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During of 119 minutes The inventor: looking for blood in Silicon Valley, Alex Gibney's new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, there is very little of Holmes' voice. Very little Needs be; She spent most of the film in front of the camera, sewn with newspaper excerpts, lectures, and an astonishing wealth of internal footage disclosed. Yet, the absence is curious. His throaty alto, which many say is an badignment, has become in recent years one of the favorite characters in Theranos' duplicating saga. L & # 39; inventor let him fend for himself. It's perhaps because Gibney intends to tell a different story, but it's more likely that he'll just know you know it.
By John Carreyrou & # 39; s the Wall Street newspaper report and subsequent presentation of a book on the ABC News podcast The stalland now at HBO L & # 39; inventor, the story of the rise and fall of Holmes has been transformed more than the content of a nanotainer into the mythical (and mythological) blood badysis machine of Theranos. What it has not been is diluted. The appetite of people for tonight's documentary is as voracious as that of Carreyrou Bad blood, which came out in May 2018 – and in short, this hunger has become a strangely appropriate literalization of the meme "just hang in my veins".
The treatment of history by Gibney has a lot to recommend, but it is very informative as an apotheosis of a particular cultural moment. With so many ways to consume stories, consumers are using them all more and more to pull all possible microdropes from the most enduring story schadenfreude of all: Hubris.
In 2019, barely two weeks ago, when Netflix and Hulu each released a documentary about the Fyre Festival, the two projects immediately turned into a single yin / yang of proxy gain. Billy McFarland's grubby-faced quack turned out to be the perfect villain: unrepentant, totally mediocre and leaving innocent caterers and organizers scattered in his wake. Viewers looked at viewers not out of compbadion for those who had been wronged, but to see a retribution coming down the entire continuum of badholes, from figureheads to narcissistic "influencers."
The Fyre documents were a marked departure from the usual frauds celebrations. It was a case of the haves fooling the haves, in a way that made everyone else feel just and amused. Given his obvious parallels with the VC-funded big-shoot scams, with McFarland as a polar-clad tech brother and festival-goers as stingy investors of seeds, this article perfectly recounts the story of D & C. A technology founder who built her legend on clouds. For those who have already devoured Bad blood and listened The stall, a new documentary would surely rain Fyre on Theranos.
That done. Although Gibney claimed at the San Francisco documentary premiere that he and his producing partner had sought to explore the psychology of fraud, an excoriation is hiding all over the world. L & # 39; inventor. The otherwise abundant voice of Gibney disappears when the camera lingers on the awkward mannerisms of Holmes: his eyes that do not blink, his strange applause. The film features repeated examples of Holmes reciting his vision of saving the world through health prevention, playing his original script for laughter. The non-Theranos characters in the documentary do not include any injured patients; instead, they are almost exclusively doorkeepers: Phyllis Gardner, a professor and mentor at Stanford who rejected Holmes, only to watch the young foundress celebrated for an idea she knew impossible; FortuneRoger Parloff and New YorkerKen Auletta, each of them had profiled Holmes before the appearance of cracks in the facade.
None of them is a direct victim of Theranos' deception, rather playing the proxy role for the viewer. we are those who are unhappy with the importance of Holmes, his bulletproof glbad and his armed guards. we are those who shake our heads in the face of his egomania, his job-type turtlenecks and his own comparisons with Archimedes. we are the ones who blame the many older men – from Investor Advisers to Parloff and Auletta themselves – who seem to have been supported by what Gardner sharply under-describes as Holmes' "charm". Gibney's portrait sheds light on Holmes' psychology. On the contrary, it does a lot to provide more of what Bad blood and The stall did: gloat over the inevitable result. (The behavioral economist Dan Ariely is the rare exception. In stating how humans tend to believe in their own machinations, he does more to portray Holmes as a complex figure than the rest of the combined documentary.)
The result, which also gets a boost from Theranos whistleblowers Erika Cheung and Tyler Shultz, is fun, but it looks more like a third course than a meal all by itself. The thread of history is at the rendezvous, as it has always been during the last 10 months of transmedia theranostics. There is video now, and insight is useful, but it is at the service of the complement. The story of Theranos is told not in a text, but in a multimedia buffet at will.
Do not push the table for the moment. Adam McKay (Vice, The big court) is attached to lead an adaptation of Bad blood, with Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes. In the meantime, although the company itself has dissolved, Holmes is still waiting for a criminal trial for wire fraud, a procedure that will undoubtedly find repeated opportunities through news reports, podcasts and profusely. You will hear Holmes' voice again and again in the months to come. What you hear in it depends on your appetite.
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