You Can See Everything. You can see everything. You can see everything.
You Can See Everything is about perspective. You can see what is shown to you. What is shown to you is, ostensibly, the interior lives of infamous white collar criminal Elizabeth Holmes and her partner, full-frontal enthusiast Billy Evans. Take two people who deeply want control of the narrative and add sinister satirist Nathan Fielder, who alongside filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, is invited into their home, and you have a shifting prism of truth that shows us ‘everything’ — everything being what is perceptible and in front of us now.
The documentary is a love story about two people who lie to each other and begin to think that what they believe is definitionally true. What we see is two people who are obsessed with each other, sure, but we also see the behaviors of control, manipulation, and gaslighting, which has festered so long that the couple at the center of the film seem to have become unconscious of the toxic game they’re playing. We do see everything, in that we can see this for what it is, but we do not see everything in that we are not given the truth of the situation in a clean way that makes sense to us as viewers.
We are being manipulated here, both by the couple, and for the purposes of exposing the agony of their delusions, by the filmmakers themselves. The filmmakers, given the subject and the cooperation granted, try to show us their own version of what has happened. They’ve said in interviews that even they may disagree about what has happened. They have the same footage as we do and more that we have not seen, but this is what being heavily manipulated feels like, we continue to search for reason and logic, because the “truths” we are shown do not make any sense.
And so, halfway through the movie, when Elizabeth Holmes goes to federal prison and Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim pull the rug out from under the movie and make some meta-fictional documentary, we are then getting their truths, which are fictions, sure, but unlike the reality presented by the couple, is trying to make sense of what has really happened.
Two years have passed at this point, between Holmes going to prison, and Amanda Seyfried — who played the Theranos founder in the Hulu show The Dropout — reprising her role, in an effort to create a play-acting reconstruction of some of the conversations and events that happened off camera. This, of course, does not make these moments empirically true or false, but they create a reading in line with Nathan Fielder’s work, which often suggests all interactions are performative.
Why Holmes and Evans are putting on a show for us is also self-evident. By participating in this post-modern work, they believe they can reclaim the narrative. The opposite is true. For their part of the constructed narrative, they run a simple playbook establishing plausible deniability for all things. Every word and action, at least in the first half, works to this end, and we can see the artifice clearly, and the high-level manipulative tactics that will make this one of the most widely discussed and debated films of the decade.
Every time we close in on an answer, the momentum is interrupted (usually by Evans, who seems borderline abusive in his level of control), and we are redirected to what the couple wants to show us. Occasionally, they lock in on what’s happening around them, like when Fielder presents the classic Abbott and Costello comedy routine “Who’s On First,” and it’s evident Holmes understands that the comedy is about “people talking past each other,” but cannot tell us who is on first or what the joke is. Evans immediately locks onto this because it’s good PR. Yes, you see, she just thinks differently than everyone else, and so she uses the wrong words.
That’s how all this trouble started, they say, as though the only trouble with Theranos was a slippage of wording. The company suggested their Edison device can run any blood test, just as Holmes says we “can totally see everything.” What she meant, they continue, is that the device could run any blood test (that it was programmed to run the chemistry for). This is not merely a misdirection in wording though, as Theranos claimed the device could do everything, then deceptively took the samples and ran them through conventional third-party machines, to falsely prove what it could do.
Which brings the documentary to its head, which is that these folks have convinced themselves that what they believe is their definitive truth and as long as they believe what they say, then they have never deceived anyone. That you can deceive for the purposes of your beliefs does not seem to occur to them, as Holmes swears up and down she’s “never deceived anyone,” and beyond the Edison’s claim issues, there’s plenty of hard proof that she has, and continues to deceive everyone, most of all herself, and her partner.
The documentary is a watershed moment in filmed psychological experimentation. It’s deeply brilliant because it’s always probing and looking deeper. It does not hand us neat and tidy conclusions and this is, perhaps, its greatest strength as a work of non-fiction filmmaking with hybrid parts. The film is not merely a continuation of the Fielder project, but a deeply reflective step forward about what all of it means, acting as a postmortem of the documentary as we once knew it, now forever changed.