Don’t Get the Wrong Idea About ‘The Dropout’

[Editor’s note: The following article contains spoilers for “You Can See Everything.”]

Among the snippets of “The Dropout” shown in “You Can See Everything,” Amanda Seyfried dancing to “I’m in a Hurry (And Don’t Know Why)” is by far my favorite.

The scene sees Seyfried portraying a 17-year-old Elizabeth Holmes as she stares intently at a poster of Steve Jobs, semi-rhythmically churning her arms and letting herself be seduced by the Apple inventor’s image. As she bends and sways to Alabama’s country-rock classic (in the first of many dance scenes scattered throughout “The Dropout”), it’s as if her ambition is trying to shake free from her body. Her focus shifts, from implicit personal frustrations to an idea sparked by her idol, but it never wavers. She’s determined. Driven. Her famously imposing peepers bulge with excitement.

In the context of the film, the scene is ridiculous. On a computer screen in front of the real Holmes is an exaggerated version of the Theranos founder, who’s watching along with her husband, Billy Evans, and documentarian, Nathan Fielder. When Fielder asks, “Did you really do that?” the answer is a foregone conclusion: Of course she didn’t. And if she did, she would never admit to it now.

In the context of the show, the scene is also ridiculous. The exaggerated version of Holmes isn’t meant to be a reenactment, like what Fielder orchestrates with Seyfried later in the movie. It’s a character, used to illustrate fundamental truths about the elusive tech founder and convicted fraudster: She’s obsessed with changing the world, she can’t wait to get started, and — perhaps most importantly — she doesn’t know why.

Therein lies the merit, the distinction, the ingenuity of “The Dropout,” which some audiences may struggle to recognize in the immediate, mind-bending aftermath of “You Can See Everything.” Even Seyfried, who emerges in the doc’s second half as the voice of the people and the project’s most valuable performer, struggles to defend the show after watching Holmes watch it. When pressed about her portrayal, a visibly rattled Seyfried hides behind the simplest explanation: “The Dropout” is a fictionalized TV show, and she’s playing a character.

That’s true, it’s just not the whole truth. It’s understandable for an actor to be a bit thrown when confronting a reality she’d previously only been able to play out in her head. (Seyfried meeting Holmes’ children, presumably without their mother’s knowledge, is one of the movie’s squirmiest moments.) But the show only needs defending if you haven’t seen it; if your main impression is from the film — where it’s contained to a section enmeshed in Elizabeth’s perspective — and not from first-hand experience within Elizabeth Meriwether’s probing, measured, and gleefully entertaining miniseries.

The show’s take on Holmes depicts the facts to interrogate the person. The movie’s take on Holmes directly interrogates the person to try to uncover the facts. When taken together, the unambiguous character Seyfried plays in the series stands shoulder to shoulder with the very ambiguous character Holmes may or may not be playing in the documentary: unknowable, yet — no matter what you believe — still ridiculous.

Before going any further, a quick reminder: Comparison is the thief of joy. No one needs to believe “The Dropout” is better than “You Can See Everything” to recognize the artistic achievements in both. While it’s always tempting in our list-making, awards-crazed, oft-repetitive entertainment era to elevate one project by claiming its superiority over another, such facile contentions tend to provoke more than they stimulate. They’re also particularly silly when connecting two distinct mediums, like film and TV, which already face a cultural power imbalance. There are many forms of art, and art is subjective. So let’s not waste time fighting over which vision of Elizabeth Holmes is superior. Instead, let’s see what they tell us about Holmes, together.

“The Dropout” never pretends to understand everything about Holmes, and it has that in common with “You Can See Everything.” Despite the documentary’s fanatical quest to determine, as The Atlantic’s David Sims puts it, “whether Holmes is a master manipulator or someone so deeply convinced of her own genius that she can’t distinguish fiction from fact,” Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim end up reveling in her inscrutability as well. How we decide what we know about another person’s thoughts and feelings — what we really know — is up to the individual who’s deciding, and what the movie claims to know is decidedly, pointedly torn.

“The Dropout” is less ambiguous, but that doesn’t make it definitive. Yes, the show fictionalizes real events to tell a digestible, entertaining story. And yes, viewers will come away with the impression that Elizabeth Holmes lied her way to fame and fortune, over and over, knowingly and willfully. But the fraud depicted in “The Dropout” is based on the facts, and their role in Holmes’ story still matters. It matters quite a bit.

The Hulu series goes beyond recapping the ABC News reports that inspired it. It’s one of the rare biopics that refuses to reduce its subject’s motivations to a single transformative moment in their past, or place the blame on societal ills, or flatten her into an evil, unfeeling monster. It allows for the unknown, be it a rock that’s yet to be turned over or the grand ineffability of human nature. And while the documentary keeps its tight framing on the Holmes’ household, brilliantly replicating the bewitching immersion of spending time with “Liz,” “The Dropout” takes the same wide lens it gave Holmes and applies it to the sweeping consequences of her crimes.

There’s her fellow scientists, whose experienced voices point out the ethical lines Holmes’ crosses to get Theranos funded. (Stephen Fry is so well-cast — and so searingly heartbroken — as Ian Gibbons, the chief scientist Holmes betrays, fires, rehires, and betrays again.) There’s company executives she manipulates into buying in, motivated as much by the alleged altruism of her product as their own FOMO over the Silicon Valley tech boom. (Episode 4 is perfectly, almost pityingly titled “Old White Men.”) There’s the slew of professional sources Theranos intimidates and the college kids they go after in court, dozens of innocent people who come to represent the millions of people who were hurt, some irreparably, by Holmes’ company.

Holmes, of course, does not come off well here, but she shouldn’t. Actions speak louder than words, and her actions, as proven in court, are the show’s focus. “You Can See Everything” is less interested in what happened than why it happened. With their unprecedented access to Holmes, Fielder and Oppenheim aim to determine if their subject knew she was lying (and still is) or if she “just thinks differently,” to paraphrase Evans’ explanation.

Holmes is much easier to sympathize with if your impression is limited to her — her story, her life, and her family, which make up the bulk of the movie. So when the occasional person is asked if they’ve heard of Elizabeth Holmes and they simply cite “the Hulu show,” it’s easy to feel frustrated on her behalf. No one likes being spoken for, and Holmes had zero control over how she was depicted in “The Dropout.”

That points to a larger problem in our culture. Turning everything into entertainment, from the nightly news to people’s lives, makes us dumber. But it doesn’t mean the show itself is problematic. In a few years, people might respond to the same question (“Have you heard of Elizabeth Holmes?”) by saying they saw “the Nathan Fielder documentary.” Would that mean they’re more informed? More understanding? Does it bring them closer to the truth about Holmes, even when the documentary itself admits the closer we get, the less comprehensible she becomes?

Sometimes a healthy distance provides greater clarity, and while I wouldn’t say either project offers a definitive take on Holmes, that’s partly because neither claims it has. Both “The Dropout” and “You Can See Everything” ultimately contend that no matter what context you’re given — news reports, court documents, old interviews, books, TV shows, documentaries — Holmes remains a mystery.

Which brings us to the question of “characters.” In “You Can See Everything,” Holmes tries to get The New York Times to retract a statement attributed to her about Jennifer Lawrence potentially playing her in a movie: “They’re not playing me,” she said. “They’re playing a character I created.” The implication is Holmes would never admit to creating a character, because that would mean she was conscious of creating a character from the beginning — of putting on a persona to get what she wants. But if she’d done that, then she’d be admitting to knowingly deceiving people, which she can’t admit, since it would be tantamount to acknowledging fraud.

When exposed to her persona — the voice, the black turtleneck, the photo of her holding the tiny vial of blood (which she supposedly hates) — it’s hard to believe what you’re seeing is natural. But the alternative, that she’s been in character in front of every camera that’s ever been thrust in front of her, sounds equally impossible.

“The Dropout” lives in the first belief. It invites the incredulity sparked by Holmes’ bizarre persona through a heightened tone and within Seyfried’s all-in performance. You see her construct the character she’s going to play for the world because you need to see it in order to believe anyone else would believe in this woman and invest in her company. The series lets the facts of what happened provide whatever answers there are regarding Holmes’ inner truth, while using Seyfried’s character as a sometimes legible, sometimes illegible cypher.

“You Can See Everything” is more open to the second belief, or at least starts there, by holding some sympathy for the “real” Holmes. Fielder and Oppenheim don’t set out to make fun of a woman who’s been endlessly mocked for the past decade-plus, and the longer you sit with her, the more possible it feels that she’s been misrepresented and misunderstood all along.

Fielder’s genuine care and consideration extends so much that the film’s final third interrogates if he’s gone too far and can’t see her clearly anymore. After getting as close to her as possible, Fielder still may only be seeing what she wants him to see: the character. Holmes wants him to believe there is no character, that this is just who she is, but he can’t do that. He doesn’t know.

So what does he do? He asks Seyfried for help. He needs a little distance from his subject. He needs to see Holmes from a separate, studied, but still intimate perspective. He needs to see her as Seyfried did in “The Dropout.” It’s helpful, even if it initially seemed like an impediment.

Back in the beach house, when Holmes takes in the scene from “The Dropout” where Seyfried screams “I get the fucking money!” over and over, like a distinctly American wind-up toy, the real Holmes retreats from the screen and cries into pillow. Fielder sits awkwardly at the foot of the bed. Evans offers a reassuring hand. But even in this unmistakably human moment, her motivations are a mystery. Maybe she’s courting sympathy. Maybe she’s genuinely appalled. Maybe she’s simply overwhelmed by competing truths: that she doesn’t see herself in Seyfried’s performance, and that so many other people do.

It made me wonder when Fielder sits down to show Holmes “The Dropout” in the first place, is he giving her space to distinguish the real her from her unwanted public image, as the scene suggests? To refute the “lies” that have defined her until now? To draw the line between the character and the human being?

Or is he forcing Holmes to confront how other people see her? How the world sees her? That, outside of her own unique understanding of reality, there’s another reality where she looks ridiculous, and no one knows why.

“The Dropout” is available on Hulu. “You Can See Everything” is in theaters now.