Just watched the film today, and have three claims. Curious if this sub agrees or not. Tons of SPOILERS:

Claim #1: This was not a documentary.

A24 and Nathan agreed to compensate Billy for his participation, knowing this wasn't customary, and could undermine the film's credibility. Sure, they could've reconsidered calling it a documentary had Billy and Liz actually pursued compensation, but that last-minute reversal wasn't known to A24/Nathan when they agreed to Billy's terms. My theory is that, rather than risk their credibility over having agreed to this in the first place, they deliberately framed the agreement as something made under protest through a clever reenactment. Marketing the film as a documentary was disingenuous, but a clever move by A24. It also gave them the moral high ground if audiences, Billy, or Liz ever questioned their integrity or motivations for accepting Billy's terms in the first place.

Claim #2: There were three sociopaths in this film: Nathan, Liz, and Billy.

Nathan: Given Claim #1, I'm convinced Nathan was in character from the moment we saw him on screen. His mannerisms, responses, questions, and even moments of tactical vulnerability were likely carefully calculated. We essentially watched one sociopath (Nathan) outsmart two others (Liz and Billy), while those two believed they were outsmarting him. A couple examples: 1) Nathan opened the interview by revealing how much he already knew about their history, essentially calling them out rather than trying to build rapport. This immediately put them (especially Billy) on the defensive. I think this was deliberate, particularly given how the compensation agreement had shifted the leverage between them. 2) Nathan included footage of himself writing notes on his arm, along with his discussion with Amanda about the word he supposedly misremembered. Both moments humanized him, but then he had Amanda reenact the scene using both words. If he'd genuinely made a mistake, or was actually nervous going into the prison, I don't see why that reenactment was necessary.

Liz and Billy: Billy is obvious enough, so I won't spend much time on him. Liz though never convinced me she was benign or easily manipulated. I think Billy and Liz are business partners first, romantic partners second. The hot-mic moment where Liz was being coached on how to answer difficult questions was pretty telling. So was her seemingly random comment about not receiving financial compensation for her transparency, which felt like an unconvincing attempt to CYA. I also think her tendency to answer Nathan's straightforward questions with overly literal responses was intentional. It gave her a way to avoid answering without appearing evasive. My read is that Billy genuinely believes any publicity is good publicity and wants to cash in on whatever remains of Liz's reputation. Liz probably sees cooperating with him as her best shot at leaving prison with some financial security.

Claim #3: Amanda was acting the entire film, including during the supposedly candid off-camera conversations with Nathan.

Again, this goes back to Claim #1. If this was no longer a documentary, but a dramatization under Nathan's creative direction, Amanda arguably had more leverage than anyone. Nathan also had a pretty convenient justification for her involvement. I think this explains why A24/Nathan chose to present events in that particular order: the agreement with Billy comes before Amanda's involvement, while the last-minute compensation reversal is only revealed at the end. That sequence makes Amanda's involvement seem like a justified response to an ethical dilemma, rather than something that was potentially part of the plan all along.

The film gave me the illusion that I could see everything happening behind the scenes, when I was really only seeing what Nathan/A24 wanted me to see. Maybe that was the whole point, and for that, it's a solid 5/5 film for me.

Edit: Apologies to those who haven't watched it yet. I tried to hide/redact all 3 claims, but couldn't figure out how to do it similar to how I hid the names in the paragraph above.

First off let me say this is not something that I set out to do from the beginning, and so for parts of it the connections may seem a bit forced. I’ve been vegan since 1994 and I’ve seen tens of thousands of movies, and often after seeing a move I’ll start thinking of a “vegan angle” to it… I finally gathered them all together in a list and put them in an order that makes sense, at least to me.

Since images are not allowed here is a link:
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Row 1: Delicatessen — Ravenous — The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover — American Psycho

Consumption becomes a claim to power when another being’s body is understood primarily through what it can provide. In Delicatessen, the butcher turns prospective employees into provisions for his tenants: employment, commerce, and neighborhood solidarity sustain an arrangement whose victims disappear into its benefits. The vegetarian underground makes that apparent necessity contestable. Ravenous gives consumption a more expansive justification: eating people literally produces strength, allowing the predator to mistake the rewards of violence for evidence of its legitimacy. Manifest Destiny extends this appetite across a continent. CTWL locates the same entitlement within domestic and commercial ownership: the gangster treats his wife, the restaurant, and its occupants as possessions subject to his appetites. When his wife’s murdered lover becomes a prepared meal, the distinction between possessing someone and consuming them becomes brutally literal. In Psycho, restaurant culture and bodily violence inhabit a world where surfaces receive meticulous attention while individuals remain interchangeable. The opening’s bloodlike sauce makes elegant presentation momentarily indistinguishable from injury. Consumption conceals the encounter it depends upon: someone lived before something became available for consumption.

Row 2: No Country for Old Men — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — The Silence of the Lambs — Eyes Without a Face

The distinction between ordinary practice and atrocity becomes unstable when familiar techniques are applied to unfamiliar victims. In No Country, the protagonist begins by hunting animals and becomes prey himself, while his pursuer’s cattle gun transfers the technology of slaughter into human encounters. Chain Saw develops that transfer through the handling of bodies: a person is struck, hung on a meat hook, and stored as flesh. The spectator’s horror depends on recognizing procedures whose customary victims rarely receive comparable identification. Lambs extends bodily appropriation into eating and clothing: one killer consumes people, while another treats their skin as material for his own transformation. The FBI agent’s childhood attempt to rescue a lamb interrupts that entitlement with an attachment to the creature marked for slaughter. Returning the lambs from symbols of her trauma to frightened animals makes their suffering matter beyond its role in her development. In Eyes, the surgeon’s effort to restore his daughter turns other women into sources of replacement skin; experimental dogs inhabit the same apparatus of confinement and bodily use. His daughter’s release of the animals rejects an arrangement under which one cherished life warrants the sacrifice of others. Affection becomes dangerous when it grants unlimited permission.

Row 3: The Face of Another — Au hasard Balthazar — Woman in the Dunes — The Fountain

The meanings assigned to bodies can determine whose suffering becomes recognizable and whose remains available for use. In Face, disfigurement alters the protagonist’s social existence, while a manufactured face restores access to recognition without resolving who he is. His treatment exposes the dependence of sympathy on an acceptable surface; his subsequent behavior complicates the assumption that recognizable appearance guarantees moral character. Balthazar moves this problem from appearance to allegory. The donkey becomes a Christ-like figure bearing humanity’s sins; returning him to a donkey reverses that movement, revealing the ordinary condition of beasts of burden beneath the sacred interpretation. His exhaustion requires consideration without first becoming redemptive. Dunes reverses the position of an insect collector who becomes a captive laborer: the man accustomed to determining another creature’s movements discovers that food, shelter, and developing attachments can coexist with coercion. His adaptation does not retrospectively authorize his capture. In Fountain, devotion to a dying wife recruits an experimental animal and an extraordinary tree into the struggle to preserve a particular human life. The conquistador’s body eventually nourishes the vegetation from which he sought immortality. What he approached as a resource becomes the world to which he must surrender his own body.

Row 4: Dead Man — Ghost Dog — Under the Skin — Cloud Atlas

The familiar positions of observer, hunter, and moral judge become unstable when humans lose their presumed authority over other lives. In Dead Man, the wounded fugitive touches a dead fawn’s wound, mingles its blood with his own, and lies beside it. The animal’s death ceases to be scenery: their wounded bodies establish a kinship that does not depend on the fawn possessing human abilities. Ghost Dog makes that recognition less morally reassuring. The hitman’s care for pigeons and confrontation with bear hunters coexist with his profession, exposing how an ethical code can protect certain lives while authorizing the destruction of others. His contradictions raise the question of how convictions acquire their boundaries. Skin deprives humans of the authority to draw those boundaries: men entering apparently intimate encounters become bodies captured and processed within purposes they cannot comprehend. Their vulnerability makes the consumer’s position reversible. Cloud Atlas organizes bodily use into an entire social system. Manufactured workers serve customers before their own bodies are recycled into food; the function imposed upon them becomes the justification for denying that their lives could exceed it. Their awakening exposes the circularity of the arrangement: being created for exploitation cannot establish that exploitation is their proper destiny.

Row 5: Never Let Me Go — Ex Machina — Blade Runner — The Lobster

Institutions preserve their authority by deciding which demonstrations of inward life will count—and whether recognition will change anything. In NLMG, the clones’ artwork is collected as evidence of their souls, yet the society benefiting from their organs retains the power to disregard that evidence. Their sensitivity can be acknowledged while their destruction continues. Machina places the examination itself inside an owner’s controlled environment: the inventor confines his artificial woman and arranges the conditions under which a visiting programmer encounters her consciousness. The programmer’s desire to rescue her becomes entangled with an expectation of personal attachment; her independent purposes expose the limits of sympathy that anticipates a reward. Blade Runner gives manufactured beings an existence defined by compulsory labor and a deliberately restricted lifespan. Their demand for more life exceeds the commercial purpose of their creation, while “retirement” disguises killing as the disposal of obsolete equipment. Lobster makes classification itself an explicit punishment: failure to satisfy society’s requirements results in expulsion from humanity into animal existence. The protagonist’s dog is already his brother, preventing species appearance from settling the question of who remains within. Those required to prove their personhood face an authority whose own right to judge remains unquestioned.

Row 6: Cow — Okja — Chicken Run — Babe

The movement through human predation, captive bodies, and manufactured lives arrives at the animals whose exploitation those analogies have made newly visible. Cow follows a dairy cow through a system that organizes her reproductive life, separates her from her calf, and ultimately disposes of her. Remaining close to her makes production perceptible as a lived experience rather than an inventory of outputs; ordinary care cannot cancel the authority exercised over her body. Okja concentrates sympathy through a girl’s relationship with one animal, then confronts that attachment with a slaughterhouse full of others. The rescue is real, but its success leaves the machinery—and its remaining victims—in place. Chicken Run makes escape collective: the chickens recognize that their insecurity arises from the farm’s purpose, not merely from an unusually unpleasant owner. The conversion from egg production to pies reveals how quickly a supposedly protected productive life becomes disposable when a more profitable use appears. Babe secures an individual reprieve by demonstrating an unexpected talent, exposing both the possibilities and limits of recognition through usefulness. The pig’s survival leaves a question for every animal unable to herd sheep: why should continued existence require exceptional performance?

Thoughts? Any films you would add or remove?

I watched A Few Good Men recently, and there's something about the ending that I found more interesting than Jessup's famous confession. Earlier in the movie, we learn that Dawson was punished for disobeying orders to bring food to another Marine. So he was clearly capable of breaking the rules when he thought it was the right thing to do. But when Santiago was targeted with a Code Red, he followed orders.

That's what makes the final verdict interesting to me. Dawson and Downey are cleared of murder, but they're still found guilty of conduct unbecoming a Marine. Downey doesn't understand why. Dawson eventually realizes they should have protected Santiago.

What bothers me is that these men were trained to obey, and then punished for doing exactly that. I'm not saying they shouldn't be held responsible. They absolutely should. But the military system that taught them to act this way also bears responsibility. For me, that contradiction is one of the most interesting parts of the movie, and it gets a little overshadowed by Nicholson's courtroom scene.

And I am so glad that the movie was made.

Made by a filmmaker, Gus Van Sant, whose work I usually intensely dislike, to put it mildly. Van Sant is the rare filmmaker who is able to make a movie about teenage male prostitutes and make it come out tedious.

Yet, I appreciate his Psycho very much. It's an ode to a classic, of course.

But more than that, I love it because of how it brought a Black-and-White classic into the 21st century. Psycho 1998 makes an attempt at answering the question of how classic movies would have been received if they were made today. I wonder a lot about how 1998's teenagers reacted to watching the remake, right in the middle of the post-Scream renaissance of the slasher horror genre.

Psycho 1998 makes the case for the timelessness of great cinema.

Spoilers for the film.

I wrote a long essay on Nolan’s The Odyssey, and one question hasn’t let go of me since I saw it. Nolan shot a film entirely on IMAX film cameras for the first time, which gave him the biggest frame of his career. He filled it with a world from which the gods and the big battles have almost been removed. So what holds up the epic?

To be honest, there’s no direct focus on IMAX in the essay. It’s more on the meanings that follow from it. It seems to me the epic here rests on a disproportion between people and what is greater than them, and this disproportion has several levels.

The first level is the gods. IMAX, as is well known, began as a format for surveying the world - all those films about nature and space, views from above - offering a gaze that used to be attributed to the gods. In The Odyssey, though, there are almost no gods. Nolan strikes out the council of the Olympians, Proteus’s news, and the peaceful realm of the Phaeacians, and the misfortunes of Troy’s conquerors look more like bad weather and bad luck than anyone’s wrath. Only Athena remains, and over the course of the film she goes through metamorphoses. In Homer she guides Odysseus home. In Nolan her image takes the place of the golden dog on the brooch Penelope gave her husband before the war, and the goddess herself, almost like a hunting dog, pursues him through his memories, now in the guise of a victim and of conscience. The gods can no longer help, and still Athena won’t let him go. The place above stands empty, and the enormous frame hands this lacuna over to the viewer. More lies open to him than to any character, but his eyes are still the same human eyes.

The second level is values. Without the gods, what remains of them is a rule that can be turned against another. Accordingly, the Trojans let the horse in because they share their gods with the Greeks, and so this rightness opens the gates, letting the enemy in under the guise of a gift. Then Athena’s priestess is killed and the goddess’s statue beheaded, and at the end Odysseus and his son defile her temple with blood and fire. The one who has to answer is the one who knew the rule and broke it. This is what gets to me most in the film: the guilt of Polyphemus, who speaks only once he has been blinded, or of the Laestrygonians, who attack without a single line, weighs less than the hero’s. People don’t measure up to their own ideals either. Songs make Helen the beauty a thousand ships sailed after, yet at Menelaus’s feast she sits with a scar on her face, barely granted a glance by her husband or the guests. The scar cuts her beauty in half, just as Menelaus cuts the fleet in half when he says only half of that thousand survived. The image they went to war for no longer coincides with the living woman.

The third level is the world itself. The open spaces are flooded with sun and almost empty of people, and life huddles in patches of torchlight. The story stands on the threshold of the Bronze Age collapse, rumors of the Sea Peoples creep across the oikoumene, and until the very end not a single tablet or written text appears on screen. This huge, indifferent world is about to crumble, and the meaning of the war is small in it and keeps slipping away. At the suitors’ feast a nameless singer squeezes the war into a refrain, “a face, a fleet, a war, a man, a thought, a trick,” news arrives late, and Menelaus cuts his story short, deciding everyone knows the rest. In effect, only the camera sees the connections between scattered places, and the bigger and emptier the frame, the heavier the small figure inside it.

Hence what keeps the film from ending. Everything horizontal in it can be overcome: the sea can be crossed, the years waited out. What resists is the vertical. Circe sends Odysseus down to the dead, the fate of Troy is decided in the cramped belly of the horse, and memories cut through the present in short flashes. Nolan has never been fond of closing his endings. Think of the spinning top in Inception, or of Cooper in Interstellar, who makes it home and then flies off again. In The Odyssey, I think, he names the reason for the first time, and it is the depth of what was done. Odysseus returns to his palace calling himself Sinon, the man he left to die by the horse, and at home he repeats the very ruse that once opened the gates of Troy, so the crime enters the house along with him. Remorse catches up with him only after the temple has burned. The goal is reached, and still he leaves for the west, into an exile he all but seeks himself. There is a reckoning in this departure, but also a refusal to hold on to what he has achieved. He promises that their story will survive in song, and adds right away that “our mistakes will once again be forgotten.”

To me this is an epic in an unusual sense, and the sublime in it lives in fall and overthrow. Troy falls, the goddess’s statue loses its head, and the weight of everything that stood above the human being comes down on him and on what he has done. I understand that without gods and big battles the film can feel detached, but this distance seems to be part of the design.

I’m curious how others read it. Did it feel epic to you without gods and big battles? And did the IMAX scale feel like spectacle, or like the world’s indifference?

I wrote about this in more detail in the essay, if anyone’s interested: https://medium.com/rock-nheavy/the-duration-of-ruins-e3ea8a70602c

I got into Nathan Fielder years ago from a random video essay on Nathan For You, and somewhat naively, I never felt it was in bad taste. The most memorable characters: The Bill Gates impersonator, the private investigator, the small dick sports car guy, the guy who drinks his grandson's piss. In a sense they were kind of bad people, or at least a little deserving, and that's why it felt ok to laugh at them. And the others, my mind just kind of brushed them off because Nathan takes a lovably submissive role in any interaction. 

Then he takes the same concept and applies it to Benny and Elizabeth and I start to see a different perspective. It starts with a jeering feeling: she's a bad person and Billy is probably silly, stupid, or as bad as her for being with her. Then Nathan is talking to her father, we're laughing at how funny the interaction is, and suddenly he drops that Elizabeth was sexually assaulted. In a flash, you realize this is horrifying. We keep laughing at this whole situation but slowly the reality sets in as a family gets torn apart right in front of our eyes, and there's this perverted, voyeuristic, almost manic feeling to it that made me feel really fucking weird and disgusted.

You realize this whole situation is fucked and everyone’s been laughing like wolves. It's heartless to make fun of a woman as she's being pulled away from her family, especially if were to believe her act that shes markedly autistic and doesn’t even understand the most obvious joke of all time. And then there's the flip side, where she might be performing for us and for Nathan. Meanwhile I still felt empathy for these people, even Benny, who is revoltingly manipulative and narcissistic.

Although Nathan seemed to have walked the line quite tastefully, there’s one moment in particular that I found very gross. On the day she’s going to jail, he’s cracking sex jokes and giving her gag gifts. Does does he or Lance or any of the crew have not a shred of empathy for a family that is likely never gonna be the same again? 

The obvious devil on your shoulder is going to say, “Yeah, but she’s evil too. She defrauded people.” okay? Does dehumanizing and torturing someone become OK just because they are not your definition of a good person? This is a much more callous and deep and cutting and fucked up version of Nathan for you. 

I started to feel a little bit of hope when I saw Amanda Seyfried. She's kind, beautiful and composed in a way that almost sets you at ease. She’s right, she’s doing the right thing. The mythologically correct thing. She tries to empathize with Elizabeth, she gets into politics with Benny at the dumpling dinner, and she does everything politically and optically right. But then you start to think “Why the fuck does she look like she’s having so much fun.”

In the recreation, when Elizabeth says she gets bullied in jail because of Seyfried's show, you see a crack in Amanda’s veneer. The perfect performance fades and all of a sudden she starts grasping at reasons why Elizabeth is guilty and reveals herself to be just as opportunistic as Elizabeth or even Benny but she’s better at following the rules and presenting herself as pure and good. She had very little thought in her own effect on this person. She, just like us, thought: Elizabeth Holmes is bad so it doesn’t matter what I say about her. Kind of emblematic of how our politics feel right now. 

And then Elizabeth herself. I almost want to believe that she is the manipulative person that the entire media has portrayed her to be, because the flip side of that is so shockingly disturbingly depressing: This fucking Benny guy is just one of the many men who has been completely taking advantage of her doe eyed love and has led her like a lamb to the slaughter into this horrible mess.

I usually say I watch movies to be entertained, or to get some insight into why we do the things we do. This made me feel disgusted at the real people, the characters, the production, the audience next to me giggling, and myself for sitting there, and yet, somehow that ends up being profound and beautiful and layered. I’ve not seen art this good in a long time.

This is the only film I’ve seen that genuinely convinced me I might’ve been having a stroke in the cinema.
That isn’t a joke, I’m not taking the piss, it even got to the point where I was tempted to pull out my phone and check to see if my face was drooping.

This has nothing to do with my actual opinion of the film, I’m just desperate to know if it made anyone else feel like this?

Keep in mind, I’m somebody who LOVES films that make you feel completely disoriented and uncomfortable.
Gaspar Noé is literally my all time favourite director lmfao.
I also adored Birdman and thought the tense, disorienting atmosphere in that film was phenomenal.
So…I don’t know what happened here?

Again, I’m not criticising the actual content of the film when saying this, but it almost felt like it was edited by someone on bath salts and not in a good way.
The discombobulated pacing and structure felt like an intentional decision given the film’s context, but in my opinion, it was executed horribly.
I need to make that distinction because I know I’m inevitably going to be told “but that was the point”, which again, is something I’m aware of.
However, I’m not sure how that is supposed to exempt the film from criticism, especially in regard to the particular creative decisions that were used to communicate the film’s underlying commentary.

I really don’t want to start any beef lol, if you loved this aspect of the film I think that’s great, I just want to know if anyone else felt the same way.

Really enjoyed both movies, but what i keep coming back to, is the very sweet, intentional and effective of mini montage scenes of childhood.

not sure if i can share youtube links hare but those scenes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maEC9NS6CkA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G8jZKqrwyk

Make me tear up...

Captures that intense innocence, child like wonder and imagination and sad nostalgia feeling.

What are some other movies that similar scenes or even better focus entirely on that type of cinematography and feeling?

Got around to watching Na Hong-jin's Hope since it recently came to Amazon Video last week. And boy, what a ride it is.

Arguably the best aspect about Hope is how Na Hong-jin makes no allusions to what he's making. It never tries to pretend it's smart or deep with its story, characters, or any of the crazy events that go down. Instead, Hong-Jin embraces the B-Movie craziness while also paying homage to countless great monster films as Ridley Scott's Alien and John McTiernan's Predator. If anything, Hope is one of those rare films in recent memory where it feels like its primary goal is to keep the audience entertained, something it does pretty well.

What's more impressive though is the clear effort and production on screen. Hope has been circling around the internet as being South Korea's most expensive film and it does show, especially during the city sequences. Credit has to go to the production designer Lee How-kyoung, as the sets of Hope Harbor being rampaged and destroyed look incredible and even life-like. I can't imagine how long it took for the crew to set some of the environments up given the first half of the film takes place in the town.

And Hong Kyung-pyo's cinematography. Honestly, out of this world. The way he jumps from long takes to framing characters from a distance plays out so seamlessly that it's almost unreal. It's especially notable during the action sequences that feel far ahead of most Hollywood action films nowadays. No split-second cutting or whiplash editing. Kyung-pyo just lets the action play out with only a few cuts and a lot of steady-cam movement. This results in some of the most fluid action scenes that still manage to look astoundingly wild. That one shot involving Sung-ki being dragged by the guy on the horse... just insane!

As for the CGI and VFX, I wasn't really thrown off by it as others. Yes, the monsters clearly stand out from the environments and are clearly made by a computer, but I actually think it works in the film's favor. It adds to the B-Movie charm quite well in terms of the fluctuating quality between the great sets and less than grounded creatures.

Nevertheless, I can see why Hope has been pretty divisive amongst critics and audiences as it's pretty simple otherwise. The characters are basic with no real arcs and a good portion of the second act slows things down considerably. I wouldn't say it drags since it does give some detail into the monsters attacking the town, but I still think Hope would've benefited from cutting it down by about 20 or so minutes. The fact too it ends on a cliffhanger is also something I'm concerned about, since it's not been confirmed if Na Hong-jin will be able to do a sequel.

Regardless, Hope is one entertaining action film that is just fun to watch. I'm still surprised to see it got nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes given this seems like the kind of film the festival tends to avoid.

Please don't downvote opinions. Only downvote comments that don't contribute anything. Check out the WHYBW archives.

Regarding spoilers: I will avoid plot specifics, but this post will touch on the major themes of the movie with a few references to key moments.

It has been striking to see the diversity of reactions to You Can See Everything, the documentary by Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim that follows Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she begins a prison sentence that she earned for defrauding investors by misrepresenting the capacity & potential of Theranos's blood-testing technology. There are a few moments in particular where Holmes says something that strains credulity - something almost certainly untrue - and we are left wondering whether she is being deliberately deceptive or if she actually believes this untrue thing. This is the crux of the story, and I think people are missing out when their reaction is along the lines of she's an inveterate liar; why are you even wondering about what's going on in her head? Because we are increasingly surrounded by bullshitters like Holmes, it's valuable to understand how they differ from liars... and how they can be much more dangerous & destructive.

So, how does a liar differ from a bullshitter? This video has a great summary, and although that link should start the video at the 4-minute mark, the prior part is worth watching if you haven't thought too hard about epistemology (ideas like when someone tries to speak the truth but says something untrue, or someone intends to deceive but they end up speaking the truth). The video cites the book On Bullshit, which lays it out as follows:

[The author] makes a distinction between "bullshitters" and liars. He concludes that bullshitters are more insidious: they are more so a threat against the truth than are liars who, like truth-tellers, are resolutely concerned with the truth, the latter in telling it, the former in avoiding it, unlike bullshitters, who are almost entirely unconcerned with the truth.

I came away convinced Holmes actually thinks she is (and always has been) speaking appropriately, while not really concerning herself with whether her words and actions are truthful. This is the way of the bullshitter. We can't know with any certainty what's going on in her head, but it seems that her mind has re-shaped ideas, words, and definitions such that her outlandish claims are actually... fine. (I hesitate to say "true" because the core idea here is that these people aren't concerned with the truth; they just want things to go their way.)

There's a great moment when Fielder puts her on the spot, asking "what do you think it is to lie?" and, as I recall, she comes up with a solid definition: "to say something you believe to be untrue". So how can someone know what lying is, say things that aren't true, and still earnestly believe they're not lying? They can "hack" this scenario simply by changing what they believe. The bullshitter believes their own bullshit, and I think Holmes fits the bill perfectly.

This portrait-of-a-bullshitter feels quite timely: our lives are increasingly being impacted by bullshitters, from the people in power to the feckless media to the influencers that will say anything as long as it benefits them. Theranos was famous for the disconnect between what was promised and what was actually delivered, and we see the same thing happening routinely in the US, from the government's wildly corrupt and anti-accountability sins to the chatbot purveyors bullshitting their way into a bubble so massive it will almost certainly tank the global economy. (For anyone feeling the urge to defend chatbots' abilities, I'll remind you that Sam Altman said "we are close to creating a genie that grant any wish". What the fuck?)

Responsibility & culpability look very different for the bullshitter, and in practice this grants them freedom to behave carelessly... without meaningfully grappling with the consequences. Even when facing incarceration, Holmes didn't express a bit of remorse. This is because she believes she did nothing wrong. I'm sure there will be no remorse from those in the government who have no regard for the truth (even after it has disastrous consequences), and the same applies to the people who are burning literal trillions of dollars on the ridiculous promise of AI-enabled miracles.

If you saw the movie and still want to shout at me "you fell for her spell, sucker - liars must be held accountable!", I don't particularly disagree. But I still think it's fascinating to investigate how a person navigates the world with essentially zero concern for what is actually true. Especially because these people are routinely tolerated in positions of power (which - I think - is having catastrophic consequences that are only just beginning to emerge).