You Can See Everything...and Still Not Know What You're Looking At

Oh, what a tangled web we weave
when first we practice to deceive.
–Walter Scott

I am a Nathan Fielder completist. I have been an avid partisan of the man’s oeuvre since I learned about his Nathan for You Dumb Starbucks parody in 2014, and my devotion has grown in proportion to his recent high-concept ambition. My investment in his work is so great, in fact, that it caused irreparable damage to a relationship with a former employer, the details of which I'm not at liberty to discuss. (Fielder himself graciously offered to intervene on my behalf to help. While it would’ve poured gasoline on the comically absurd circus fire of that situation and possibly led to some great television, I had to decline.)

So, of course, I was sold on the movie You Can See Everything by simple virtue of it being a Fielder, independent of its incredible premise: Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos currently in prison for defrauding investors of billions of dollars, had, for some inscrutable reason, given unfiltered access to her life to one of Hollywood's most eccentric documentarians. (If that word is even an accurate description what he does.) The result is not merely another retelling of the Theranos scandal but an intimate look at one person’s thought processes that amounts to a sustained meditation on the nature of deceit itself.

If Nathan for You (2013–2017) was 90% absurdity and 10% concern for serious issues, then The Rehearsal (2022–present) turned the silliness dial down to make the balance more like 70/30. I would say that You Can See Everything goes much further and flips the ratio. It’s a sincere, disciplined attempt to deal with difficult and elusive truths…but eventually Fielder can’t help himself. He goes full Fielder by the second half, a turn that breaks up the heaviness and keeps it remarkably watchable throughout its three-hour runtime. I can’t tell you whether it lives up to the hype, because I don’t know how much hype you’ve heard, and I think we’re better off trying to ignore hype anyway. But it was everything I hoped it would be. It’s in my pantheon of favorite documentaries, next to Grizzly Man (2005) and The Act of Killing (2012).

One of the darkest truths of human nature, to me, is our capacity for deceit. The regularity with which we lie in order to protect ourselves or gain advantage over others is such an obvious truth, such a baked-in fact of human existence, that a world without deceit can even be hard to imagine. (Ricky Gervais’s flippant The Invention of Lying supports that, I think.)

But to me, a more interesting truth is wrinkled inside that of deceit’s banal ubiquity: we have a low tolerance for untruth despite our propensity toward telling it. When we’re the ones lying, our intolerance for untruth incentivizes us to start believing our own lies.

Lies are psychically unpleasant, a bitter morsel that the mind wants to spit out. Part of this comes from our natural difficulty conceptualizing negativity. Negative statements are a greater cognitive load for our minds to process than positive statements,^[1] which is why “don’t think about a pink elephant” is a notoriously hard instruction to follow. Lying, by extension, is a lot for the mind to keep up with. It’s twice the work: you have to remember the lie and also remember the truth the lie is meant to hide. As they say, a truth-teller doesn’t need a good memory. Setting aside the moral reasons against it, we’re wise to avoid lying on the grounds that most of us simply struggle to keep up with the task.^[2]

But the darker, more pitiable side of our nature, as I see it, is that we begin to believe our own lies not just because they’re too much work to keep up with. It’s that we seem to lack the courage to face the person we see in the mirror when we lie. We don’t like the lie we are telling, so we lie again and tell ourselves it’s the truth.

Whether it’s from our inability to administer complex apparatuses of lies or if it’s out of an intolerance of the shame we feel as liars, we rarely succeed as long-term masters of our deceit. It is all too easy to lose the thread of the truth we started out trying to hide and get taken in ourselves, becoming victims of our own falsehoods. Deceit is a beast that untames itself and slays its owner.

In the scene featured in that infamous teaser, with its point-blank close-ups of their faces, Holmes asks Fielder, “Why would I deceive you?” The genius of You Can See Everything is that it doesn’t stop at trying to figure out whether Holmes is being genuine or deceitful in asking that question, but whether she herself even knows the difference. The heart of this story is an impenetrable black box—but not the defective 2’x2’ lab-in-a-box that Holmes built her brief empire on. It’s Holmes’s own motives and her relationship to the truth, which remain out of our grasp.

You Can See Everything touches on a cluster of interrelated subjects, each of them with its own gradations of nuance and subtlety. One narrative that Alex Gibney’s The Inventor (2019) advances is that Holmes was the dominant partner in her romantic relationship with Theranos COO Sunny Balwani, and Fielder’s movie complicates that considerably by revealing some disturbing aspects of her current marriage to Billy Evans, suggesting a preexisting affinity for domineering men. But it also doesn’t merely reverse the narrative. Domination and power have few clean lines around them when the parties involved are given to manipulation and self-interest. Women such as Amanda Seyfried and Stanford scientist Phyllis Gardner have called attention to the inability of men in Holmes’s life to see through her charm and judge her character accurately, yet in my own conversations, this movie seems to have made Holmes more sympathetic to women, not less. The scene featuring “Who’s On First” feels like a disquieting trespass into Holmes’s own mental processing, which is so—again—impenetrable that I can only speculate about what formal diagnoses might explain it. Like the other interpretive layers that this movie adds to the story, this angle doesn’t clarify but rather deepens the mystery of who Elizabeth Holmes is, at least to me.

Each of these sub-themes is irreducibly complex on its own. But under the suffocating blanket of deceit that covers them all, they become nearly impossible to scrutinize. You can’t get to the bottom of who is dominating whom in Holmes’s past and present romantic partnerships, because the primary text you’re relying on is the accounts of dishonest people. It’s difficult enough to parse another person’s self-deception, but the possibility of our own gender biases deceiving us into undue sympathy or criticism further unsettles the process. The movie’s final fireside scene is a stunning culmination of its meditation on deceit: spending enough time steeped in the question of one person’s self-deceit can make us doubt our ability to stay safely above it, prompting us to question our own judgment and the judgment of those allied to our cause. I can’t say at what point Elizabeth Holmes began deceiving people about technology that “can” perform every diagnostic test. (The conversation where that definition is contested provokes incredulity on an order with Bill Clinton’s legendary circumlocutions around “is”). I can’t say who started taking advantage of the other first between Holmes and Evans, and while it’s obvious that Evans is manipulating that relationship for his own gain today, it’s hard to say for sure if Holmes is even bothered by it. I can’t say whether Fielder has been taken in by Holmes’s charm or whether Seyfried is unfairly critical of her, and I can’t say whether the differing degrees of sympathy gained after the revelation of Holmes’s sexual assault have been properly purified of all our gender biases. I can’t say how much Holmes premeditates her deceit, or how much of it flows out of recursive self-deception. But what I can say is that the truth is not in her, and the longer I spend looking for it the further away it feels.

You can see everything, but you still won’t know what you’re looking at, because you can’t trust your eyes to recognize something that’s staring you in the face in full-frame, 4:3 aspect ratio, unblinking.