In several interviews, whistleblower Tyler Schultz describes how he knew how blatantly fraudulent Theranos was, but then he would meet with Holmes and walk away feeling weirdly disoriented, doubting his own understanding of obvious facts.
If you want to know about her lies and the dangers Theranos posed to real humans, that story has been told. If you want to understand what Tyler Schultz is describing, that’s what this story is for.
I guess you can say there’s some sort of journalistic ethics issue, but that all depends on how you frame this film. I knew about Holmes going in, and I’m pleased that I got the story that I got instead of the expose some wanted.
Yeah, I’ve since read Bad Blood and watched The Inventor on HBO and there’s apparently a podcast, so I can’t imagine rehashing all of that would have added anything. I’m glad it did what it did. I’m a notoriously naive person so I feel like I needed that lesson.
I agree to the extent that it does as an immediate reaction to the movie. I walked out, not necessarily sympathetic, but at least thinking there was more going on with her than plain grifting. I had a lot of the same thoughts as @Bullitt – her brain works differently, she’s weaker than I thought and easily manipulated by men.
But after sitting with it for a while, I believe it’s all part of her grift. Like @steronz posts above, I got to witness how she manipulates people, get a better understanding of why so many people believed her, and hopefully inoculate myself a bit against it.
No one I’ve discussed it with at length ended up with a sympathetic impression of her. But by definition, I’m discussing this movie with people who want to think about it more, so I’m getting a skewed view what the audience takes away from it. Maybe the typical viewer sees it, thinks “hmm, she’s not so bad” and doesn’t give it more thought. @Bullitt, I’d be curious if your view changes at all after reading this thread and letting some time pass after your viewing.
Similarly, but not the same, I went in really disliking her based on the reporting I’d read but came away thinking of her the way I thought of our pathologically lying high school/college friend. Which is that, in some way she was/had been wired to lie, and while it pissed me off, it wasn’t actually personal. Later though I decided the distinction didn’t matter, she’s a lying liar and that’s how she interacts with the entire world.
I have only one data point, one of my best friends, who went in knowing nothing except the vaguest facts about EH. She didn’t come away sympathetic, but afterwards she did read a bunch of articles and watched the documentary to ground herself in the facts…which I suspect a lot of non-EH-knowers will do after seeing this.
But the show is about artifice. All kinds of over the top shit happens in The Rehearsal. I haven’t seen that episode yet, but I don’t think anyone watching the show would get the impression he was accurately portraying anything at all. The whole point is that he is an unreliable narrator.
In the aforementioned farming episode, they are swapping children out every four hours so some woman and Nathan can experience parenting from 0-18. It’s a different, older child every four hours. It’s a ridiculous premise on its face. Nobody would watch that and think it’s a serious representation of parenting. So why have this special standard for airplanes in a show that is deliberately and obviously faked?
Hard disagree. He put out just plain wrong information - I’ve detailed this in prior posts and other threads. He either didn’t understand what he was talking about (the “he’s a fool” hypothesis), or did understand and put out shoddy information anyway (“he’s a liar”).
And I don’t have much patience for the idea that I don’t get his style or I’m somehow missing the point. He bullshitted about my profession in a way that was irresponsible. When called out on this, he doubled down. There’s no joke to get.
I disagree with @Llama_Llogophile about their interpretation of the show, but the second season of The Rehearsal does dive into the world of aviation in ways that… confuse the line between truth and not to levels unseen on the show before. “Deliberately and obviously faked” is not a fair way to describe a world where Fielder actually gets a pilot’s license, actually flies a 737, and has defended the truthiness of his in-show conclusions in interviews after the fact. A far cry from “I pretended to be a parent in a context where I obviously was not the actor’s parent.”
To be clear, I didn’t say he faked anything. Rather, he lied about what actually happened. Fielder did get a pilot’s license and did, apparently, fly a 737. What he did NOT do is become an airline pilot - it would appear he flew a private flight with a bunch of hired actors on board. This would be very unlikely for Joe Pilot to pull off without the resources of HBO behind them.
What Fielder DID do is completely misrepresent how airline pilots are trained and work together, specifically with regard to Crew Resource Management. So to sum up - he was criticizing airline industry procedures by appearing to, but not actually, becoming licensed or trained at that level. I call that lying.
So again, I’m uninterested in anything this guy has to say. Every documentary has a point of view. But Fielder is irresponsible and IMHO should be considered as acting in bad faith until proved otherwise.
And he was very explicit about exactly what he was doing – he talks about renting the plane, he shows the “passengers” as actual actors “auditioning” for the role, he shows that the flight attendants are also actors. At no point does he misrepresent that flight as an actual airline flight.
What I would allow a quibble with is that he says that hiring the actors as passengers is a loophole. Since it’s a charter flight, he could just invite 200 of his friends or volunteers on. The fact that they’re actors getting a SAG rate is irrelevant. But I don’t believe he could charge any of those people money, as that would then be operating a commercial flight, which he was very clear he was not allowed to do.
I also think this is a misrepresentation of the show, or at least misremembering. He didn’t claim that he went through the whole process of becoming a commercial pilot only to be dismayed at the lack of CRM training, for instance.
Rather, he claimed up front that there was a real problem in airline cockpits. He then proposes a hypothesis – what if we train pilots to “act” in a certain role, just as actors do, in order to solve this problem. That’s basically the whole show, and the whole premise of The Rehearsal.
Again, where I’ll concede that he crossed the line was that he overstated how much he had to “discover” this problem. As you note, it’s a well-documented problem and has been addressed with CRM training for decades. He does mention that pilots get training, but makes it seem (via his hired expert) like it’s not enough. And in our previous discussions about the show, that’s where I felt comfortable conceding the point – he shouldn’t have given viewers the impression that little was being done about CRM. Could pilots be doing more training on this? Perhaps, but there’s only so much time in the day, and CRM incidents are relatively rare. He sidesteps that reality so that he could make a funny show, and I can understand why that would rub people the wrong way.
Yet he gives a critique of industry standards. So I say again, he did not become an airline pilot and set up a situation which made it seem like he knew what he was talking about, but didn’t.
I’m not the one misrepresenting something here. He was completely, utterly wrong about how CRM training is delivered and concocted a ridiculous, unlikely scenario with him as a pilot. Why? I don’t know. What I do know is he was spewing bullshit, plain and simple. I’ve heard the context and apologetics for him here and in other threads and none of it holds water. Any information coming from Fielder should be considered nonsense until proven otherwise.
I talked to my friend, and to expand on this, she thought midway through that Fielder might be hinting at something more empathetic or different from what little she’d heard about EH, but by the end she thought EH was fully in on the act with Billy and kind of a psycho.
Because it’s a comedy show, and he thought the premise was comedic. Of course we should consider it all nonsense. OBVIOUSLY. I mean, training airline pilots in acting methods to combat CRM issues? Do you think this is a serious idea for serious people!?
I get it, you don’t think airline safety is a laughing matter. Fine, fair criticism. But I do think you’re mispresenting the actual show. And if I recall, you refused to watch in on principle, so that tracks.
This reminds me of when MAGA jerks claim that whatever nonsense Trump said lately was just a joke, and it’s our fault for not getting it.
So again, hard disagree. Fielder tried to make it look like his critiques should be taken seriously by performing a pilot stunt. But wait - ha ha! It’s just comedy! Sorry, no. That’s not OK. But if this is considered a hijack I’ll stop here. I’ve had my say.
Went to the theater with the missus – about 2 weeks ago she suggested we might go watch the film. Her suggestions are usually based on NPR stories or recommendations from her clients. After the film my comment was “Interesting but not entertaining.”
She found it boring, and had napped a few times.
The audience on a Monday was small. There was a tiny bit of laughter from the couple next to us. I chuckled once. Until reading this thread I had no idea the director came from a comedy background.
Sometimes I like ambiguity and sometimes I don’t. I did not feel my time was wasted, but won’t go out of my way to recommend the movie to friends.