There’s a woman with whom I attended school who had the misfortune of enduring multiple childhood brain tumors. She was still quite smart, and although she was severely awkward, this was a magnet school, so she wasn’t that much weirder than the institutional average. I did figure she’d grow out of that like most people do, but when we reconnected years later, she was still stuck in a state of emotional immaturity. Although the reasons for her inability to connect with others on the same level were recognizably clinical, it wasn’t difficult to see how those without knowledge of her past would sometimes find her company off-putting, and as fellow Louisiana expats in Texas, I unsuccessfully tried to integrate her into my friend group. She departed for parts unknown during the first year of COVID, and when I think about her now what I remember most was how uncanny she looked when she smiled. Her brain simply didn’t produce neurochemicals in a typical way, and as such she didn’t naturally smile or frown; these facial movements were clearly practiced in a mirror to better fit in, and witnessing a smile that never reaches the eyes can be unnerving. Elizabeth Holmes is the same, but my high school classmate didn’t commit mass fraud and negligence (that I know of).
You Can See Everything is directed by Lance Oppenheim (Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, Primetime) and Nathan Fielder, a graduate of one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades. Following on the success of his Comedy Central TV series Nathan for You, which was at once both a Bar Rescue/Kitchen Nightmares style “save the floundering business” reality show and a satirization of the same featuring Nathan concocting outlandish schemes, Fielder went to Showtime and HBO, where he conceived The Curse and The Rehearsal, respectively. Both are two of the most fascinating and bizarre pieces of art of this century, blending surreality, human interest stories, and psychological manipulation. As time goes on, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell where the lines lie between Fielder the person, Fielder the documentarian, and Fielder the subject. If Fielder ever became as notorious as Holmes and a Dropout-style TV series were made about him, and (even less likely) he ever dropped his public persona (if that’s even what it is), I can conceive of how he might respond to the question of how he felt about it the way that Holmes allegedly did when asked about Amanda Seyfried: “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”
That quotation bears significant relevance on You Can See Everything, as it seems to be the one issue that Holmes is hung up on, and it is admittedly a potential key to her entire puzzling deal. Holmes makes a great number of claims about herself, many of them spurious at best: that she was never in tech for the money and was always altruistic in her desire to make medical testing more widely available, that she doesn’t feel that she did anything wrong, that she has never lied in her adult life. They cannot possibly be objectively true, but could this possibly be her truth? Is she simply delusional? At a pivotal juncture in the film’s first half, Holmes’s partner Billy Evans tries to make the case that Holmes’s contemporaneous claims of what the Theranos machine “can” do during her girlboss heyday wasn’t an attempt at deception but part of a larger fundamental gap between how Holmes thinks/speaks and how everyone else interprets her. To that end, Fielder shows the couple the classic Abbot & Costello “Who’s On First?” routine, and observes Holmes, who seems to laugh not because she finds something funny, but because she’s conditioned herself to laugh when others are laughing. When questioned, she can’t identify what is funny about the routine, and Nathan has to spell out for her that the joke is that a player has the unlikely surname of “Who.” When is she pretending—when she says that to her there was no difference between verbalizing “Theranos can do X, Y, and Z” and “At some point in the future Theranos could theoretically do X, Y, and Z,” or when she misses the point of the most famous comic banter of all time? Is it all just playing a character she created? I can’t conceive of why Elizabeth Holmes and her husband would think that Fielder would be the ideal person to document her final weeks before going to federal prison; it makes no sense. But I can see why Fielder would take the job.
I was fortunate enough to go into this film without being spoiled by some of the more unusual metatextual jumps that it eventually makes. There are elemental, recurring ideas in Fielder’s work that, in retrospect, I should have expected, but even if you guess he’s going to do some Rehearsal-esque stuff, I would not have guessed who he was going to involve in his scheme. It leads to some of the film’s best material, especially as the surprise star of the second half manages to embody what you would expect from a more standard documentary treatment, balancing empathy for Holmes against recrimination for her, and when Nathan starts to become a little too charmed by Holmes, it’s this person who sees through it. One could criticize the film (or Fielder through it, as the man and the text are inextricably intertwined) for being too empathetic for Holmes at certain points, as You Can See Everything isn’t really about her; it’s about Evans, which we should have known from the beginning since it’s his image that we open on. Holmes departs the movie at the halfway point to begin her term in federal prison in Bryan, Texas, at which point we jump ahead two years to where we find Evans firmly ensconced in tech bro culture in Austin: operating out of a WeWork, shooting automatic rifles at the weapons range, and creating deepfakes of his incarcerated partner while various reptiles slither and slip about the room.
Holmes and Evans are a match made in hell. She trusts him fully and completely, and he is a control freak who can’t even let her scramble eggs without intervening. He makes deals on her behalf (maybe), has taken over Holmes’s online presence by providing proof of his power of attorney over her to Twitter, and accepts the nonconsensual generation of AI porn of Holmes as an inevitability that he chooses to profit off of. Despite all of this, he and Holmes seem to remain completely simpatico, up to and including describing their love for one another with the same faux-poetic narrative. It’s bizarre. Is everyone just playing characters that they’ve created? Is anyone real, ever?
I’m not sure what You Can See Everything is—documentary of a criminal, confession of a voyeur, character study of a master manipulator (or two?), or docufiction of a woman with no sense of reality. It’s both earnest and detached; it’s damning, and sometimes surprisingly sweet. For now, I’ll settle for “utterly engrossing.”
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
