Hulu’s ‘The Dropout’ is good television but bad messaging
Let’s start with the positive. The show was really good tv — interesting, well-organized, and the cast, especially Amanda Seyfriend as Elizabeth Holmes, were all fantastic. Although it easily kept my interest through all 8 episodes, I had this itch that wasn’t quite getting scratched and I couldn’t figure out why. And then the end cards appeared. Following the final scene where Holmes, now Lizzy finally lets out the scream she seems to have been holding in her whole life waiting for her Uber outside of the now-empty Theranos building, the audience is filled in on what becomes of some of the characters we’ve just watched — and some we apparently never will.
The end cards let the audience know that since the exposure of the massive fraud at Theranos, women in Silicon Valley are having a hard time securing venture capitalist funding with one entrepreneur purportedly being told to dye her hair to look less like Holmes. Reading these seemingly irrelevant and likely difficult to actually quantify facts I finally realized why I was leaving that series a bit unsettled. The show’s inclusion of this information made it very clear where the show stands not just on Holmes but on gender inequity in tech and beyond. It is implied here that Holmes is to blame for women being underrepresented in Silicon Valley. If only the show had just gone one layer further (I know, it’s a lot to ask) they could’ve examined why it is that all women must bear the burden of one woman’s mistake. To state what I thought was obvious plenty of men have committed massive amounts of fraud, sank companies, been indicted, and have been the source of just as awful destruction as Holmes and yet, it’s safe to assume that when a male entrepreneur is trying to secure funding for his start-up he isn’t forced to account for the sins of Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling or the man scamming people was literally named after, Charles Ponzi. Not to mention the massive amounts of fraud taking place daily through the theft of personal information for profit by tech companies started by and currently run by men.
And rather than calling out this pretty transparent inequality loud and proud or, as no media seems to be able to do anymore, simply not have an opinion, the show makes the choice to uphold it.
It became clear to me that the viewpoint of the show was being communicated to the audience the whole time through Dr. Phyllis Gardner, a professor at Standford we meet earlier in the show who shuts down Holmes’ cockamamie idea for being, well, cockamamie. In one scene, Holmes attempts to appeal to Gardner through misguided gender solidarity to which Gardner gives her the classic women need to be better than men to succeed and even then it’s not good enough speech. This scene felt representative of the show as a whole, through its exposure of the dynamics between women, particularly of the white feminist persuasion, who like to invoke the cause only when it serves their needs and run the other way as fast as possible as to not be associated with imperfect women. Gardner reappears later on in the series as the only ally of Richard Fuisz, Holmes’ former neighbor who has decided to take her down after she dared to not ask him for permission to start a business kind of adjacent to his. Collaborating with Fuisz on his male-fragility-induced odyssey feels a lot like the show pinning Holmes for women losing opportunities within a well-document boy’s club. Just as Gardner gives her tacit permission to Fuisz to use her hard-fought position to hedge his personal vendetta, the show provides the same to the tech bros to continue to exclude women. The anger is directed at how Holmes plays the game within a rigged system, not at how the system itself is rigged.
Look, Elizabeth Holmes did very bad things for which she is being rightfully punished. But neither she nor Theranos were created in a vacuum. Her abusive boyfriend and COO of Theranos Sunny Balwani literally says “I created you” as Holmes is finally breaking up with him in the final episode. At that moment, an entire culture was saying those words to her. Theranos would never have been able to survive as long as it did without the patriarchal bro-culture that permeates Silicon Valley that had such deep FOMO over losing out on potentially the next Twitter that they poured their money into a product they had never seen. But sure, let’s be pickier about which women we give money to.
I think it was all the exposure of the hypocrisies, pettiness, and hubris of these men through this series that made it feel like such a letdown to see the end cards stroke the status quo in that way.
Disappointing, yes but unfortunately par for the course these days. Larger concepts like sexism can be difficult to parse through because they’re so deeply embedded in basically anything with a power structure that it sometimes feels like moral whack-a-mole. And yet, despite the obvious complexity of sexism, the media likes to chew up the sexiest parts and spit them back out into digestible baby bird bites for the masses. It certainly isn’t the first nor will it be the last time Hollywood serves us up another through the looking glass version of female empowerment that paradoxically lets the system off the hook.
