So many comments about Holmes, I think, are missing the point. This isn't about Holmes, and neither, IMO, is the article. Like all things Nathan Fielder does, this is a movie by Nathan for Nathan. Elizabeth Holmes is just used, in every sense of the word, as a prop.
The article was written by someone who's never seen any of Nathan's other work and is apparently blown away by his skill at and unquenchable fetish for using and deceiving people. Yeah, that's his whole thing. Congrats, you just watched a documentary about psychopaths.
This article falls into the same trap, I dunno what to call them, artsy-upper-class-society-and-film reviewers often do; writing vague yet meaningful-sounding things about the obvious subtext of a movie as if it was a revelation, yet without any specific observations about it.
Yes, this is a documentary about a person. And how the documentary is presented will color your perspective of the person. This should (hopefully) be apparent to anyone who's watched a documentary about a person before.
But how does it do it? What tools does it use to that effect? I appreciate that this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous, but what makes this unique from other documentaries that deal with ambiguous subject matter?
> this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous [...] with ambiguous subject matter?
There's a big difference in ambiguousness and ambivalence, especially in documentaries. "Ambiguousness" represents an uncertain logical conclusion, whereas "ambivalence" stands in for (the strength of) conflicting forces.
I'd wager that an ambiguous documentary would be close to being unwatchable, and I can't remember that I've seen any. Since I've yet to see You Can See Everything, unfortunately I can't comment about it in any way.
No one including my wife was interested in seeing it so I went by myself. It was long, but interesting. The author hits the nail on the head:
“You sit there believing you’re watching a documentary about a woman who deceived the world, only to discover that you’re also watching a demonstration of how easy it is to deceive you.”
I don't think there is any magic sauce to this movie. I saw it yesterday, and do agree (spoilers ahead) there are three acts: deception, sympathetic, puppeteer. I feel though that this article treats the movie as if its some sort of hypnosis; it's not. Its a very well put together movie that makes you question everything thats happening. I and others came out of it largely questioning:
A. Is she truly the most manipulative person we've ever seen
B. Largely oblivious to what's happening around her
and not:
- Is she guilty
This movie I would say does not answer those questions, nor do I think seeks to.
I haven't seen it, but my opinion is she likely was what lawyers call "reckless", as in she should have known but didn't care (blinded by the upside and a "we'll figure it once we scale" tech attitude that works a lot better for db performance than healthcare).
I never understood why people care about that. Lots of corporate executives take courses on how to speak in public and change their behaviour on stage. Actors certainly do. As for Kamala Harris and her sudden southern accent in front of certain audiences...
I think if you're stuck on that question, her manipulation poked through the silver screen and worked on you.
To me the subtext of the movie was that a sociopath's manipulation is so strong that even against the heavy counterforce of the filmmaker's bias, it makes it through. I agree with TFA's general premise that the film forces you to confront how easy it is to deceive you -- but it's not the filmmaker who's doing the deceiving. Sociopathic manipulation is about sparking doubt. Gaslighters don't need to prove anything, they just need to plant a "but what if" in some corner of your mind. The fact that the author felt compelled to write TFA at all is ironically a product of that manipulative power.
Another way to think of it is: the documentary makes you think whether, if you were in the room with her in the years that Theranos was operating, you would have fallen for it.
I saw the movie Friday night. It is a mind job. You'll walk away with more questions than answers.
Without spoiling the movie, it's possible for people to be multiple things at once. That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of. The movie is a wild ride.
> That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of.
Thanks!
Surely the documentaries are made in a way that's depicts that very accentued, manipulative, borderline psychopathic person. This is likely more than she was in real life. She might even have been motivated by genuine will to improve the diagnostics field. So yeah you might be "deceived" by these docudramas.
I fear that this kind of poetic write-up muddies the water into "oh, maybe things are more nuanced, and played on her weird personality and background to make things look worse, maybe it wasn't so bad".
People got misdiagnosed and suffered directly because of her. She's every bit guilty of that, as deserving of a harsh judgement as any person directly causing that kind of harm.
I'm not bragging: but I do not watch any (almost any) video of the news, so I never see Trump speak or see the Israeli military against the Palestinians or watch the footage of the trials, etc. I do read the news. I just sort of drifted into it when I was an early cord-cutter. I think around the yr 2000 there wasn't much video and I got used to it. I do find that I am much less overstimulated than my friends and family who watch a lot of news video.
Lacan described registers of experience: the Imaginary (visual, sexual, emotional, fantasy), Symbolic (language, associations), and Real (the unsymbolizable, "impossible"). Watching video is immersion in the Imaginary, you get roused, riled up, turned-on, activated, thoughts are connected by paranoia, magical thinking, and aggression. It makes HUGE difference to not not follow the news that way! Again, I'm not bragging, not proud of myself, not espousing a Mr Spock outlook. But it is hard to miss the difference.
This reads like a high schooler discovering that film can manipulate you, but doesn't go any further than that.
"We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not."
She speaks for herself. The author then doesn't bring up a single fact, piece of evidence, or anything else besides just restating the pedestrian premise a few times. I don't share her inability to study a topic in-depth, come to a conclusion or challenge my previously held beliefs, and then pass judgment while attaching a calibrated degree of certainty to the soundness of my conviction.
> But the thing that often gets lost in the retelling of her story is that Holmes was actually acquitted of all four charges related to defrauding patients. She’s in prison because a jury found that she knowingly misled investors who poured more than $700 million into the startup.
What gets lost more is that Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients, so it's not even like Theranos was absolved of those charges. The kicker is that the CEO and co-founder of a company that has been established to willfully defraud patients somehow managed to escape conviction.
Also, just because the jury didn't think there was enough evidence to convict her of defrauding patients (beyond reasonable doubt), doesn't mean she was innocent.
It actually does. You can judge her, but she is not guilty. The more we as a society decide the justice system is just an arbitrary way of deciding who gets punished and not _the_ way of deciding if a person is or is not a criminal the more we slide towards oblivion.
If a person is found not guilty, they are not guilty. To argue otherwise is to undermine the core institution of western civilization.
Important to note that in the original conception of western civilization, no one is 'innocent'. This idea that you have some secret special power to sniff out a persons true heart from a distance, which is separate from a jury of a persons peers studying and debating the evidence, is at best misguided and arrogant, and at worst a pernicious threat.
For context for others, Holmes was acquitted of defrauding patients. A juror stated that she was acquitted because Holmes didn't directly interact with the patients. On the other hand, she did directly interact with investors, so the evidence was much clearer.
Separately, Theranos' COO and Holmes' boyfriend at the time was convicted by a separate jury for defrauding patients. Theranos also settled multiple lawsuits for ~$50M and declared bankruptcy soon after.
This point is also clearly made in the film. Sounds like the article has nothing to say and just wants to leech off the success and attention of the doc.
Holmes and Theranos leadership did more than defraud investors. They knowingly ran unreliable tests on actual patients. People were told they were miscarrying when they weren't, or that they had HIV when they didn't. And they drove an employee, Ian Gibbons, to suicide, then threatened his widow with a lawsuit when she talked to reporters about it.
That is not because Theranos did not commit such fraud against patients; Balwani was convicted on those charges. It's just the prosecutors were unable to prove that Holmes was culpable.
You're conflating Holmes, Theranos and Balwani. Holmes was found not guilt of that which you accuse her of. That you also accuse others at the same time who where found guilty doesn't change that fact.
That’s true but not relevant. I have absolutely no sympathy for the rubes who thought FTX was a good place to put their money, but that doesn’t make the fraud any more OK.
The people that invested their money did not make these decisions. The people running the fund did. You're victim blaming. Most people don't get a very wide choice where their money goes outside the couple of options the fund managers present. I'd also venture most people do not even look at what stocks are in the fund. They'll look at the past earnings and check the box.
As someone outside US politics and as someone who generally takes the position of an impartial observer it’s always fun to engage people in gentle debate to see if they understand why they feel the way that they vehemently[1] do about a person or topic.
A fun one to ask to rile up Fox News listeners is to ask them which specific law Hillary Clinton is guilty of breaking.
Trump just threatened to jail her, so this is still relevant!
That’s just a random example, there are many such biases people hold where they have a strong belief but no clue where they got that belief.
[1] A study showed that many antivaxers would cheerfully get their kid a shot if offered $50! That’s what their “conviction” is actually worth.
If you intend to engage "for fun" then you must actually engage by hearing the other side and rebutting. Otherwise you're not engaging, you're just trying to shout your assumptions louder than your opponent.
Your comment doesn't seem to exhibit any understanding of the opposing arguments.
Just offering my take of your comment as an impartial observer.
I saw a video on YouTube a while ago about her. I think it was either by Internet historian or someone similar. Not sure if it’s worth going to theaters for this
“I watched an unrelated YouTube video therefore I’m not convinced this movie is good” sure is a paradoxical level of judging a book by its cover.
I assume what you meant is that having heard about the person the movie focuses on, you have no interest in seeing more about her. Having felt entirely apathetic about Holmes since the early days of the Theranos scam, I can’t say I disagree with you.
The article was written by someone who's never seen any of Nathan's other work and is apparently blown away by his skill at and unquenchable fetish for using and deceiving people. Yeah, that's his whole thing. Congrats, you just watched a documentary about psychopaths.
Yes, this is a documentary about a person. And how the documentary is presented will color your perspective of the person. This should (hopefully) be apparent to anyone who's watched a documentary about a person before.
But how does it do it? What tools does it use to that effect? I appreciate that this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous, but what makes this unique from other documentaries that deal with ambiguous subject matter?
There's a big difference in ambiguousness and ambivalence, especially in documentaries. "Ambiguousness" represents an uncertain logical conclusion, whereas "ambivalence" stands in for (the strength of) conflicting forces.
I'd wager that an ambiguous documentary would be close to being unwatchable, and I can't remember that I've seen any. Since I've yet to see You Can See Everything, unfortunately I can't comment about it in any way.
“You sit there believing you’re watching a documentary about a woman who deceived the world, only to discover that you’re also watching a demonstration of how easy it is to deceive you.”
I couldn’t agree more.
A. Is she truly the most manipulative person we've ever seen
B. Largely oblivious to what's happening around her
and not:
- Is she guilty
This movie I would say does not answer those questions, nor do I think seeks to.
To me the subtext of the movie was that a sociopath's manipulation is so strong that even against the heavy counterforce of the filmmaker's bias, it makes it through. I agree with TFA's general premise that the film forces you to confront how easy it is to deceive you -- but it's not the filmmaker who's doing the deceiving. Sociopathic manipulation is about sparking doubt. Gaslighters don't need to prove anything, they just need to plant a "but what if" in some corner of your mind. The fact that the author felt compelled to write TFA at all is ironically a product of that manipulative power.
Another way to think of it is: the documentary makes you think whether, if you were in the room with her in the years that Theranos was operating, you would have fallen for it.
Without spoiling the movie, it's possible for people to be multiple things at once. That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of. The movie is a wild ride.
Thanks!
Surely the documentaries are made in a way that's depicts that very accentued, manipulative, borderline psychopathic person. This is likely more than she was in real life. She might even have been motivated by genuine will to improve the diagnostics field. So yeah you might be "deceived" by these docudramas.
I fear that this kind of poetic write-up muddies the water into "oh, maybe things are more nuanced, and played on her weird personality and background to make things look worse, maybe it wasn't so bad".
People got misdiagnosed and suffered directly because of her. She's every bit guilty of that, as deserving of a harsh judgement as any person directly causing that kind of harm.
Lacan described registers of experience: the Imaginary (visual, sexual, emotional, fantasy), Symbolic (language, associations), and Real (the unsymbolizable, "impossible"). Watching video is immersion in the Imaginary, you get roused, riled up, turned-on, activated, thoughts are connected by paranoia, magical thinking, and aggression. It makes HUGE difference to not not follow the news that way! Again, I'm not bragging, not proud of myself, not espousing a Mr Spock outlook. But it is hard to miss the difference.
"We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not."
She speaks for herself. The author then doesn't bring up a single fact, piece of evidence, or anything else besides just restating the pedestrian premise a few times. I don't share her inability to study a topic in-depth, come to a conclusion or challenge my previously held beliefs, and then pass judgment while attaching a calibrated degree of certainty to the soundness of my conviction.
trying to minimize fraud? what a weird article.
If a person is found not guilty, they are not guilty. To argue otherwise is to undermine the core institution of western civilization.
Separately, Theranos' COO and Holmes' boyfriend at the time was convicted by a separate jury for defrauding patients. Theranos also settled multiple lawsuits for ~$50M and declared bankruptcy soon after.
They didn't do their diligence and do kinda deserve to lose their money.
> Holmes ... did more than defraud investors.
Which was not proven in a court of law as judged by a jury of her peers.
A fun one to ask to rile up Fox News listeners is to ask them which specific law Hillary Clinton is guilty of breaking.
Trump just threatened to jail her, so this is still relevant!
That’s just a random example, there are many such biases people hold where they have a strong belief but no clue where they got that belief.
[1] A study showed that many antivaxers would cheerfully get their kid a shot if offered $50! That’s what their “conviction” is actually worth.
Your comment doesn't seem to exhibit any understanding of the opposing arguments.
Just offering my take of your comment as an impartial observer.
I assume what you meant is that having heard about the person the movie focuses on, you have no interest in seeing more about her. Having felt entirely apathetic about Holmes since the early days of the Theranos scam, I can’t say I disagree with you.