Drawing Blood from a Stone-Faced Liar
Elizabeth Holmes I was confused, flustered, shaken up, and mad at Joe after seeing the year’s most talked-about film, You Can See Everything , last Sunday. It is an ostensible documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes was CEO of that company, which fraudulently claimed to have developed technology enabling a machine, the Edison, to run a vast array of tests from a single drop of blood. Blood is a fitting metaphor for the epistemological quest at the center of this film; trying to get the truth from Holmes feels like drawing blood from a stone. Joe, maddeningly, emerged from this dizzying experience claiming he understood what he had just seen. He saw black-and-white where I saw only gray. I admit I dozed for a snippet of the film’s three-hour running time, but a brief slumber is understandable, if not entirely justified, given the “over and over again” nature and almost incantatory rhythm of the inquisition between satirist and “documentarian” Nathan Fi...
