“fyi you can totally see everything”
I abhor micro-analysis of a film’s title, but it’s imperative here in the case of the film You Can See Everything. The word “Can” is doing all of the heavy metaphorical lifting. Anyone who is obsessed with grammar (or anyone with a real peach of a middle school English teacher) would happily tell you that the word “can” is an indicator of ability. So what Elizabeth Holmes is telling Nathan Fielder via text in the film, and what he and co-director Lance Oppenheim are telling the audience is that the potential to see everything does indeed exist in some way, shape, or form.
In 2023, little more than a month before reporting to prison for (what was supposed to be) an eleven-year sentence, former Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans decided to invite Fielder and Oppenheim—with the backing of A24—to document their final month together as a family with their two small children (one of whom was born weeks before cameras started rolling).
I know a lot of folks know of Fielder and his prior work on Comedy Central’s Nathan For You, but the premise of the show that made him famous was him pitching comedically terrible plans to help struggling small businesses. This would often lead Fielder off on various tangents, sometimes abandoning the business owner altogether as he did in his infamous “Dumb Starbucks” episode.
The final episode of his show was a feature-length endeavor titled “Finding Frances” where Fielder and a Bill Gates impersonator traverse the country in an attempt to find the impersonator’s proverbial “one that got away.” These obsessions further expanded into his fascinating HBO series The Rehearsal, where he attempts to help people prepare for big moments in their lives by accurately recreating the circumstances and allowing the people to rehearse the moment over and over to perfect it before having the conversation in real life.
I give you all of this context to say that he may seem like a baffling choice to document the final days of this couple as they attempt to relaunch her business plan once again. Evans attempts to spin the hiring of Fielder as him being a kindred neurodivergent spirit to Holmes, but Fielder’s well-known brand of mischievous documentary filmmaking should’ve been a bright red flag. I’m not sure if they viewed Fielder as someone they could control enough to portray them in a positive light, but that certainly didn’t pan out.
It’s also interesting to note that Oppenheim himself just explored similar territory in last month’s Primetime. Has reality television corrupted the documentary form, rendering the truth increasingly elusive, or did it just reveal the fact that documentary was never reality to begin with? Oppenheim’s presence feels like a logical extension of his work on Primetime, how do we recover the truth once the circus leaves town?
All of the film’s advertising has centered on the first half of the nearly three-hour endeavor, and I’m not going to say much more about the second half except to say that if you are familiar with Nathan Fielder’s work, he’s up to his old tricks. Fielder’s obsession with reality and the ability that endless money and resources gives him to recreate any given reality is what the film’s second half embraces. But just as he learned on The Rehearsal, the question for the audience is always going to remain the same: whose reality is being presented?
Memory is a faulty thing, and attempting to recreate reality based solely on the recollection of one or two people is never going to be an accurate depiction of what actually happened. Nathan Fielder can get awfully close to reality by meticulously reconstructing the locations and circumstances down to the last detail, but it’s still his version of events within that framework.
There’s a particularly fascinating scene where Fielder is attempting to recollect something that was said to him by Holmes and he has to decide whether the final word in her sentence was “it” or “something.” The quote he decides to go with is “I know he was talking to you about something,” but replace “something” with “it,” and the entire context of their conversation shifts. This is where the obsession lies in the back half of You Can See Everything, and frankly, in most of Fielder’s work.
In one of the film’s most agonizingly uncomfortable scenes, Fielder shows Holmes and Evans the famous “Who’s on First” routine originated by Abbott and Costello, in an attempt to further elucidate the fact that words have multiple meanings and a statement like “Who’s on First” is both a question and its answer. I won’t say much more about this scene, but the separate and distinctly different reactions that Holmes and Evans have to the bit speak volumes about the couple in relation to one another.
Holmes herself leans into an obsession with words early on as she and Evans insist that a New York Times reporter misquoted her. Focusing on Amanda Seyfried’s portrayal of Holmes in the Hulu series The Dropout—which Holmes, Evans, and Fielder watch on the couple’s bed at one point—Holmes told the reporter that Seyfried wasn’t playing her, she was playing a character. Their obsession lies in whether Holmes said it was a character that “I created” as printed, or “they created” as Holmes recalls it to have been stated.
This points toward the major contradiction in Holmes’ standard posture throughout the film, and even her life. She seems to willingly cede control in certain areas in order to protect her own self-image. Her driving factor in business is to perpetually play the genial genius while her business and romantic partners play hardball behind the scenes. Does that position serve her or her image well? I’ll just say that it’s hard to sway public opinion on someone like Elizabeth Holmes.
I will always be a champion of the position that words matter, words have meanings, those meanings have deeper roots, and there is inherent fault in so much of the language we use in our interpersonal conversations. Finally, along comes a movie like You Can See Everything to help shine a light on that point. Endless arguments can be had over individual words in sentences from conversations had years earlier. As Robert Evans famously said, "There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each differently.”
What makes You Can See Everything such a rich and fertile film for discussion is that pulling on any one thread of the dozens presented in the film can lead to additional questions about the motives of those involved. It hasn’t been 24 hours since I first saw it and I’m already thinking about other conversations, other looks, other words. This one’s gonna stick in your brain for a good long while, find someone to chat about it with, you’ll have plenty to talk about, not least of which is whether or not seeing everything was ever a realistic possibility.
Header image via IMDb