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What is it nearly con artists that fascinates us? Correct at present our entertainment platforms are crammed with shows about real-life mountebanks and charlatans.

On Netflix lone yous accept documentaries including The Tinder Swindler and The Boob Primary – both dealing with loathsome male person grifters – and Bad Vegan, about a meat-hesitant female person fraudster. In that location's as well the rambling mini-series Inventing Anna, which dramatises the exploits of the fake heiress Anna Sorokin.

And now on Disney+ in that location is The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried as the enigmatic Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the dodgy biotech start-up Theranos. Once feted every bit America'southward first self-made female person billionaire, Holmes was recently convicted of defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars. When sentenced later this twelvemonth, she'll face a maximum penalty of 20 years' imprisonment.

The Dropout aims to "humanise" Holmes, which is easier said than washed. Of all the celebrity fraudsters, Holmes might exist the hardest ane to get a handle on. Her story has been told multiple times now, but e'er from the outside, with no direct input from Holmes herself. The definitive book about the Theranos affair is John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, published in 2018. Alex Gibney'due south documentary The Inventor came out a year subsequently. So did The Dropout, the podcast on which the new series is based.

Even after consuming all iii of those projects, you could be forgiven for still wanting to know more than about Holmes. She's a maddeningly elusive character. We know what she did, but nosotros don't know what she was thinking when she did it. Even when she testified at her trial, Holmes didn't provide a coherent business relationship of her motives. Indeed, she denied she'd done anything wrong. Mayhap she even believed it. We know then little about the inner Holmes that we can't rule anything out.

Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in the Dropout (left), and the real Elizabeth Holmes.

Holmes dropped out of college at 19 to constitute Theranos – the name was a mashup of the words therapy and diagnosis. Before long, she was telling the world that her company had developed a portable blood-testing device chosen the Edison. Housed in a beat about the size of a PC belfry, the Edison was supposedly capable of running at least 200 of the tests most commonly washed in pathology labs. And it could do so past using just a drop or two of blood fatigued from the fingertip, eliminating the need to stick big nasty needles into patients' veins.

The trouble was, none of information technology was true. The details are complicated, but the long and short of information technology is that the Edisons never worked. Nor was it actually possible, even in a conventional lab, to run a whole suite of accurate tests using blood drawn from the fingertip.

To conceal these awkward facts, Holmes lied to investors and systematically faked test results. In the process, she separated large sums of cash from very prominent people. The chemist's concatenation Walgreens sank $US140 million into its doomed "partnership" with Theranos. Rupert Murdoch invested $US125 meg in the company – and wound up selling his stake for precisely one dollar.

Holmes (pictured here with former US president Bill Clinton) rubbed shoulders with political and business elite before her world came crashing down. Credit:Getty Images

What went through Holmes's head while she was doing all this? The non-fiction sources won't tell y'all. The Holmes they give u.s.a. is a kind of Silicon Valley Frankenstein's monster, cobbled together from borrowed fragments of other people's lives. Her blackness turtlenecks came from Steve Jobs. The college dropout motif had echoes of Beak Gates. Her motivational mantras came from Mark Zuckerberg ("Move fast and pause things") and Yoda ("Practice or do not. At that place is no effort.")

When a announcer asked Holmes to pick the ane word that all-time described her, she came back with "mission-oriented." What kind of person thinks that's even a word? Was anyone home behind the miasma of jargon and the unblinking water ice-blue eyes? Holmes's persona seemed to be a willed construction, built around an upstanding dead zone.

Elizabeth Holmes (centre) arriving at court in Jan. Credit:AP

The Dropout, which was made without Holmes's co-operation, doesn't pretend to take made whatever factual discoveries that definitively cleft the mystery of what fabricated her tick. The show'southward creator, Elizabeth Meriwether, has set out to penetrate the enigma imaginatively, using invented scenes and dialogue to tell us what Holmes might have been thinking as the scenery collapsed around her.

Every bit for Seyfried, she has the unenviable task of portraying a graphic symbol who was herself a kind of role-histrion or actress. Seyfried gets many things right nigh Holmes, including the slouching posture and the ungainly, muppet-like walk. But one thing she doesn't quite nail is the optics. Holmes'south eyes kept you out. Seyfried's allow you in. Actors express what they're feeling, whereas liars hide it. When Seyfried's Holmes feels worried, she looks worried. Paradoxically, she comes across as a realer person than the existent Holmes ever did.

Elizabeth Holmes featured on the comprehend of "Fortune" mag in 2014. Credit: Supplied

Why is that? Was there something radically wrong with Holmes? There are enough of online pundits who think and so. They'll tell you that the emotionless and manipulative Holmes ticks many boxes on the famous psychopath checklist. They'll tell yous that chief executive is the number-one occupation favoured by psychopaths.

There are moments when The Dropout seems to flirt with the psychopath theory. "I don't experience things the mode other people feel things," Seyfried'southward Holmes admits. In one scene she coldly watches while a young woman breaks down in tears. Later on, she performs an identical crying jag of her own when the Theranos board threatens to sack her.

The implication is that Holmes lacks authentic emotions of her own, and has to simulate them by aping the behaviour of other people. This is another mark of the psychopath, if you ask the online diagnosticians.

Amanda Seyfried seems, in many ways, more human than the real Elizabeth Holmes has. Credit:Disney

There's besides the intriguing matter of Holmes'due south phonation. Early in her public career, Holmes seems to have made a conscious decision to start speaking in a robotic, put-on baritone. Again, the online Holmes-watchers have had a lot of fun with this fact, uploading snippets of one-time interviews in which Holmes seems to drib her baby-sit and briefly speak in her natural vocalisation.

The Dropout shows Holmes working on her new phonation in front of a mirror. When she debuts it during a conversation with a board member, he asks if she'south coming down with a cold.

The fake voice is an important clue if we want to get to the bottom of the Elizabeth Holmes mystery. And then is the related fact that Holmes used to write little notes reminding herself to curb her emotions. "I evidence no excitement," one of them said. "ALL ABOUT BUSINESS," said another.

If Holmes had to remind herself to behave like an automaton, does that hateful she really wasn't one? Or did the mask go function of who she was? Did she article of clothing it so long that she rewired her personality, inadvertently short-circuiting her moral conscience?

In Gibney'due south documentary, the Theranos whistleblower Erika Cheung says something that encourages this suspicion. "I don't feel like it's a common cold-blooded scam," she says. "… Information technology started off as something small-scale, like one lie, and snowballed into this really crazy situation."

Jennifer Lawrence is slated to play Elizabeth Holmes next. Credit:AP

In other words, Holmes wasn't a con artist in the classic sense. She was no Bernie Madoff or Charles Ponzi. She didn't set out with the crass aim of ripping people off. And she never cashed in her shares and did a bunk, as conventional swindlers tend to do.

If she wasn't a con creative person, what was she? The Dropout tries various theories on for size, but never settles on a single respond. And maybe information technology'due south better that it doesn't. The testify allows us – compels u.s.a. – to debate the question among ourselves, and come up with answers of our own.

My preferred theory is that Holmes was her own showtime victim. She was a zealot, a true believer. She conned other people only afterwards successfully conning herself.

"I'thou gonna modify the world," she frequently said. She never seemed to stop believing she would, even as the evidence piled up that she wasn't going to. She knew her machines didn't piece of work, and lied to cover that upward. But she sincerely seems to accept believed that the malfunctions were mere glitches on the road to glory. After all, hadn't she named her automobile after Thomas Edison, who once said, "I have not failed; I've but found x,000 ways that won't piece of work"?

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Nor tin can you blame Holmes for believing the stories she told herself about Theranos, given how eagerly the media echoed those fantasies back at her. America fawned over her as if she really was the new Steve Jobs, even though she'd never invented anything that demonstrably worked.

In the terminate, Holmes proved that cocky-deception tin can exist seriously bad for business. But for a long fourth dimension her delusional self-belief made her a formidably constructive liar.

Indeed, that seems to exist exactly why man beings evolved the capacity for self-charade in the first place. "We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others," the biologist Robert Trivers has written. When we knowingly lie, we give off signals that beguile our lack of confidence. If nosotros believe our ain lies, other people are very likely to believe them too.

Perhaps this is why nosotros find Holmes so compelling. We all lie to ourselves. Nigh of us don't practise information technology on Holmes's calibration. Simply nosotros can simply about imagine landing ourselves in our ain smaller version of the monstrous prepare she got herself into, by persistently ignoring the divergence between her dreams and reality.

Anyway, the chat near Holmes goes on. Even as we debate the merits of The Dropout, a movie based on Carreyrou's Bad Blood is in the works, with Jennifer Lawrence set to play Holmes.

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Elizabeth Holmes hasn't lost her knack for making consummate strangers part with money, then. Her swindling days are behind her, but she retains the power to make the states pay for entertainments that seek to explain her. And the search seems bound to exist countless, since Holmes has never explained herself, and probably never will. And even if she does, how will we know she's non lying?

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Source: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/why-no-show-book-podcast-or-film-can-get-elizabeth-holmes-quite-right-20220328-p5a8ir.html

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