Here’s one summary: Nathan, a fastidious neurotic, is a performance artist who is obsessed with understanding the truth about other people1, despite his anxiety that they can never be truly understood. He meets Elizabeth, a world-famous liar, whose bug-eyed appeals to innocence disguise the fact that she can’t stop making things up. He relies on artifice to understand other people’s honesty; she performs honesty to disguise her artifice. That this sounds like a log line for a trippy but possibly ingenious rom-com is appropriate. You Can See Everything is trippy, ingenious, hilarious, and sometimes, weirdly, romantic.
Who is Elizabeth Holmes? I’ll give you my answer. She is a relation between two characters. The first is a pathological liar. The second is a perfectionist who needs to believe that she is so purely good that she cannot admit to having ever told a fib.
“You’ve never lied?” Nathan Fielder asks early in the documentary. No, she says. “Not even a white lie?” No, she says. She can never remember telling a lie.
Well, I remember. Elizabeth Holmes claimed Theranos’s technology could perform more than 1,000 blood tests, when the machine never did more than about a dozen. She asked Pfizer to endorse her technology, but after the company declined to do so, she put its logo on a Theranos report, anyway. She claimed Theranos would generate more than $100 million in revenue in 2014, when the company actually generated only about $100,000, and she refused to let investors see financial documents that would have exposed the 1,000X discrepancy. She bragged that her technology was saving lives in the US military when it wasn’t even being used. She lied about what her technology could do, how it was being used, where it was being used, who she was working with, and how much revenue the company was generating. It is difficult to think of a category of deception whose box she didn’t check.
In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Fielder struggles to understand what Holmes means when she insists that the Theranos device “can” run thousands of tests. Fielder points out that it never could. Holmes insists that the technology actually could, provided that forthcoming technology allowed it to do so. Given their back-and-forth about the words can and could, Fielder is reminded of the Abbott and Costello skit, “Who’s on First?” So he plays the famous black-and-white clip for her on a computer. Holmes, a Stanford matriculant who was once the richest self-made female billionaire in history, says she doesn’t get it.
Some of my friends who saw the movie said this scene proved that Holmes lacks the specific mode of interpersonal awareness required to get certain forms of comedy. Like, maybe she’s just autistic? But surely Holmes suffers not from a mental inability to understand puns, but rather from a psychological incapacity to admit dishonesty2 combined with an insistence on clinging to some representation of neurodivergence that might excuse her criminal behavior. I think she intuits that Fielder is playing the video in order to mock her tendentious use of the word can. Understanding the joke—even suggesting that she almost understands the joke—would mean understanding that Fielder thinks her defense is a joke. The stakes are high. And so, she lies.
“Is Elizabeth Holmes a serial liar?” is not a hard question to answer. Nor is it one best approached by moving in with a convicted fraudster to quiz her about the meaning of Abbott and Costello skits. So, Lance Oppenheim (the talented young co-director who remains behind the camera) and Fielder pursue a different question, which is something like this: “Can Nathan Fielder ever achieve absolute certainty about the character of Elizabeth Holmes, as he embarks on a series of increasingly Escher-like investigations into her motivations, and his own?” On paper, this question might seem as compelling as licking a Möbius strip. On the big screen, the answer turns out to be a completely enthralling investigation into the subject of ambiguity.
You cannot know a person, the filmmakers are telling us. You will never accumulate sufficient evidence to possess their interiority, to understand their motivations, their rationalizations, the stories they build, destroy, and rebuild to understand themselves. You can go to the person’s house to film them for thousands of hours; you can film your conversations with close-ups so excruciating that everyone’s nose pores achieve topographical definition; you can ask any question; you can ask an actress, who has inhabited the inner life of this person, to play the character over and over; you can use every instrument of sincerity and irony and artifice to get at the truth; you can even name your project You Can See Everything. What a big joke. You cannot. Seeing everything is not the same as knowing anything.
One of the film’s perverse pleasures is our introduction to Elizabeth’s husband, Billy Evans. Every few years, Hollywood interrupts its assembly line of predictable bad guys—man who wants unlimited power; brilliant psychopath—to produce a genuinely novel villain archetype. Billy does not disappoint in this regard. He is a fully 21st-century species of dude, a kind of extremely online neo-chauvinist who resembles something a writer for The Cut might whip up after spending a fortnight marinating in Manosphere content. What is she doing with him? Is she, as many have suggested, the real victim of this film? “I think it’s too simple to present Holmes as the victim of predatory men,” John Ganz writes. Holmes seems to display a kind of “splitting” in her relationships, where she seeks out partners to do the bad that she cannot reconcile within herself:
Both her present husband and Sunny Balwani are manifestly aggressive and controlling. Balwani was known as “the enforcer” at Theranos. (Both are even preoccupied with weapons.) Holmes described Balwani as abusive in her testimony. There are points in the film where Evans’s behavior could be interpreted as abusive control—and other people certainly look at it that way, with good reason … instead, I think the men in her life embody aggressive qualities she cannot acknowledge or integrate in herself.
I love this interpretation because it doesn’t require us to soften our opinion of Holmes, but rather casts her borderline-trad deference to Billy as a part of the act. While the filmmakers are sometimes guilty of obscuring Elizabeth’s pathology by trying so damn hard to make a documentary about the nature of ambiguity, they are not remotely guilty of obscuring Billy’s nature. There is not much mystery here. With some guys, you really can see everything.
Nathan Fielder started his career as a bone-dry comic on Nathan For You, in which he “helped” small business owners by concocting byzantine schemes for them to make money. But he has matured into a kind of gonzo documentarian. In the series premiere of The Rehearsal, Fielder counsels a 50-year-old trivia enthusiast who wants to make an awkward confession to a friend. The process of rehearsing this confession—which includes the construction of a full-scale replica of the bar where they do trivia—is one of the weirdest and funniest episodes of television I’ve ever seen.
In the first half of You Can See Everything, Fielder tries to understand Holmes in a mostly conventional way—by moving into her beach house to ask questions of her and Billy. In the second half, Fielder tries to understand Holmes in a wildly convoluted way, befitting his work on The Rehearsal—by bringing in Amanda Seyfried, the actor who played Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout, to portray Holmes, to speculate on her motives, and ultimately to force Fielder to question his own.
In the final scene of the film, Fielder visits Holmes in prison, where she tells him that she’s upset that he’s hanging around with Seyfried. Fielder can’t film this conversation. So he films a reenactment of his memory of the conversation, and we get to watch Amanda Seyfried playing Nathan Fielder’s memory of Elizabeth Holmes telling Nathan Fielder that Elizabeth Holmes is tired of having other people tell the story of Elizabeth Holmes, especially Amanda Seyfried. The scene is performed with utmost solemnity and is also so fucking funny that I couldn’t hear some of the lines because the packed house was laughing so loudly.
The existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote that “the self is a relation that relates itself to itself.” This nearly sounds like nonsense3. It’s also a lovely description of Fielder’s documentary style. He loves asking his subjects to play themselves and watch themselves be played, always searching for a way to depict the act of self-awareness. So we get Elizabeth Holmes watching Amanda Seyfried play Elizabeth Holmes. Then we get Amanda watching Elizabeth watching Amanda playing Elizabeth.
There’s another curious similarity between Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism, and Fielder, a great practitioner of existential comedy. Kierkegaard was a bit of a prankster, himself. He often wrote under cheeky fake names that frequently overruled his other alter egos. In his final book, published after his death, he wrote that you cannot force someone out of an illusion by confronting the illusion directly. You need a bag of tricks: satire, irony, artifice. In Kierkegaard’s own words, one must sometimes “deceive people into the truth.”
You Can See Everything is a film about the tension between two modes of deception. Holmes uses deceit to tell big lies, and Fielder uses conceit to tell strange truths. The film ends with a strangely moving shot of them playing together in the ocean. Maybe this is just another joke, with the documentarian drowning the last morsels of his reliability as a narrator. Or maybe, in the end, there’s something honest happening in the water, as two masters of artifice see in each other that rarest thing: an unerring commitment to the bit.
Or, at least, the performance of being obsessed with the truth of other people
Text messages between Holmes and Theranos president Sunny Balwani show that she sent several messages that demonstrate an adequate understanding of metaphorical language. One message: “You are breeze in desert for me. My water. And ocean.” The idea that the woman who wrote that text suffers from a cognitive inability to understand wordplay, like some poor right-brain stroke victim, is ludicrous.
And it might be nonsense! Some historians think Kierkegaard was mocking Hegel with this horrific sentence construction. But, taken seriously, I think he’s saying something like: a person becomes their full self by standing over and above their internal tensions—e.g., their need for infinite freedom and desire for finite belonging—and by actively choosing to become something definite. In SK’s case, this basically meant choosing Christ. But secular humanists can also read this passage as a commentary on the experience of consciousness: the mind as an entity that can watch itself watching itself. And it’s this sort of infinite regress of people watching people watching people that Fielder has managed to turn into a novel art form.