Illustrated by Geliza Paunan
When Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheimer’s documentary, You Can See Everything, ended, my theater was filled with the electric buzz of dozens of recliner movie seats slowly closing. We spectators who had trekked out on a Sunday evening were caught in a pall, a sort of “what the fuck did I just see” type of silence.
You Can See Everything is a spectacle. Ostensibly about Elizabeth Holmes, the woman who created Theranos, a medical device that claimed it could run any blood test, the film dovetails into a meta mind-fuck that has you wondering if you just spent three hours letting yourself be manipulated by people who were already convicted of scamming people.
It’s a physically uncomfortable watch at times. The film is suffocating, closing in on each subject, Nathan Fielder included, at a tight zoom. You find yourself staring at the acne around Fielder’s mouth as he talks, or the water in Holmes’ way-too-wide blue eyes, or the scruff of Billy Evans’, Elizabeth Holmes’ partner’s, beard. Each eyebrow furrow or frown or Adam's apple bobbing is caught in full glory. It’s a bit like watching Animal Planet.
You begin tracking expressions more than what people are saying, each person cut down into the tiny, individual parts that make up their face. Less human, more animal.
There’s a voyeuristic quality to the film. The intense focus on each minute detail in people’s faces turns each expression into a possible lie. When Fielder asks Holmes questions, and the camera stares at her blue eyes and the way her mouth curls into the ghost of a perpetual smile, you ask yourself, is she lying? Is that her tell? It makes every moment seem artificial. When Fielder asks Holmes what emotion is hard for her and she admits she has trouble crying, the lone tear that the camera follows falling down her face is like a well-paid actor.
The way Fielder interrogates Holmes and Evans can also be excruciatingly awkward at times, pinpointing tiny moments and sticking with them far longer than is socially acceptable. Part of Fielder’s charm is this sort of strange character he has built that operates outside of conventional niceties. He will let a silence linger. He will baldly ask about people’s sex lives. He will question Evans as to why he snatched a bowl of eggs out of Holmes’ hands to whisk it better. He will put on Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” routine and push and push on Holmes until she admits she doesn’t understand the joke.
This character is what has led to the success of Fielder’s other comedy shows. Across from Holmes and Evans, though, it creates a haunting dynamic. No one seems to ever react to things the way I would expect. It was like three aliens pretending to be human – every conversation both far too earnest and simultaneously far too suspicious.
For a documentary titled You Can See Everything, you didn’t feel like you were really seeing everything. Or, more accurately, the title itself, and the film at large, were a play on Holmes’ own lie that she tries to defend in the documentary. When describing Theranos, she said their company could run any blood test, provided the chemistry was possible. In this film, you could see everything, provided anyone was telling the truth.
At the end of the day, the only person who will ever know if Elizabeth Holmes was lying is Holmes herself. There is a perpetual wall between what we want to know as an audience and what we will be allowed to know. And in the best part of the film, Fielder leans into that wall, rather than trying to circumvent it.
For the first half of the documentary, we watch Holmes and Evans navigating the last 34 days before Holmes goes to prison. We see their odd, but tender, moments together and the way they care for their children. We talk to Holmes’ parents and watch them try to run their business together.
And then Holmes goes to prison.
In the later act of the film, Fielder has to navigate the fact that he has scenes he wants to discuss that weren’t caught on camera, and now can’t be caught on camera since he can’t bring a camera into the prison Holmes is being held in. As Evans even says, they have to make a documentary without access to their main subject.
But as we might expect from the man who made The Rehearsal, Fielder charges through this problem through elaborate reenactments. He even goes so far as to enlist Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the Hulu show The Dropout, to become Holmes, providing her with scripts to act like Holmes in the moments Fielder didn’t get on camera.
It’s a meta solution to a problem. As Fielder himself notes, Seyfried isn’t Holmes, even though she becomes completely engrossed in the character, to the point where her hatred for Evans is palpable on screen. She injects her own perceptions into the character she is playing, finding answers and truth where there isn’t any. She is playing the character Fielder has created.
To add to the confusion, Fielder himself hasn’t recorded these lines for her. They are pulled from his own memory of the situation. There is absolutely no way Fielder has remembered every single line word for word – something I know too well.
When I worked for my school newspaper, I was writing a puff piece about a school dance, interviewing some random classmate between classes. I didn’t record the interview, just wrote down the quote I wanted the second we were finished. When the piece was published, the girl I interviewed contacted the paper in an absolute rage, demanding the quote be removed because she “absolutely didn’t say that.” To this day, I swear I wrote down her exact words, but fundamentally, I will never know the truth. I will never know how accurate my recollection was, nor will Fielder. Did Holmes actually say, line for line, any of the words Fielder feeds into the mouthpiece of Seyfried? We can’t ever know.
On top of his memory, the audience also has to contend with the fact that the picture we get of Holmes is shot through the perception filter of how Nathan Fielder views her. At times, their relationship seems extremely close, although it’s impossible to tell how much of that was real and how much of it was the character Fielder, and perhaps Holmes, was playing. Seyfried even questions Fielder about his biases, asking if he’s at all protecting Holmes in his recreations.
Holmes in his documentary has presented herself as this almost hapless being. She doesn’t understand comedy; she is being taken care of and dominated by Evans; she “thinks differently.” It’s almost impossible to reconcile this poor woman about to go to jail with the cutthroat business woman who swindled Silicon Valley.
It begs the question: which Holmes character is real? Could she possibly be a victim to these domineering and obnoxious men in her life? Is she recasting herself in the cloak of victimhood in this documentary to make herself look innocent as she and Evans create Theranos 2.0? Is it just the perception of how Fielder viewed her? Again, we will never know, and it makes for some of the most riveting scenes in this documentary.
The core of the latter half of the film rests on a crucial question: Evans asked to be paid for their part in the film, and Holmes claims she doesn’t know about any money. Who is telling the truth? You begin to feel like if you could just figure that question out, you could unlock the Pandora’s box that is Elizabeth Holmes. But our resolution on this is hazy. The moment Fielder confronts Holmes about what she knows about Evans’ actions is hidden behind this wall of Fielder’s memory and Seyfried’s acting abilities, since Fielder has to question her in jail. Seyfried believes she is in a toxic Stockholm relationship; Fielder thinks he saw true love between them, and we, the viewers, will never know the truth.
In a strange way, this critical deceit of the film is almost the most truthful a documentary could ever be. There is no film that tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth, including documentaries. They are all just stories we are telling. While the director might capture things on camera and present them as fact, there will always be parts of the film left on the cutting room floor. Narratives are built, and characters are created. You can never see everything.
So, Fielder might film the cringy, everyday moments of life – Evans full frontal in the shower, Holmes crying on her couch, Evans’ overcontrolling behavior towards her – but it will never be the complete truth. Instead of shying away from that flaw in the film, Fielder emphasizes it.
They are all just playing characters someone has created. Whether the creator is Holmes and Evans or Fielder is up to the viewer to decide.
