“You Can See Everything” Review: You Can’t See Anything

Nathan Fielder graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades. Maybe that’s why, as co-director of the brilliant You Can See Everything, he also serves as investigator, needling into Elizabeth Holmes and her fiancé Billy Evans’ lives in endlessly inventive, often poignant ways. Maybe he feels qualified, in some way, to study Holmes’ maze of possible manipulation tactics, or analyze Evans’ repeated attempts to wrest control of the project away from him. Fielder is, after all, famous for his own misleading and strangely enticing brand of humor, as well as his inclination to orchestrate everything around him like a stage play. But gone from this film are the hapless salesman of Nathan for You and the hilariously neurotic analyst of The Rehearsal—for all intents and purposes, Fielder is a down-to-earth, ordinary guy here, at least compared to his main subject, who is outright bizarre. The only problem: Nathan Fielder is the main subject. Of his own documentary.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This is a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, and rest assured that she appears in various forms, embodied and disembodied, to command the film even as she’s in a Texas prison. She is dissected, prodded, and scrutinized so thoroughly that by the end of the movie we know everything about her (although, as it turns out, knowing and understanding are quite separate terms). Evans, in turn, gets his own moments in the spotlight, presenting himself as an equally eccentric personality for audiences to gape at. Yet it’s Fielder who acts as our mysterious, inscrutable intermediary: he has by far the most screen time of any character, and it’s through his eyes that we come to see everything—or, more appropriately, nothing.

Heavy spoilers following. Go watch the film.

If there are three moments that epitomize You Can See Everything, all three of them, at least for me, have to do with words. Semantics are the instrument to which Holmes and Evans dance, in glossy heeled shoes, around an increasingly perplexed Fielder, who spends most of his time on set trying to work through the swirling confusion of subtext and subterfuge. Early on, the couple are on the phone with a representative from the New York Times, which published the now-infamous profile where Holmes said, in reference to dramatizations of her case on television: “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” Evans rightly recognizes how that quote paints Holmes’ entire aesthetic—the baritone voice, the bleached-straight hair, the Steve Jobs turtleneck—as an elaborate lie, a damning blow to her supposed innocence in Theranos’ investment dealings, and so he emphasizes and re-emphasizes that she actually said “they’re playing a character they created.” As neither Evans nor the Times has conclusive evidence one way or the other, we never find out what the actual quote was. It’s heavily implied, however, through Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s depiction of just how comically obtuse the couple are, that credibility sides with the journalists.

Of course, CEO and businesswoman Elizabeth Holmes couldn’t really be as witless as she presents herself here—or could she? “Could” is a loaded word. “Could,” in the world of Theranos, is the difference between truth and fiction, between concrete and hypothetical, between vacuous innocence and nail-sharp cunning. Midway through the pre-imprisonment half of the film, Holmes lays out the components of her famed blood-testing device on a table in order to explain how it works. She maintains to a skeptical Fielder that the technology functioned perfectly, and it could have run tests if the specific chemistries had been finished. It’s just that these individual chemistries hadn’t been finished, so the company was very limited in its capabilities: but in principle, as she told her investors, the machine “was capable” of working. I found myself shaking my head fiercely during this whole explanation, and then a second later nodding just as vigorously when Fielder asked if Holmes knew the distinction between “is capable of” and “can,” and how saying the device is capable of working might deceive people into believing that, as of this moment, the device does work. Words are so powerful, so confusing, and apparently enough for Holmes to get tied up by her own statements—she truly seems baffled at the prospect that she could have used diction to deliberately mislead her stockholders, employees, and patients.

“That was not the device that I worked with 12 hours a day. That was not the device that we hid from regulators. That was not the device that failed quality controls. That was not the device that we used to knowingly give patients incorrect medical information. And she completely misled [Fielder] down this completely different rabbit hole.” —Tyler Shultz, Theranos whistleblower

Fielder obsesses over syntax, over Holmes’ part-falsehoods and part-slip-ups, trying to sift through a version of reality that will eventually provide the “gotcha” moment to exonerate or condemn her once and for all. It’s why he overanalyzes every interaction with the coercive and controlling Evans, frequently asking him, “Why’d you just do that?” or “Why’d you just say that?” It’s why he studies the camera footage so thoroughly, until finally he stumbles on the discrepancy that comes to define the film’s second half: although her fiancé negotiated for a share of A24’s profits from the documentary, Holmes claims that neither of them are making any money off of this project. It’s why he brings in Amanda Seyfried to reenact those initial meetings with A24, as well as the crucial climactic scene, in which Fielder visits Holmes in her no-filming prison to ask if she really was aware of Evans’ monetary bargain. After all, the answer to that question might very well determine whether Holmes is a manipulative, cash-hungry liar or the one being manipulated for money by her tyrannical partner.

Unfortunately for truth, Elizabeth Holmes isn’t this documentary’s subject. Nathan Fielder is. We don’t know, for example, that Holmes left the meeting room for the exact amount of time Evans needed to bully A24 into a deal, even though he tells us that’s what happened. We also don’t know whether her absence during the negotiations was designed specifically to absolve her of responsibility for the deal—Fielder only gives us his speculations. Everything we understand about the film is metabolized through Fielder’s cameras, his lines of questioning, and ultimately, his words. As he and Seyfried recreate the prison conversation from a script, he initially has her (as Holmes) confess that “I knew he was talking to you about it,” referring to the money, only to immediately cross that out and replace it with “I knew he was talking to you about something.” He explains that he doesn’t remember feeling surprised when Holmes said that line to him in real life, so she must not have said those exact incriminating words.

Feelings and words and memory—these are unreliable narrators, imperfections that obscure whatever valid information we might have started out with. Fielder’s investigation offers the audience a vicarious sense of control: we get to scrutinize Holmes and Evans alongside him, searching for the telltale hesitation, the contradiction, the moment when the mask slips and we finally understand the truth. But, as Fielder ultimately posits in the film’s scintillating conclusion, what exactly is truth to a distanced, chair-bound audience? Why are we so intent on discovering the facts of a case from which we’re so far removed, looking down at the onion layers and thinking we have the ability to tell what’s at the core of another person’s life? In this era of “seeing everything,” with an arsenal of cameras and recorded data and Internet articles at our fingertips, why is it harder than ever to get around our own perspective? And why, why on earth, do we feel more strongly than ever that we can?

Caleb Lee is a sophomore at Columbia College studying English. Name 10 books.