American capitalism’s obsession with “disrupters” and boy-wonders in designer hoodies has led to some dark places. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was praised as the evolutionary zenith of nerd-dom until his mantra of “move fast and break things” proved ripe for subversion in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election.
Consider, too, what Twitter has done to our public discourse. And that was before it was run aground by zillionaire man-baby Elon Musk (South African but a product of the Silicon Valley cult of radical individualism).
The disrupters’ club has historically been a boys-only affair. Which is perhaps why entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes was heralded as such a mould breaker. She created history with her medical start-up Theranos, becoming the youngest self-made female billionaire in the United States; at one point, her estimated net worth was north of $9 billion. But the blitz of magazine covers and gushing interviews failed to pick up on the fact that her blood analysis technology didn’t work. That she was faking the results.
That story – of rise and fall, tech guru turned prison inmate – is told with riveting verve by The Dropout (BBC One, Tuesday, 10.40pm). Arriving on terrestrial TV two years after its debut on Disney+, it remains a gripping cautionary tale, illuminated by a powerhouse lead performance by Amanda Seyfried.
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Her Holmes is a rhapsody in self-delusion. She is an ambitious young woman who, quite correctly, believes she has every right to be as successful as Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. Yet we also see where that ambition can lead: to faked lab results and an uneasy relationship with the truth.
The story begins in the ultimate dream factory: suburban America. Holmes is a dorky teenager who worships Apple’s Steve Jobs and sees a bright future stretching ahead. But when her father loses his job at Enron, the energy-trading and utility company that perpetrated one of the biggest accounting frauds in history, the family’s comfortable existence is jeopardised. The message she receives loud and clear from the universe is that her seemingly perfect life is built on sand – and that the only person she can rely on is herself.
Determined to do better than her family, she gains a place at prestigious Stanford University and signs up for a college exchange in Beijing. Unlike her classmates, she is in China to learn rather than booze and misbehave. There, she starts a friendship with Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), a postgrad 19 years her senior. They remain in contact after she has returned to the US, where she is sexually assaulted at a party. Refusing to be broken by the patriarchy, she becomes even more determined to make her mark, which is when she comes up with the idea of an easy-to-use blood test kit. By the end credits of episode one, Theranos has been born.
Even at the height of her acclaim, Holmes cut a curious figure. She had a weird, intense stare and an odd speaking voice (later revealed to be an affectation). These quirks would have been easy to caricature. Seyfried instead portrays Holmes as a desperately aspiring millennial over-compensating for her middle-class impostor syndrome by bending the truth as though it was a plastic spoon.
As we know, it all fell apart in the end. How incredible that someone as intelligent as Holmes couldn’t see what was coming. Seyfried grippingly conjures that capacity for self-deception. Fuelled by her performance, The Dropout stands as a warning against Silicon Valley’s messianic hucksterism and its fixation on charismatic outsiders with big ideas.
