You Can See Everything is a film that touches on many themes and ideas, each one of them filtered through a central, all-encompassing exploration of Truth.
Truth in media. Truth in relationships. Truth within yourself. Truth in power. Truth in communication. Truth in actions. Truth in performance. Truth in the idea of truth.
Every time I think about the film, which has been almost every single moment since I exited the theater at 10 pm last night, and have a theory about a person’s behavior, I immediately correct myself that the theory is not about the actual person or their behavior but is actually about “the film’s representation of the person’s behavior that the person chose to portray while the filmmakers were filming them.” That’s what kind of layered exploration of the concept of truth and self and documentary filmmaking we’re getting into. Which is not a surprise for anyone familiar with Nathan Fielder’s work.
It certainly seems like the fact that Fielder co-directs the film with Lance Oppenheim elevates the material to something more than what, when described in the simplest possible way, sounds like a three-hour episode of Nathan Fielder television. The combined powers of the men who brought us The Rehearsal and Some Kind of Heaven complement each other in a way that allows the film to show us a seemingly familiar side of (the onscreen character of) Nathan Fielder that breaks and shifts and is analyzed as much as the “intended” subject of the film, Elizabeth Holmes. The mindfuck layer of possible truth about Fielder is added by the second director’s presence — if this were solely a Nathan Fielder project, our suspicions that it’s all a work would be even higher. Oppenheim’s involvement adds a layer of possibility that we could be seeing a true side of Fielder that broke through because of how he was affected by Holmes, and his pursuit of finding the truth about her hidden in the version of herself that she is presenting.
While we’re on the subject of Elizabeth Holmes, there couldn’t possibly be a better “subject” for a film that explores the themes of truth and communication and how we represent ourselves than the former CEO of Theranos. Holmes’ story (and in turn, Holmes herself) is so familiar to so many, to the point of oversaturation. People feel like they know this story inside and out, whether they know it from a book, or a documentary, or a television news special, or a podcast, or a scripted television drama, or all of the above. But do we know a version of her she created for the media, or one that is a creation of the media itself, or a version that is the performance of an actress that is based on those other representations of her? We even question whether Holmes knows herself, how much of her is real and how much is a construction, and what the difference between the two is anyway.
The film allows for anything to be possible when it comes to Holmes. She could be a puppetmaster, always manipulating everyone around her with carefully chosen actions and purposefully vague phrasing she prepared with future semantic-game gaslighting in mind. She could also be a traumatized, neuroatypical bad communicator who (thought she) was trying her best to succeed in making a helpful product and (thought she) was playing the same game as everybody else in the tech world when it comes to representing their company, its product, and its capabilities. Is her partner Billy Evans an asshole? Certainly. Is he using her? He for sure thinks so. Is she also using him? One could assume. Is she using him in a way that makes him think he’s using her but actually she’s in control of it all, or are they both using each other? Who can tell. But are they actually in some kind of weird, twisted, romantic, two-people-who-kinda-match-each-other’s-freak love? That’s kinda also possible.
There’s an argument to be made that finding out Holmes’ true intentions is simple, no matter what she says. That argument would say that her intentions were to lie her way into lots and lots of money…because that’s exactly what she did. In the overwhelming amount of cases, I’d say this approach is spot on, an open-and-shut case. The specifics of Holmes business, the way she speaks about wanting to change the world for the better, and some of the financial facts (like never selling any stock for personal gain) allow there to be some wiggle room. Is this because she was playing a calculating, manipulative game of chess or because all she cared about was changing the world? I certainly lean toward believing the former, but she plays the game well enough to leave room to believe the latter. Or, I suppose, is so bad at the game it makes us believe the former. Or, in actuality, the film’s portrayal of the version of herself that she presents during the filming allows us to believe either, or both, or none.
One thing this film made me know for sure is that lying is…lame as hell. It’s super dumb. It’s why the ending of The Usual Suspects sucks. Oh, you were just making this shit up the whole time? Who gives a fuck. You wasted my time. Congratulations to you, I guess, for telling me something I assumed to be true that actually wasn’t. You’re the smartest person alive. It’s why I never cared about the Theranos story before. I tried reading Bad Blood, and watching The Inventor but couldn’t get invested enough to finish either. I was never compelled to watch The Dropout (but might now, after this film). Oh, a businessperson was lying about their business? That’s just what I assume all of them are doing all of the time. That’s kind of their whole thing.
I know that a common anxiety that many people have is “what if everyone I know is lying to me all the time?” We’ve all (I think) fantasized about some kind of bizarro world situation where we walk into a surprise party where all of our friends and loved ones say “hello! we’ve been pretending this whole time! we actually hate you and you suck!” Some of the worst fears we can possibly imagine involve the people we love not being truthful with us in one way or another. I’ve also had unwanted intrusive thoughts (that I’ve never acted out on, I swear) that ask, “what if you just became a liar about everything?” It doesn’t seem that hard to get away with. Most people are trusting, and if you keep your story straight and play the semantic game, you can gaslight your way out of most “gotcha” situations. But that’s why lying sucks. That’s why taking advantage of people is wrong. That’s why preying on people’s best nature makes you a monster. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you again. Fool me three times, shame is still on you, you dirty liar.
A deeper, more devastatingly scary fear that more of us should probably have (but makes total sense that we avoid thinking about it) is: “What if the person lying to me all the time is…myself?” What if the person I am, or think I am, or pretend to be, is just a projection of an idea of who I think I want to be? What if I am capable of the same kind of deception on myself and others — possibly without even knowing it? I can admit to personally being in an argument with someone and afterward, once emotions have come back down, finding a way to better articulate what I should have said in the moment. Is this me discovering “the truth”, or is it my brain finding a convenient explanation that gets me off the hook for any blame for the original argument? I can easily imagine that happening on a larger scale and having it affect a lot more than just one person. It’s easy to put yourself in (the theoretically innocent) Holmes’ shoes, if only on a small scale.
People who know her personally and professionally have written that Holmes is definitely playing a game, is certainly a liar, and that the film allows for too much benefit of the doubt in the way it chooses to present her version of the story. That’s very much a purposeful choice of the filmmakers’ to make their work an exploration of truth in a way that forces you down a rabbit hole of thought instead of just straightforwardly presenting events. It’s an artistic decision, and perhaps a bit of a lie with the purpose of finding a greater truth — not dissimilar from the altruistic version of Holmes she attempts to represent herself as being.
That’s what makes Holmes, or, more specifically, the version of Holmes the film chooses to portray to make its point, so interesting. If she’s just a liar, she sucks. That might be the real-world truth, but the version of her the film lets us be open to believing is one that is much more complicated, interesting, relatable, and allows us to question everything we know about how we perceive the world and move through it. Even if we’re pretty sure we have it right, it’s worth stopping to consider if we might be wrong every once in a while. Maybe we can see everything, but can we see everything?
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