Holmes serves as a starting point. She isn’t where the journey ends.
The release of You Can See Everything has been met with what can only be described as universal praise. Across both professional critics as well as avid film goers, the movie is being praised as the best of the year; my personal go to assertion is that it is the best film of the 2020s. This sort of praises seems hyperbolic, and there is a real possibility that it will die off over time as more and more space is created between its release and more people have time to see it.
The most valid piece of criticism however is that as an actual documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, it fails in some very specific ways. It leaves out key aspects of her actual fraud, namely that there were key pieces of information that she forged to make it appear like she had certain endorsements that she never actually was able to achieve. She presented the technology as far more tested than it actually was. In the film, Holmes is given space to assert that her fraud is a matter of miscommunication, that she never willingly misled people. Those who have followed the case, from reading Bad Blood to listening the endless hours of coverage of the Theranos trial, will immediately see the seams of what directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim left out of their narrative.
However, this criticism, while valid, somewhat misses the mark for one simple reason.
You Can See Everything isn’t a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. Not really.
There is an anecdote that Fielder and Oppenheim first decided to explore an Elizabeth Holmes documentary at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles. During the course of the film, there is one discussion Fielder has where he explains a trick (that isn’t really a trick) by David Blaine. The idea of stage magic, and the deceit inherit to it, permeate throughout the film. The magicians wants you looking over here. But by distracting you with this, do they actually reveal something else?
You Can See Everything is not about Elizabeth Holmes. It is about the way people feel about Elizabeth Holmes, and the way that they deceive themselves into thinking they know Holmes through endless consumption. It is about the rise of the parasocial figure, celebrities that we find ourselves drawn to as strongly people within our own social sphere. It is about how we build cathedrals of understanding, based purely on what we have heard second or third hand. It is about the collective pseudo reality we all live in.
Compare You Can See Everything to the other tech-centric documentary it came out alongside. Alex Gibney’s Musk is an exhaustive and exhausting look at the world’s first trillionaire, a man who has determined that his obscene wealth gives him the right to shape the world to his whims. It makes this case by giving a biography of Musk’s highs and lows, not shying away from his accomplishments while always casting a slight question mark over everything. It utilizes interviews with people who have been in Musk’s orbit to give a portrait of the man, allowing us a sense of totality in how we consider Musk as an individual.
By contrast, if you see the purpose of You Can See Everything as biographical, it is a failure. It doesn’t really even tell us much about Holmes’ story. It also doesn’t really tell us who Nathan Fielder is, or Billy Evans, or any of the other people that enter and exit into their orbit. There is some background given on how the film itself came to be, and we get fairly straightforward insight into at least what Holmes and Evans’ intent in the film is: they see it as a means to “set the record straight.” One suspects that Fielder’s perspective is to get to the “truth,” to try to find some sort of resolution into exactly what Holmes is up to.
But that isn’t where the film ultimately lands. What the film veers into, especially in its expansive second half, is an exploration of the lines between what is known and what is unknowable. Fielder increasingly because curious less about the question of if Holmes lied, if she deserves to go to prison, but becomes obsessed with the nature of Holmes’ relationship to her partner. Is she manipulating him? Is he manipulating her? Are they in on it together? Do they actually love each other?
Some of this connects with Fielder’s previous work, which has always been interested in how humans connect with anyone else. And like other explorations, Fielder’s own longing for connection eventually takes center stage, as does his bewilderment at how other people live their lives. But it wouldn’t be quite right to describe You Can See Everything as simply an adjacent work, another season of The Rehearsal.
That is in part because it’s not just a film by Fielder but also utilizes the skills of one of the most exciting documentarians working together. I wrote about Lance Oppenheim’s debut future, Some Kind of Heaven, years ago. I was impressed even then with how Oppenheim, as a documentarian, seemed very interested in elevating the visual storytelling of documentary to feel more “cinematic,” using cinematography and editing more associated with narrative filmmaking to craft his worlds.
Since then Oppenheim has continued to develop that style, though unlike Some Kind of Heaven borrowing from Wes Anderson and David Lynch, You Can See Everything is more indebted to grittier work like Brian DePalma or Jonathan Demme. But he is still driven by this desire to cast the real world with the same craft and sheen of cinematic, narrative storytelling. And in partnering with Fielder, whose penchant for self-examining explorations of human fragility, he finds an excellent partner whose passions help guide his own. You Can See Everything is a documentary that is much more indebted to Hitchcock and Fincher than it is Gibney or Michael Moore. That is precisely what makes it so exciting.
There is a scene late in You Can See Everything that I can’t stop thinking about. Amanda Seyfried and Fielder are sitting by a fireside, reviewing the script the Fielder has written of his prison discussion with Elizabeth Holmes. This conversation is intercut with Seyfried is reading the script, which includes a detailed criticism Holmes shared about Seyfried. The scene then intercuts with her reading it, acting defensively, then having to embody her own critic. This included Seyfried even having to mispronounce her own name.
The cognitive dissonance of the whole exchange, the way that Fielder and Oppenheim bend reality back on itself to both recreate the real with knowing artifice but also acknowledge the very discomfort that tensions creates, is the heart of what You Can See Everything is driving towards. It asks you to determine what is real, what is storytelling, and how those two things intersect much more than we like to imagine. The nature of documentary, historically, is to live in the pre-supposition that what you are seeing is real. But what is real? What is truth? What is more honest than living in the discovered discomfort of having to criticize yourself, not even knowing how to say your own name?
You Can See Everything isn’t a film “about” Elizabeth Holmes. It is a film about the way that we think we know the shape of the world, but our possibility of ever actually knowing anything is as flimsy as the limits of our own mind. It is the sum culmination of what is knowable and mystery, and the gray area between those. You can see everything. But where does everything even end?
