Amanda Seyfried in The Dropout Photo: Amanda Seyfried in The Dropout
In the end, it was a good idea. Affordable, non-invasive home blood tests offering real-time analysis? This is a good idea, especially in a country where healthcare is often expensive and unaffordable. It came from Elizabeth Holmes, who dropped out of Stanford, whose good idea turned into a $ 9 billion company. In 2015, the truth about Holmes’ technology – that it didn’t work – was revealed. Books, podcasts, and documentaries appeared, each revealing the depths of the founder’s deception. Last January, she was convicted of four counts of fraud. She faces up to 20 years in prison.
But Terranos? It’s still a good idea. In Silicon Valley, where cryptocurrency now reigns, that means something. This makes Theranos one of the more complex and nuanced stories of Silicon Valley fraud. Theranos is not Juicero. He could help people. And Holmes, a female CEO at Sea of Technology Brothers, was easy to support, even with that curiously deep voice and annoying, unblinking look.
“I’m in a hurry” / “Satori” / “Green juice”
B-
B-
“I’m in a hurry” / “Satori” / “Green juice”
Amanda Seyfried plays the eccentric Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout, who dedicates her first three episodes to Holmes’ evolution in the icy prodigy with a turtleneck, famously insisting on “not showing excitement,” “speaking infrequently,” and calling immediately. of nonsense. ” Seyfried finds nuances of this future intensity in her image of teenage Holmes, who opposes the frivolity of her peers in her efforts to be taken seriously at Stanford and approaches ugly expressions of emotion – her father cries, for example – with a mixture of curiosity. and a pity. When a family friend asked what she wanted to pursue, she replied emphatically, “I want to be a billionaire.” Seyfried’s supply is charged: for someone who worships technology giants like Steve Jobs, a word like “billionaire” is not a fortune, but a rare social status. Millionaires are just rich; billionaires are changing the world.
This is an attractive performance, but in these early episodes there is an arrangement that balances out the peculiarities of Elizabeth’s journey. The cultivation of her early patents is disguised by brief conversations about the “beauty” of microfluidics and long, meaningful glances at her fingertips. an older technological millionaire with whom she develops a romantic relationship. Seyfried and Andrews have chemistry, but there is knowledge of the scenes of their courtship, a lack of danger that fails to capture the truly strange vibrations of their union. The same sense of knowledge extends to her unfortunate early encounters with venture capitalists. Elizabeth’s story is one of a kind, but these scenes are reminiscent of other biographical films.
G / O Media may receive a commission
So smart
It can be used to make video calls, stream your favorite shows and manage your smart home from one easy place.
What works better is the nuance of evolution itself. Elizabeth’s hardening is depicted as multi-stage. Drawing on Holmes’ testimony last year, the show portrays Sunny as an abusive and controlling, corrupting presence that she saw in Terranos (and Elizabeth) as an opportunity to hide in renewed relevance. More guilty (and more interesting) is Silicon Valley, where hype culture forces creators to go overboard with promises (and often cheat) in their efforts to get the money they can help deliver. Finally, there is Elizabeth herself, whose belief in her own technology is both admirable and misleading, driven by an arrogant tendency to believe in her own advertising. This is Silicon Valley in short – pressure, money, ego – but the danger is that not everyone who falsifies it will succeed in the end. In the first few minutes, we were told that technology didn’t work, so what these episodes did was study how far a company could counterfeit. This portends what is to come.
Amanda Seyfried and Navin Andrews in The DropoutPhoto: Beth Dubber / Hulu
It’s the same with The Dropout’s sense of humor. Michael Showalter (Wet Hot American Summer, The Big Sick) compensates for the show’s lack of visual brilliance by intertwining drama with striking, grim comic images – the Theranos machine doesn’t work, belching a drop of blood – and characters who portray the absurdities of startup culture and the super-rich. . Of course, there are the cold-blooded brothers of technology, but there are also Larry Ellison (Hart Bochner), who publishes Buddhist philosophy, and Richard Fuis of William H. Macy, a parasitic patent collector and friend of Elizabeth’s parents who throws a wrench at her. a story of purity. malice. Macy’s slimy turn with dead eyes drips with bored malice; he is just such a petty, brutal tyrant that you will find in the pocket of the United States, where people have more money than reason.
However, it is more than just a foil for Elizabeth. In this context, it symbolizes Silicon Valley in its most rotten form. It symbolizes the creator who gets rich from the promise, not the fulfillment of that promise. And that is where the story of Terranos exists, between promise and fulfillment, idea and fulfillment. Think of the short scene in which Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry) tells how Elizabeth identified herself as an “inventor” in the patent applications for the Theranos blood test device, even though she was not involved “in any scientific way” in the creation of Theranos. real product. What does this say about Elizabeth? And after all, how different are she and Fuis?
Homeless observations
- The Dropout is based on the eponymous podcast from ABC News. I would also recommend John Carreiro’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in Silicon Launch, which many consider to be the final text of Theranos.
- One of the best exchanges comes at the beginning of episode three, when customs ask Sunny what his profession is and he replies, “I don’t have one.” Again, we are faced with the question of what a person actually does.
- Shawolter’s comedic moments do appear in episode 2, where Elizabeth makes everyone give dozens of blood samples by finger pricking. Bandaged fingers and piles of bloody tissue? Fun.
- What’s going on with this soundtrack? We recklessly jump between the nostalgia of the 90’s (LEN), the ambient (Juliana Barwick), the country (Alabama), dance-pop (Robin) and a whole bunch of late indies (Passion Pit, Wolf Parade). Choose a mood and stick to it.
- However, Seyfried’s dance moves, like Gumby’s, are a pleasure.
- Elizabeth: “I don’t feel the way other people feel.” I hope they irritate this thought more because I still don’t see it in Seyfried’s performance.