grift at her disposal, but Theranos was an illusion.  And not even her sugary words could change that.

I realize that I explained more about the con that was Theranos and less about the movie.  I suppose it's because it's a documentary and there's not much else to say.  But it's got Alex Gibney behind the camera, and he's one of the great documentarians now working.  Like any good journalist, he gets all the facts that he can and draws out the best quotes from his sources (once Theranos starts falling apart, you can feel the paranoia of the employees who have jumped ship and are spilling the beans).

But that's not enough.  Documentaries are a form of narrative just like any other kind of film.  And Gibney knows that storytelling prowess is just as important.  That's where, I think, Gibney falls short.  His other films, like "Taxi to the Dark Side" and "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" (which is such a close cousin to this film that one wonders why no one learned their lesson) were cleanly told and filled with passion and anger.  Here, Gibney seems to be less invested.  Maybe that's because Theranos was such a farce to begin with.  No one could keep it all straight.  Least of all the employees.