The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019) - Review
Originally published April 2019While I was watching the HBO Documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, I was constantly getting flashbacks to my experience watching the Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. These documentaries have more in common than a generic title followed by a more specific subtitle: the tone, the pacing, and the simple fact that both documentaries were about compulsive liars who had managed to fool countless people and make millions of dollars in the process. The big difference was that, while Fyre was about a botched music festival, The Inventor's story had some higher stakes and was about something with a little more influence and impact on our society as a whole.
While this may be an unintended consequence of having watched both documentaries, it is somewhat refreshing and reassuring that people of the highest caliber when it comes to wealth and power in the US can be just as easily fooled as some rich kid who wants to see Blink 182 in the Bahamas. Obviously, it's also a bit discouraging that people with such power can be so easily misled by a woman in a turtleneck with a dream. Nonetheless, this juxtaposition of emotions is to be expected when the story "The Emperor Has No Clothes" occurs in reality.
Image: HBO/Warner Bros.
Pros
Brings the audience up to speed about what occurred and why the story is important
Spends some time discussing the social and economic impact of a story like this
Gives more insight and necessary criticism of the way businesses can be run when they have the necessary resources
Cons
Story is still incomplete; haven't quite seen the entire fallout of the thing
A few significant people involved in the lie aren't interviewed much and it would have been interesting to get more input from their side
A lot of the footage and discussion with Elizabeth Holmes was footage recorded before she was found out; it would have been nice to get her perspective after the empire had crumbled
Additional Thoughts
The Inventor does the right thing by bringing its viewers up to speed on the big fiasco by starting at the beginning and following through the timeline until the inevitable end. For those who don't know, Elizabeth Holmes is a young woman who managed to convince the rest of the world that she was the second coming of Steve Jobs, right down to the black turtlenecks. While her "invention" wasn't quite as obviously ubiquitous as a small computer you can keep in your pocket, it was still ambitious and significant. Holmes wanted to reinvent the technologies and techniques around the process of drawing and analyzing blood. To an outside observer, you might not think this is a big deal, but there are several reasons why you would be incorrect in assuming so.
Image: HBO/Warner Bros.
Despite the fact that Holmes' invention and company were never a complete reality, the idea and the purpose were there. How blood samples are taken and analyzed is still a somewhat archaic practice, requiring a significant drawing for each individual who wants to get tested for a variety of ailments or conditions. This practice is also mostly controlled by a small group of powerful companies that have a near-monopoly on the business and have very little incentive to change their methods. Holmes' invention, The Edison, was supposed to change all that by being a small device no bigger than a slow cooker in your kitchen that could take a single drop of your blood and run the same tests just as accurately. More importantly, its proximity and convenience were going to be enough to make sure that you didn't have to wait until you felt ill to see your doctor to schedule a blood draw. You could do it in your own home and know what your results said; it would be complete transparency.
That was the dream anyway. The reality was that the device never fully functioned in the way it was promised. That didn't stop Holmes and other key players involved in her company Theranos from keeping the story alive as long as possible. The Inventor compares Holmes to other big inventors before her that obviously inspired her like Jobs and Edison. Most importantly, it compares her to their faults, like how Edison was a charlatan and often lied about his achievements until he could make the lie true. "Fake it till you make it" is a phrase mentioned multiple times in the documentary, and for good reason. That was certainly the plan for Theranos and Holmes' dream.
Image: HBO/Warner Bros.
The Inventor does a good job of giving you the backstory about Holmes and her quick ascension, along with all the important people who helped bring her there. Using a lot of leftover marketing footage and interviews, the documentary manages to tell a story that feels much more intimate than other documentaries because a lot of it includes face-to-face interviews with Holmes. You also get to see the level of frustration and cynical disbelief about the whole story from the perspective of engineers who worked on the projects and the journalists who helped tell Holmes' story. It's fascinating, entertaining, and informative.
Perhaps what I liked most was that The Inventor was willing to bring up the psychology behind the lie and discuss how these sorts of stories influence us as people and as a culture. A few social experiments are brought up about how people behave when dealing with someone else's money and how that behavior changes when it's "for a good cause." Perhaps just as fascinating as the experiments themselves is the behavior of people involved with Theranos' lie and the "fake it till you make it" strategy. There were those who actively knew things weren't working and who wanted to keep that secret, but then there were the people who had plenty of evidence available to them to prove the lie but chose not to see it, due to the dream and the power of celebrity. While Theranos went from being worth $10 billion to less than $0 overnight, it seems inevitable to see a story like this occur again before you know it because it's something that seems to keep happening in our society.
Image: HBO/Warner Bros.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
The Inventor is another stylish HBO documentary that manages to inform as much as it entertains. While other HBO documentaries haven't always managed to provide as much information as possible, The Inventor definitely educates you pretty quickly on the whole Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes story, while still taking some time to point out how it could all have happened in the first place, and what might be done in the future to prevent something like this from happening again. It's an inherently intriguing story and it's deftly handled here.
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