This review appeared in the May 2022 issue of Sight & Sound and is reprinted with permission.
A series about med-tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes unpacks the magical thinking underpinning transformative visions, confidence tricks and the American dream.
Want to know your future wellbeing? A small, sleek box can tell you. All it needs is a drop of blood… If it sounds like a fairy tale, that’s because it is. The premise – the promise – was that a desktop machine equipped with unparalleled, unexplained medical technology could run hundreds of diagnostic tests from minimal blood samples. It was bogus and eventually revealed as such, leading to the implosion of Theranos, the billion-dollar company responsible, and the criminal conviction of its feted founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, in early 2022.
Holmes exerted a powerful fascination in US economic and cultural contexts, both as self-starting, black-turtlenecked blonde messiah of tech and as culpable prime mover of a horrifying project of medical exploitation. Based on an ABC podcast, The Dropout dramatises the saga, showing Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) during her brief time at Stanford, alongside her eager older partner Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews, part Svengali, part stooge) and at the reins of her increasingly dystopian enterprise. Seyfried compellingly conveys the charismatic zeal that saw Holmes make true believers of Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, and the uncannily mixed effects of her attempts at self-fashioning (awkward gait, deepened voice), and the chilling extent of her amoral indifference.
The Dropout is one of several recent series about young women in trouble in America’s recent past and their doomed attempts to navigate fierce-flowing streams of aspiration, identity, gender, criminality and publicity; the peculiar ordeal of the videotaped legal deposition is a recurring motif. Where Pam & Tommy and American Crime Story: Impeachment sympathetically revisit episodes of industrial-scale slut-shaming, The Dropout more closely resembles Inventing Anna in centring an ambivalent or antiheroic figure whose experiences nevertheless expose societal ills far beyond individual capability.
The show is a kind of rake’s progress, then, but not satirical enough, its procedural and semi-farcical aspects (how will Holmes get away with it this time?) too straight-faced to offset its fundamentally alienating protagonist. Yet it invites potent questions. How much rapacious narcissism will be indulged and enabled in the name of disruption? How many things at how many levels, from the psychological to the structural, must go wrong, and be incentivised to go wrong, for so many to invest in a figure as broken and toxic as Holmes as the vehicle of civic transformation and ‘wellness’?
Holmes’s lust for glory and her enablers’ tunnel vision each speak to the belief that reality must surely bend to desire and will. The Dropout is a case study, then, in the magical thinking that underpins transformative visions, confidence tricks and the American dream.
