Study in power of selfdelusion

The Inventor is a coolly appalling portrait of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal, writes

AS a quick glance at recent headlines will remind you, we are living in deeply fraudulent times. But if there are few people or institutions worthy of our trust anymore, perhaps we can still trust that, eventually, filmmaker Alex Gibney will get around to making sense of it all.

Over the course of his unflagging, indispensable career he has churned out documentaries on Scientology and Enron, Lance Armstrong and Casino Jack — individual case studies in a rich and fascinating investigation of a hustler at work.

Gibney approaches his subjects with the air of an appalled moralist and, increasingly, a grudging connoisseur. His clean, straightforward style, which usually combines smart talking heads, slick graphics and reams of meticulous data, is clearly galvanised by these charismatic individuals, who are pathological in their dishonesty and riveting in their chutzpah.

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Gibney’s latest exercise in coolly measured outrage, is an engrossing companion piece to his other works in this vein. The subject of this HBO documentary is Elizabeth Holmes, the selfstyled biotech visionary who dropped out of Stanford at 19 and founded a company called Theranos, which promised to bring about a revolution in preventive medicine and personal health care. Its topsecret weapon was a compact machine called the Edison, which

could purportedly run more than 200 individual tests from a few drops of blood, obtained with just a prick of the finger.

Holmes’ vision of a brave new world — one in which anyone could quickly and easily obtain a comprehensive, potentially lifesaving snapshot of their health — proved tantalising enough to raise more than $US400 million ($NZ588 million) and earned her a reputation as possibly the greatest inventor since, well, Thomas Edison. Her investors included Betsy DeVos, Rupert Murdoch and the Waltons. Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and James Mattis sat on her board of directors. But that was all before the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou and other investigative journalists exposed glaring faults in the Edison’s design and sent the company’s $US10 billion valuation spiraling downwards. Theranos dissolved last year, and Holmes and former company president Sunny Balwani were charged with conspiracy and fraud.

Full disclosure: As the son of a retired medical technologist who spent more than 30 years testing blood the traditional way, I approached The Inventor with great fascination and more than a little schadenfreude. The movie, for its part, seems both magnetised and repelled by its subject, a reaction that it will likely share with its audience. Gibney is perhaps overly fond of deploying intense, lingering closeups of Holmes’ face and peering deep into her unnerving blue eyes (‘‘She didn’t blink,’’ a former employee recalls). If the eyes are the windows to the soul, The Inventor just keeps looking and looking, as though uncertain whether its subject has one.

The movie is thus not entirely immune to the very spell that it seeks to diagnose — namely, the captivating image of Holmes as a strikingly focused and selfassured young woman thriving within the maledominated ranks of tech innovation. But it submits to that spell, ultimately, in order to shatter it from within. Holmes opted not to participate in the documentary, but her presence is inescapable throughout, due to not only recordings of her many public appearances, but also hours of promotional footage that fell into Gibney’s hands.

When we see Holmes walking around the company’s gleaming Palo Alto offices or revving up her staff, we are effectively seeing Theranos as it sought to present itself to the world. And as Gibney knows, damning his subjects is always less efficient, and less effective, than letting them do it themselves.

And so The Inventor becomes less an expose of whitecollar crime than a study in the power of selfdelusion and corporate megalomania. Gibney’s methods are simple but often brutally effective. He juxtaposes the selfflattering corporate imagery with his own sobering interviews with former Theranos employees, who describe a culture of intense secrecy and paranoia, grotesque technical and ethical malfeasance, unreliable test results and dangerously malfunctioning equipment. There may be no more nightmarish movie image this year than the graphic mockup of the inside of an Edison prototype, a Pandora’s box of infected needles, broken vials and bloodspattered surfaces.

You might leave The Inventor thinking about the dangers of trying to revolutionise something as universal (but also as specific) as human health, or wondering why we are so easily enthralled by the seductive, often specious language of technological disruption. You might also be tempted to read up on Holmes and her continued insistence on seeing herself as not the villain, but the victim in her own story, which suggests she might, in fact, be the biggest sucker of all.

µ The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley premieres on Saturday at 8.30pm, on SoHo 2.