Theranos-Style Fraud Has Become the Norm

Perhaps Elizabeth Holmes was simply ahead of her time: Today, the Theranos founder’s crimes look less notorious amid a pervasive culture of grift and graft.

Her biotechnology company infamously promised to revolutionize medicine by conducting hundreds of tests on mere pinpricks of blood.

A decade after it fell into disgrace, and three years after she began serving her 11-year federal-prison sentence for defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, Holmes is the subject of a new documentary.

You Can See Everything , directed by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, came about because Holmes and her partner, the hotel heir Billy Evans, invited Fielder, a surrealist sketch comedian, to live with them just before she went to prison.

They allowed him to film whatever he saw.

The result is unsettling, because Holmes’s placid indifference toward the truth has become more familiar than it was when Theranos unraveled.

Holmes, who insists that she wants to be transparent with Fielder, implacably maintains that she did nothing wrong and that Theranos was capable of meeting its promise of technological breakthroughs.

In reality , the company never had a device that could deliver the promised number of tests on tiny blood samples; its machine could run only a handful of basic tests, sometimes inaccurately, and had to secretly rely on conventional analyzers.

Yet the film shows that even in the dwindling days before her sentence began, she and Evans were talking about creating Theranos 2.0. (Evans’s new company, unlike Theranos, involves lasers.) [ Read: Manipulator vs. manipulator ] Fielder, who previously played a cringingly anti-social business consultant in his show Nathan for You and a man who obsessively practices for difficult social interactions in The Rehearsal , is known for inhabiting an absurd persona for awkwardly long periods of time.

He seems shaken from his encounter with someone capable of doing so for longer.

Holmes is one of those people so entangled with the avatars and projections they create—a woman who maintains, despite her conviction on fraud charges, that she has never lied in her life—that the authentic self cannot be found.

Fielder earnestly attempts to learn the truth, but is never able to do so satisfactorily.

To a moviegoer, the effect is exhilarating—like encountering the nested realities of Christopher Nolan’s Inception or the superposition of documentary and fiction in Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (about the real-life case of a downtrodden Iranian cinephile on trial for impersonating a famous movie director).

To a writer who covers American politics, Holmes’s hall of mirrors is uncomfortably familiar.