The Con Next Door
Few characters haunt the American imagination like the con artist. While the gangster and the cowboy excite us, the grifter stands behind them as the image of everything we fear we might become and suspect we already are. From Melville’s The Confidence-Man to Hickey in The Iceman Cometh to The Music Man’s Harold Hill, these personalities act as oracles of our personal and national fate. Like Charon at the River Styx, they usher us to the dark side of the American Dream, frightening figures who whisper in our ears that all of it—our hopes, our ideals, our triumphs—is fraudulent. Rather than liberate the power of human ingenuity, they warn, democracy and free enterprise merely turn us into a leech—or, worse, the leech’s sucker. In a culture that allows for personal reinvention like no other, the line between the con and the king almost vanishes. America gave us Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. It also gave us Ferdinand Ward and Bernie Madoff. At some level that scares us, there’s no difference. The horror of the huckster lies in the fact that you can’t detect him until it’s too late. The gangster is killed at the end of the movie, the cowboy rides away. But the con man walks among us. He marries your daughter and bilks you of your fortune. Worse: she is your daughter.
And her name is Elizabeth Holmes. Fresh off her conviction in Federal court, Holmes has burst back into the public square with the release of the limited series The Dropout on Hulu. Her case transfixes us for all the reasons I just stated. With her performance as the infamous Millennial, Amanda Seyfried adds a new name to the list of indelible American scammers. Played out over eight taut episodes, her portrayal offers us a window into Holmes’s evolution from an everyday, if awkward, teen into a tyrannical tycoon—the founder and CEO of Theranos, the blood testing start-up that defrauded investors of millions and destroyed untold lives. Seyfried not only transforms herself into Holmes in uncanny fashion, but also discloses the way the woman transformed herself. She invites you into the unsettling process of how a Stanford dropout shed her frumpy style and timid personality to birth a mesmeric, disciplined persona that deceived legions of followers and left a trail of devastation in its wake. The show deftly illustrates how Holmes used her self-proclaimed idealism to trade on the good will of others—mentors who admired her for wanting to change the world. When Madoff was unmasked, trust died. When Elizabeth Holmes was exposed, altruism perished, too.
The Theranos saga has gone through many iterations. It began as an exposé in The Wall Street Journal, spawned a book and the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and generated a podcast for ABC. This last installment served as the source material for the show, and while you may know the story from these other media, the film brings its emotional power to you on a whole other level. It begins in 2001 when Holmes, growing up in Houston, witnesses her father (Michel Gill) lose his career as Enron collapses. The director, Michael Showalter, intercuts these shots with a reenactment of Elizabeth’s 2017 deposition in which she stonewalls investigators who seek to uncover the extent of her malpractice. Right away, the symmetries of her story stand out—a woman whose company was a house of cards had a father who was the victim of another. Motivated in part by his ruin, she decides to do everything to avoid the same end. She announces to neighbors at a Christmas party that she wants to become a billionaire and create a product that will revolutionize modern life. Later, her father shows her a drawing she made as a child in which she shares her dreams and he breaks down. Shaken, she dances therapeutically in her room while staring at a poster of Steve Jobs.
After she enrolls at Stanford, she takes her worship of the computer whiz further. Almost obsessive, she searches for a singular idea that will launch her career. What’s sad is that she shows real smarts. She corners a chemistry professor named Channing Robertson (Bill Irwin) to get into his graduate level research study. She tells him that his students have performed their experiment incorrectly, and when she turns out to be right, he lets her in. Unfortunately, this success feeds delusions of grandeur. She presents Channing with the design for a medical patch that will diagnose disease and deliver medication automatically. Channing has doubts, but sends her to Phyllis Gardner (Laurie Metcalf), a professor whom Holmes admires. Gardner pours cold water on the idea; she points out that it’s impossible on technical grounds and that Holmes has clearly never met a real patient. Gardner condescends to the younger woman, but she’s right. When the student tries to press her case—appealing to Gardner’s idealism, then to her feminism—the Boomer cuts her down to size. “Being a woman doesn’t mean you get to skip any of the steps,” she explains.
But Holmes is undeterred. She conceives a new idea: a device the size of an iPhone that will take just a pinprick of blood from your finger and run every test available. People can keep them in their homes, rather than going to a lab, and avoid needles and vials of blood evermore. This machine, she imagines, will alter the healthcare industry the way the Mac changed computers—from IBM behemoths into personal products. Convinced of her genius, Holmes drops out and gets her parents to invest her tuition money into her new company, Theranos. She places Channing on the board and hires a team of engineers. And more: she starts a relationship with one Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), the 37-years old son of Pakistani immigrants. As the series portrays it, the two meet in Beijing on a summer language immersion program. Holmes is the only American taking it seriously. Balwani does as well, and they strike up an unlikely pairing. He tells her that he made millions off a software company he founded, a fact that gives her an erotic charge. As Andrews plays him, Balwani nurses a deep-seated grudge against the establishment, including the medical world for failing to diagnose his father, which led to his death. Holmes holds her attraction at bay for several years, but begins to see him romantically just as she launches Theranos.
She faces a minor problem: the machine doesn’t actually work. Her team puts in punishing hours, yet meets with nothing but failure. Rather than admit defeat, she soldiers on, convinced that if she just hustles enough and brings in the cash, innovation will follow inspiration. All will be well and she will ultimately be vindicated. Galvanized by Jobs, Bill Gates, and other entrepreneurs—and goaded by venture capitalists—she spins a web of deceit that grows more and more tangled. The series captures the halcyon days of Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, complete with the indie rock soundtrack of the Aughts. The writing is tight, showing how Holmes’s lies create intersecting crises that she evades each time by ratcheting up the con. At every stage, someone warns her that she’s crossed a line and abandoned her true self. But at every stage, she refuses to concede and doubles down. This generates feelings of both exhilaration and nausea as you watch. Elizabeth Meriwether’s script blends comedy and drama in seamless fashion. And under the direction of Showalter, Francesca Gregorini, and Erica Waston, the show maintains narrative clarity throughout the multiple plot lines and driving pace.
The creators have assembled a cast of thousands, and there’s hardly a false note among them. As Balwani, Andrews stokes an air of haughty disdain mixed with menace, what with his clipped speech and bruised attitude. Metcalf admirably captures the no-bullshit attitude of Gardner, while Elizabeth Marvel plays Holmes’s mother as emotionally removed and generationally out of touch. William H. Macy is almost unrecognizable as the profane, cantankerous neighbor who tries to capitalize off Elizabeth’s invention. Utkarsh Ambudkar and James Hiroyuki Liao make a solid straight man-funny man duo as the lab techs Rakesh and Edmond, while Stephen Fry gives a tragic turn as Ian Gibbons, Theranos’s chief biochemist. Kate Burton lends her stage nobility to her role as his wife, an inspired bit of casting. Josh Pais, Alan Ruck, Andrew Leeds, and Rich Sommer share side-splitting banter as hapless executives from Walgreens driven mad by Holmes’s games—until they join her. They deliver much-needed laughs just as Elizabeth’s guile reaches astonishing proportions.
It’s always a pleasure to see Irwin, and he draws on his clown background to play a doc who’s a dupe. The character actor Michael Ironside gives a brass-tacks performance as Don Lucas, an early investor who’s also scammed by Holmes. She made a speciality of deceiving old white men (the name, actually, of the fourth episode) and her list of victims included the statesman George Shultz, played by Sam Waterston here as a charmed grandfather. In fact, Shultz’s grandson, Tyler (Dylan Minnette) worked for Theranos and became one of the biggest whistleblowers in the company, over the fierce objections of his patriarch.
But the show belongs to Seyfried, in the end—her performance grounds the series. Holmes took her con to the level of a cult; as Seyfried plays it, her unblinking stare hypnotizes you. The actress reveals the CEO as she develops her alter-ego, dropping her voice into that unsettling low register we’ve become familiar with. The scene where she achieves this feat really disturbs you. As Showalter directs, it’s as if Holmes has become Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. She stares into a mirror, her split psyche captured by dueling cameras, the way Brian DePalma does with Michael Caine in his psycho-killer picture Dressed to Kill (1980). This is the swindler as a mixture of narcissism, sociopathy, and multiple-personality disorder. You see how Holmes must delude herself to her core, lest she suffer a mental break—she’s both the perpetrator and victim of her own deceit. You’ve heard of cognitive dissonance, but she takes it to another dimension. In the wake of the scandal, she’s accused Balwani of exerting a Svengali effect on her, but as the show portrays it, the manipulation went in both directions: a kind of sexual-professional codependency. Seyfried captures Holmes’s mannerisms without making them affected—the tics rise out of her monomaniacal drive for success.
It’s that very success that comes in for indictment by the show. Holmes named her machine the Edison, which is ironic in ways that no doubt escaped her. Thomas Edison was, like her, a put-on persona and a wild self-publicist. And like her, Jobs, and Gates, he didn’t invent anything original so much as redesign products already in existence—in his case, light bulbs developed by everyday tinkerers. Nevertheless, he seemed to incarnate the qualities of the self-made man and individualism that laissez-faire capitalism names the end-all and be-all. But Edison actually saw himself as a bulwark against industrial capital, not its avatar.
At his lab, “The Wizard of Menlo Park” cultivated a culture that valued “ingenuity, improvement, and fellowship more than wealth,” as historian Richard White says in The Republic for Which It Stands (2017). The inventor gave his employees control over their work, unlike the robber barons of that day (and ours). He believed that the person who mastered a set of skills knew best how to use them. The jobs were demanding, but his employees controlled their labor conditions—they decided how and when to go about tasks and meet deadlines. “The Menlo Park factory was a loud, rowdy, raucous place,” White relates, “full of nightly sing-alongs around a large organ, gaming, practical jokes, and midnight feasts.” When a worker finally asked Edison about the rules of the place, the response took him aback: “Hell, there are no rules here. We’re trying to accomplish something.”
If Edison chafed against the commerce of his day, Holmes, by contrast, is its embodiment. As Seyfried plays it, the CEO turned her company into a police state. Holmes was an autocrat who put her employees under surveillance, pit them against each other, and dictated their every move. She stole their freedom, annihilated their creativity, and quashed all fun. Her totalitarian rule reached into their hearts and minds, destroying the moral core of those around her and even driving some to death. Holmes justifies her behavior throughout the show by comparing herself to Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. And the infuriating thing is, at some level, she’s right.
There’s little ethical daylight between her behavior and that of other tech giants, or any workplace that creates a hierarchy between bosses and plebes. The only difference is that her company failed, while theirs succeeded—and now, as democracy disintegrates on social media, we’re wondering if such “success” was really worth it. The Theranos scandal shouldn’t surprise us—it’s the inevitable result of an economic system that incentivizes greed, ruthlessness, and personal ambition over the common good. Though Holmes is the face of today’s Gilded Age, she’s hardly its cause. If anything, The Dropout doesn’t explore these systemic problems enough. Nevertheless, it makes you reel at the vices of neoliberalism, shake your fists at our for-profit health system, and wretch at the sight of the new American con artist. And if the show’s correct, she’s everywhere.