Look Here: YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING

Nathan Fielder is used to being the manipulator. His Comedy Central show Nathan for You talked small business owners into elaborate pranks disguised as advertising gimmicks. His HBO show The Rehearsal is even more complicated, an ever-growing nesting doll of practice sessions for all manner of life events that gets all the more tangled by the episode. The fact of his manipulations are the form of his art, and key to the fundamental questions his work asks. What is truth? What is performance? And how are people’s behaviors and perspectives shaped, and pushed? Now his first feature film, singular documentary You Can See Everything, finds him in the position of manipulated. Maybe. That’s not to say he’s the total innocent here, but he’s crafted a film that finds him potentially in over his head with subjects who may want to use him to shape their own narratives more than he wants to use them to make his own art. 

He’s invited by Elizabeth Holmes and her husband Billy Evans to film the last month before she goes to prison. You might recall she’s the disgraced founder of failed tech startup Theranos, which claimed to have a machine that can run all manner of medical tests from just one drop of blood. That said machine could not do all of those tests is the reason why the company failed and she’s incarcerated for defrauding investors. It also fueled true crime tellings of her story, from a journalist’s book-length expose Bad Blood to Hulu miniseries The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried. The interest in the story is in the character she seems to have created: the “lean-in” tech boss speaking in a low, slow affected voice that somehow charmed big names with deep pockets to fund her efforts. The very caricature she cultivated for her rise, abetted her fall. 

So it makes a certain amount of sense that Holmes and Evans would want to tell their side of the story. They have a vested interest in downplaying the crimes and proclaiming her innocence. In front of the cameras they’ll take care of their kids. They’ll claim total transparency when pressed for details. They’ll assert that she’s never lied, and even make plans for a “Theranos 2.0.” They play some transparently obvious power games with the documentarians. What doesn’t make clear sense is why they’d choose Fielder to record all of this. His playful, prankish approach to the documentary form and his slippery tonal sincerity seems a high risk if the intention is mere reputation recovery. At first he appears to approach the project with a genuine sense of wanting to understand them. His disarmingly blank affect and deadpan jabs allow his questions to hit hard before hitting their defenses. But the more he records the more questions he has. Holmes and Evans are committed to a devious definition of truth tied to pure belief, allowing themselves endless subjectivity while refusing it to others. They denigrate others’ interpretations of their actions as woefully inaccurate while claiming that truth is whatever they believe. 

Fielder, co-directing with Primetime’s Lance Oppenheim, provides an artfully lensed document with intense close-ups and a dread-filled score to keep the sense of suspicion growing as his subjects talk to him and past him. What is their relationship to reality, to truth, to each other, and to this project? We might even change our mind about who’s playing whom several times over. The deeper we get into it, the less we seem to know. Can we really know another person? That’s a fine place to start our inquiry. Somehow it expands to being about the collapse of certainty, the deep confusion of others’ minds. In typical Fielder fashion, what starts seemingly graspable slowly slips out of easy categorization. The way there is tensely uncomfortable, hilarious, surprising, and weirdly moving—sometimes all at once. By the end it’s somehow about everything sick at the heart of our culture. It’s about storytelling and narcissism and deception. It’s about how we know, and if we can know. Looking back, you might even realize it’s all in the title. Just because a camera’s there to see everything doesn’t mean we actually understand anything.