LOVING THE LIE: ELIZABETH HOLMES, THOMAS EDISON, AND ALEX GIBNEY S. Topiary Landberg The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019), about the infamous biotech company Theranos and its enigmatic founder, Elizabeth Holmes, is the latest documentary from Alex Gibney. The Theranos/Holmes story is a perfect vehi- cle for Gibney, a writer-director who specializes in essayistic films that detail the complex nexus of dishonesty, ruthless- ness, hubris, and painful reckonings. His filmography is filled with documentaries that fastidiously recount the dark underbelly of outrageous acts by rich and powerful people who eventually get their comeuppance—such as Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), The Armstrong Lie (2013), Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (2010), and Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015). And while this most recent film follows Gib- ney’ s tried-and-true formula for investigating well-known scandals ripped from recent headlines, The Inventor is unique in his oeuvre in one essential way: its central charac- ter is a woman. In Gibney’ s film about a central female character, he both foregrounds the role that gender plays in this multi-billion- dollar fraud and at the same time decenters female perspec- tives. Instead of trying to understand Holmes’ s motivations and provide insight into her experience, The Inventor focuses on the question of how so many powerful and experienced men could have been seduced by Holmes’ s vision and fallen prey to her allegedly innocent wiles. In his telling, Gibney, as the film’ s narrator and director, reinforces an ancient sexist trope while creating the illusion that his film transcends misogyny. The Holmes/Theranos story is a subject well timed for its 2019 release. As a fantasy for the Trump era, The Inventor of- fers viewers a savory tale of outrageous, bald-faced deceit in which lies are finally exposed and its victims cathartically re- leased from their grip. Of course, in this post-#MeToo era in which the failed presidential campaign of Hilary Clinton is still an open wound for many, The Inventor offers HBO an opportunity to present the story of another seemingly femi- nist heroine whose outsized ambition seemed to catapult her to success until a painful and shocking reckoning brought her down. In the film, Elizabeth Holmes is being heralded as Silicon Valley’ s youngest female CEO, celebrated as embodying a welcome answer to the tech industry’ s problem of intractable sexism. Holmes cultivates an image of herself as a young ge- nius entrepreneur, exceptional in the tech world not only for her gender but also for her avowedly humanitarian motives. Yet when she is eventually revealed to be incapable of telling the truth, the film shifts to portray Holmes as a convenient cypher for Silicon Valley malefaction and an emblem of the lack of ethics in the tech industry generally. The Inventor rep- resents Holmes’ s success as a condition of her exceptionalism: her being a female visionary entrepreneur is an outsized as- pect of her appeal and the reason she is able to garner so much positive attention and support. Yet her fall is portrayed as just one more spectacular implosion resulting from every- day business-as-usual recklessness. Roger Parloff of Fortune and Ken Auletta of the New Yorker , both prominent male journalists who wrote articles that directly contributed to her ability to raise millions of dollars of venture capital for Ther- anos, admit to Gibney in on-camera interviews that they were seduced by Holmes and her story at least in part be- cause she was a woman and her gender made for a great story. Gibney makes the point that many, including a number of Theranos employees, were intoxicated by the idea that Sil- icon Valley’ s new wunderkind was finally female. The film makes the point that this response was true for both men and women, but was especially poignant for one of the few women to be interviewed in the film. Former Theranos em- ployee Erika Cheung tells Gibney that, when first hired by the company, she enthusiastically regarded Holmes as a female role model. Yet one of the only other women inter- viewed in the film, Phyllis Gardner, is the only person who 64 FALL 2020 Film Quarterly, Vol. 74, Number 1, pp. 64–68, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/FQ.2020.74.1.64. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-pdf/74/1/64/413346/fq_74_1_064.pdf by S Topiary Landberg on 01 October 2020