The Allegory of the Cave
Imagine a group of people who have spent their entire lives chained inside a cave, restrained in such a way that they can only stare straight ahead at a stone wall.
Behind them burns a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners, people carry objects, statues, and assorted figures, casting shadows onto the wall in front of the captives.
Having never seen anything else, the prisoners believe these shadows constitute reality. They name them, discuss their movements, argue over their significance, and even compete to predict which ones will appear next. They’ve constructed an entire understanding of existence based upon what amounts to a prehistoric puppet show.
One day, a prisoner is freed.
Turning toward the fire hurts his eyes, and the objects casting the shadows confuse him because everything he has ever believed about the world is suddenly called into question.
He’s dragged upward, out of the cave and into the sunlight, where the brightness is almost unbearable. Gradually, his eyes adjust. He begins to see reflections, then actual objects, then the stars, and finally the sun itself.
For the first time, he understands that everything he once accepted as reality was merely a shadow of something considerably more substantial.
When he returns to the cave to tell the others, his eyes, having adjusted to the sunlight, can no longer see very well in the darkness. The other prisoners mock his clumsiness and conclude that leaving the cave has damaged him. When he explains that their entire understanding of existence is an illusion, they refuse to believe him.
Their ridicule eventually becomes anger, and Plato suggests that if the liberated prisoner actually attempted to free them, they might very well kill him for his trouble.
—Plato, Book VII of The Republic
THE ALLEGORY TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
The premise of You Can See Everything, released Thursday, is deceptively simple. Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced biotech wunderkind convicted in 2022 of bilking investors out of millions with medical technology that worked about as well as a screen door on a submarine, invites a film crew into her family’s San Diego beach cottage to document the final 34 days of domestic bliss before she trades ocean views and expensive throw pillows for an 11-year prison sentence.
Enter Nathan Fielder, the magnificently uncomfortable mind behind HBO’s The Rehearsal and Nathan for You, two television experiments that take the basic premise of Candid Camera, strip away the reassuring laugh track, and replace it with the creeping suspicion that everyone involved is either being manipulated or too stupid to realize they’re doing the manipulating. Fielder has built a career turning ordinary human behavior into elaborate psychological hostage situations, usually with the participants enthusiastically volunteering to lock themselves in the basement.
The delicious wrinkle here is that Fielder didn’t come knocking on Holmes’s door. She invited him in, along with her partner, Billy Evans, who had apparently negotiated himself a slice of the film’s profits without bothering to mention this minor financial arrangement to the woman whose impending incarceration was providing the entertainment.
Given Holmes’s professional history, there’s something almost poetic about her discovering that someone close to her has been conducting business behind her back. It’s the sort of irony that would be rejected by a screenwriter for being too goddamned obvious.
Holmes, meanwhile, offers a predictably sentimental explanation for inviting cameras into the final weeks of her freedom: “I think this is the moment in time to capture this story, before I’m gone.”
Which is a lovely way of describing a trip to federal prison when you’re the one who committed the fraud. Apparently, even after the house of cards has collapsed and the federal government has begun sweeping up the wreckage, there’s still time to negotiate the documentary rights to the rubble.
I went to see the film with my sister, who knew very little about Holmes, hadn’t seen The Dropout (the Hulu limited series featuring Amanda Seyfried’s Emmy-winning portrayal), and asked at the outset, “Is that really her?” My niece had seen it the night before and texted us that it was a genuine mind-blow and that she loved it.
I’m a huge fan of Fielder, whom I consider something of a 21st-century Andy Kaufman. If you know me at all, you understand that, for me, Kaufman is a god, so this is no small compliment. I had some idea of what we were getting ourselves into. I’d read about Holmes when she was dubbed the youngest female billionaire, watched a few of her interviews, and binged The Dropout.
None of that prepared me for the absolute mindfuck that You Can See Everything put me through.
The film catches its subjects at a particularly inconvenient intersection of motherhood, impending incarceration, and the kind of industrial-strength denial usually reserved for cult leaders and people who still believe O.J. was innocent. Holmes, still breastfeeding the younger of her two children, is frantically challenging her conviction while fielding phone calls about the finer points of federal prison life. One imagines the transition from beachfront California motherhood to government-issued underwear requires a certain amount of psychological preparation, although Holmes seems determined to approach the whole thing as an unfortunate scheduling conflict.
Her partner, Billy Evans, has apparently decided that the best way to recover from one of the most spectacular biotech frauds in American history is to get the old gang back together and give the whole thing another shot. He’s working on a new low-cost blood-testing device, with Holmes providing assistance, and cheerfully refers to the enterprise as “Theranos 2.0.”
Because when your first attempt at revolutionizing modern medicine ends with criminal convictions, billions in evaporated valuation, and a Hulu-worthy cautionary tale, the obvious next step is a sequel. Silicon Valley has always operated on the principle that failure is merely an opportunity to innovate, although usually the failure doesn’t involve a federal indictment and an entire generation of investors wondering whether they might have been better off purchasing magic beans.
For Holmes and Evans, however, there’s nothing particularly absurd about this resurrection. They both insist she is entirely innocent, a misunderstood visionary sacrificed on the altar of public opinion. The unspoken suggestion is that Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, her considerably older former lover and Theranos chief operating officer, was the actual villain in this medical technology version of Bonnie and Clyde. Balwani, convicted on twelve counts of fraud, conveniently serves as the designated bad guy in a story where apparently nobody else had any idea what the hell was going on.
“The world believes a reality about me that isn’t true,” Holmes tells Fielder, demonstrating the remarkable ability to transform a mountain of documentary evidence into a personal branding problem.
Fielder, to his credit, isn’t buying the merchandise. He points out, with the understated discomfort that has become his signature, that there’s considerable evidence Holmes defrauded investors and deceived regulators, the public, and actual patients. These are admittedly inconvenient details when attempting to establish yourself as the innocent heroine of your own redemption documentary, but such is the price of allowing someone into your home who occasionally asks follow-up questions.
Fielder lurks, watches, and asks questions that hang in the air like the smell of something dead behind the refrigerator. His presence gradually transforms the Holmes-Evans domestic paradise into a psychological interrogation chamber, where every carefully rehearsed declaration of innocence is met with the unnerving possibility that someone in the room might actually be paying attention.
Throughout this first half of the film, and I use the word film deliberately because the documentary label becomes increasingly inadequate, Fielder demonstrates his extraordinary ability to ask questions that are simultaneously innocuous and devastating. He has a gift for being weirdly pointed and harsh without ever appearing particularly aggressive, as though he’s conducting a deposition while trying very hard not to inconvenience anyone.
Early on, he asks Evans how he and Holmes met. The story is slightly implausible, and Fielder keeps tugging at its loose threads with the persistence of a toddler dismantling an expensive sweater.
It was during this exchange that I noticed Evans desperately wants to possess the Steve Jobs/Elizabeth Holmes “reality distortion field” quality. He wants to be the charismatic visionary who bends the perceptions of everyone around him through sheer force of personality, but he lacks whatever peculiar wiring allows Holmes to pull it off. Watching him attempt the maneuver and fail makes Holmes seem all the more extraordinary.
With Holmes, Fielder is considerably less successful because the more you see of her, the less you know.
Oppenheim’s camera frequently invades Holmes’s personal space with close-ups so extreme you half expect to discover the location of the missing Theranos millions somewhere inside her pores. Her enormous, ink-black pupils stare back at us like a Disney princess designed by David Lynch, and the longer the camera lingers, the more you begin to suspect that whatever makes Elizabeth Holmes tick isn’t available in the standard human operating manual.
For all this cinematic spelunking into the depths of her face, the film reveals remarkably little beyond the fact that Holmes is an extraordinarily strange human being. The documentary manages to humanize her by demonstrating just how fundamentally unlike most humans she seems to be.
In fact, it raises an intriguing objection to her conviction, although the objection has nothing to do with the guilty verdict itself, which seems perfectly reasonable given the evidence. I’m thinking more about the constitutional requirement that she be judged by a jury of her peers.
Elizabeth Holmes doesn’t have peers. You’d have better luck assembling a jury of twelve identical Bigfoot sightings.
In one particularly revealing exchange, Fielder attempts to demonstrate the peculiar limitations of Holmes’s aggressively literal communication style by showing her Abbott and Costello’s legendary “Who’s on First?” routine. She laughs, apparently encountering the classic comedy bit for the first time, but when asked to explain what makes it funny, she struggles.
Fielder then asks her the name of the first baseman.
“I don’t know,” she replies.
Which is either the most brilliantly executed deadpan response in the history of American comedy or evidence that the woman genuinely cannot process the fundamental mechanics of a joke. Abbott and Costello built an entire routine around the absurdity of language, and Holmes somehow manages to become the only person in the room who might actually be more confusing than the routine itself.
This is the central mystery that slowly consumes Fielder. Is Holmes a spectacularly literal, socially alien creature whose inability to communicate normally makes her appear deceptive even when she’s telling the truth? Or is she a world-class bullshit artist, so thoroughly committed to her own manufactured reality that even the most sophisticated interrogation techniques bounce off her like tennis balls against a bank vault?
The distinction matters, although it does nothing to erase the damage done by Theranos. A person can be profoundly strange and still be guilty of fraud, just as being socially awkward doesn’t automatically make someone a criminal mastermind. The trouble is that Holmes occupies some bizarre territory between these possibilities, leaving everyone around her trying to determine whether they’re witnessing a malfunctioning human being or a flawlessly functioning con artist.
Fielder spends a month studying her, questioning her, watching her breastfeed, watching her strategize, and watching her construct and reconstruct the narrative of her own innocence. He has extraordinary access to a woman whose entire public identity was built around controlling what other people were allowed to see.
After all that access, all those questions, and all those excruciating close-ups, he understands remarkably little.
Eventually, the clock runs out, Holmes goes to prison, and the cameras lose their central attraction. By every reasonable expectation, the documentary has reached its natural conclusion, except Nathan Fielder has never demonstrated much interest in reasonable expectations, and the entire enterprise is about to mutate into something that makes the preceding hour look like a perfectly conventional episode of 60 Minutes.
SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON, SO STOP READING IF YOU WANT TO EXPERIENCE THE SURPRISE OF YOUR FUCKING LIFE THAT MAKES THIS FILM FAR MORE THAN ANYONE COULD HAVE CONCEIVED OF
Returning to Plato’s cave, Fielder refuses to provide the sunlight. He has spent the first half of the film showing us the shadows on the wall, and when the opportunity arises to lead us outside and reveal the truth, he does something far more interesting.
He constructs additional shadows.
Nobody gets to leave the cave, nobody gets to bask in the clarifying light of objective reality, and nobody emerges with the satisfaction of finally knowing what the hell is going on. Fielder instead begins demonstrating just how easily the shadows can be manipulated, reproduced, interpreted, and mistaken for something solid.
At the halfway point, You Can See Everything becomes something I’ve never quite seen before, a completely fucking original experiment in the relationship between observation and understanding.
With Holmes safely tucked away in federal prison, where documentary filmmakers aren’t exactly encouraged to wander the halls with cameras and release forms, Fielder and Oppenheim find themselves communicating with her through Billy Evans, her increasingly erratic and controlling husband, who seems determined to manage his wife’s public image with all the grace and subtlety of a drunken air traffic controller.
Unable to get inside Holmes’s head through conventional means, Fielder takes a detour into the sort of absurdist territory that makes his work simultaneously fascinating and vaguely alarming. He travels to a farm in upstate New York to meet Amanda Seyfried, the actress whose acclaimed portrayal of Holmes in Hulu’s 2022 series The Dropout demonstrated that a talented performer could convincingly reproduce the peculiar voice, robotic mannerisms, and unnerving intensity of Silicon Valley’s most notorious turtleneck enthusiast.
The logic is ridiculous and strangely compelling. If the actual Elizabeth Holmes remains an impenetrable mystery, perhaps the actress who spent months studying how to pretend to be Elizabeth Holmes can provide some insight into what makes the genuine article tick. It’s the psychological equivalent of asking Anthony Hopkins for advice on criminal profiling because he played Hannibal Lecter.
And yet the proposition makes a perverse kind of sense.
Seyfried constructed a version of Holmes that audiences could understand, or at least recognize as human. The real Holmes, despite granting Fielder virtually unrestricted access to her private life, has managed to remain about as emotionally accessible as a malfunctioning ATM.
Perhaps the imitation can explain the original, particularly in a culture where the fictional version of a person frequently becomes more comprehensible than the person herself. We’ve reached a point where millions of people understand historical figures primarily through the actors who portray them, and our collective understanding of reality has become so entangled with its dramatization that the distinction between the two is often a matter of which version we encountered first.
We’re still in the cave, but now we’ve hired professional actors to make the shadows more convincing.
Amanda Seyfried turns out to be the secret weapon of You Can See Everything, providing something the film has been desperately lacking up to this point: a reasonably normal human being capable of reacting to Elizabeth Holmes without looking like she’s attempting to solve a Rubik’s Cube with her mind.
Where Fielder and Oppenheim approach their subject like anthropologists studying an undiscovered species of emotionally constipated primate, Seyfried brings the instincts of an actress, someone whose entire profession involves figuring out what makes other people behave the way they do and then pretending to be those people for money.
Until her arrival, the documentary has been largely trapped inside the suffocating confines of a California beach bungalow, where Holmes, Evans, their children, and the film crew engage in a prolonged exercise in psychological discomfort. It’s like watching a family vacation hosted by the Church of Scientology, except nobody seems particularly interested in having a good time.
Fielder begins showing Seyfried footage from those sessions, including a gloriously ridiculous sequence in which Seyfried watches Holmes watching Seyfried portray Holmes in The Dropout.
It’s a hall of mirrors constructed entirely out of narcissism, performance, and the increasingly tenuous distinction between reality and its dramatization. Somewhere in the multiverse, another Amanda Seyfried is watching this documentary while Elizabeth Holmes watches her watching herself, and the whole thing threatens to collapse into a black hole of self-reference.
Unlike Fielder, whose emotional range generally runs from mildly uncomfortable to catastrophically uncomfortable, Seyfried reacts like an actual person. She laughs, expresses disbelief, and points out the things the audience has been screaming at the screen for the past hour.
Holmes and Evans behave like aliens attempting to pass as suburban Californians, Evans has the vaguely sinister energy of a man who knows exactly where the bodies are buried and has already purchased the adjacent property, and watching a woman who once promised to revolutionize medical science struggle with the apparently insurmountable technological challenge of beating a couple of eggs is undeniably hilarious.
Seyfried’s contribution, however, goes well beyond providing the audience with someone willing to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation. She brings the practiced eye of a performer who understands that human behavior consists of carefully constructed gestures, vocal choices, unconscious habits, and a million tiny decisions that communicate things we might never consciously intend.
Fielder has spent weeks trying to determine whether Holmes is performing innocence or genuinely believes in it, while Seyfried approaches the problem by examining the performance itself and asking what it might reveal.
Toward the end of their conversation, she begins slipping back into the character she created for The Dropout, lowering her voice, adjusting her posture, and reproducing Holmes’s peculiar physical presence. It’s an eerie little transformation that demonstrates how much of what we consider someone’s personality is communicated through the smallest and strangest details.
Watching Seyfried become Holmes while Fielder watches her become Holmes, I began to wonder whether the actress might actually understand something about this woman that the documentary filmmaker, despite his extraordinary access, had completely missed.
Seyfried’s involvement takes the documentary into increasingly bizarre territory, which, given that we’re already watching a filmmaker investigate a convicted fraudster by interviewing the actress who pretended to be that fraudster, is saying something.
She becomes a theatrical surrogate for Holmes, stepping into scenes that Oppenheim and Fielder either couldn’t record or hadn’t anticipated needing. With Christopher Abbott playing Billy Evans, somewhat less convincingly than Seyfried inhabits Holmes, the filmmakers begin reconstructing private encounters from memory.
The documentary has essentially become a community theater production of its own making, except the stakes involve millions of dollars, federal prison, and the slippery question of whether anyone involved knows what the hell they’re doing.
One particularly fascinating reenactment concerns a tense meeting between Holmes, Evans, Fielder, Oppenheim, and executives from A24, the studio financing the film.
According to Fielder’s recollection, Holmes leaves the room before Evans announces that he’d like to be paid for participating in the documentary. The producers agree, presumably because negotiating with the husband of a convicted fraudster is just another Tuesday in Hollywood. Later, Fielder persuades Evans to surrender his financial stake, but the more interesting question concerns whether Holmes knew he was trying to extract money from the production in the first place.
Here the film’s central mystery becomes considerably more interesting than the standard Is Elizabeth Holmes a Liar?exercise.
Suppose Holmes genuinely believes she’s innocent, and suppose her declarations of honesty are sincere, at least within the peculiar reality she’s constructed for herself. Does that mean she doesn’t understand what Evans is doing on her behalf? Has she perfected the wonderfully convenient art of allowing the men in her life to handle the unpleasant business while maintaining plausible deniability?
There’s an enormous difference between being innocent and arranging your circumstances so that you never have to witness the guilty parts, although I suspect the distinction is considerably less important to the person collecting the money.
Seyfried’s performance doesn’t answer the question, but it provides something more useful than another round of Holmes staring blankly into a camera. It offers a possible interpretation.
As she and Fielder dissect the scene, adjusting gestures, vocal inflections, and motivations, Seyfried reconstructs Holmes with such unsettling precision that the imitation occasionally feels more authentic than the original.
The enormous eyes, the carefully lowered voice, the peculiar rhythm of speech that sounds like someone taught an artificial intelligence to imitate a motivational speaker using only three YouTube videos, it’s all there.
One could reasonably imagine Seyfried receiving an Oscar nomination for playing Elizabeth Holmes in a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, which would present the Academy with the delightful bureaucratic challenge of deciding whether an actress can win an acting award for impersonating a real person in a film that technically isn’t supposed to contain acting.
But Seyfried’s participation eventually extends beyond serving as a theatrical consultant. She accompanies Fielder to Texas to meet Evans, and the resulting dinner party is the sort of social catastrophe that makes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? look like a pleasant evening of board games and cheese dip.
The three gather at Evans’s home for dinner and drinks, where Evans decides, apparently without warning anyone, to put a prison phone call from Holmes on speaker.
Suddenly Seyfried finds herself speaking directly to the woman she portrayed in The Dropout, a performance Holmes has repeatedly insisted caused her considerable distress. Watching Seyfried physically sink into the couch while desperately searching for something appropriate to say is one of the film’s most delicious moments of unmanufactured discomfort.
Here is an accomplished actress who spent months learning to become Elizabeth Holmes, only to discover that actually talking to Elizabeth Holmes is considerably more difficult than pretending to be her.
She compliments Holmes’s family, which is the sort of conversational emergency exit people use when trapped at Thanksgiving with relatives whose political opinions have made discussing the weather potentially dangerous.
Later, as Seyfried, Fielder, and Evans continue talking, the encounter becomes increasingly hostile, with Evans directing his resentment toward Seyfried.
He regards both her and Fielder as opportunists feeding on his family’s misfortune, but Seyfried represents a particularly irritating threat. Fielder is still making his film, which means Evans can negotiate with him, manipulate the process, and perhaps influence the finished product. Seyfried has already released her interpretation of Holmes into the world, where millions of people have seen it, and no amount of aggressive dinner conversation can stuff that particular genie back into the bottle.
Evans responds by becoming petty, defensive, and increasingly personal. He paints Seyfried as a disconnected coastal celebrity exploiting his wife’s suffering, then drags her public criticism of Charlie Kirk following his death into the conversation as evidence that she doesn’t understand the real America.
It’s a peculiar conversational strategy, turning a discussion about a television performance into a referendum on celebrity politics, but Evans seems convinced he’s exposing some fundamental hypocrisy. Instead, the exchange reveals just how little common ground exists between the people sitting around his dinner table and how quickly an argument about art can turn into an argument about identity when someone feels personally threatened.
What fascinates me most about Evans and Holmes is their almost comical inability to understand how popular culture works.
Evans apparently watched Nathan for You, a show built around elaborate business schemes and the exposure of human absurdity, and concluded that Nathan Fielder was precisely the man he wanted documenting his family. Holmes watches Abbott and Costello perform “Who’s on First?” and struggles to grasp the central joke.
These are people who confidently discuss revolutionary medical technology but seem bewildered by the mechanics of a comedy routine or the possibility that a dramatic portrayal might reveal something beyond its literal dialogue.
It’s as though they attended college, skipped every humanities course, and emerged believing that understanding how machines function automatically qualifies you to understand how people function. They can discuss blood diagnostics, venture capital, and market disruption until the cows come home, but ask them to consider subtext, metaphor, irony, or the possibility that their own behavior might communicate something beyond their stated intentions, and suddenly everyone needs a lawyer.
I find this especially interesting because I suspect there’s an entire class of people in our technology-obsessed culture who regard art as some quaint recreational activity for people who couldn’t hack calculus. They can explain the mechanics of a blood-testing device that doesn’t work, but the idea that an actor might reveal something about human nature through interpretation seems to offend their entire understanding of how knowledge is acquired.
Which may explain why Seyfried unsettles Evans so profoundly.
Artists are dangerous to people obsessed with controlling their own narratives. A journalist can be challenged on facts, a filmmaker can be pressured about footage, and a lawyer can be hired to dispute the accuracy of almost anything. An actor, however, can take your gestures, your voice, your carefully manufactured public identity, and create a version of you that feels more emotionally truthful than anything you’ve ever said about yourself.
You don’t have to agree with the interpretation for it to stick, and your inability to understand it may actually make it more effective.
The film reaches its strangest and most compelling destination when Fielder arranges a brief visit with Holmes in prison, deliberately arriving before Evans.
Cameras aren’t permitted, so the conversation exists only in Fielder’s memory. He writes down what he can recall, returns to Seyfried’s farm, and asks her to help reconstruct the encounter.
What follows is a fascinating collision between documentary filmmaking and theatrical interpretation, a rehearsal of a conversation that already happened, performed by one person who was there and another who has made a career out of pretending to be the person who isn’t.
Sitting together beside a fire, Fielder and Seyfried begin examining his recollection like two actors working through a difficult scene. They question the dialogue, discuss motivations, experiment with subtle changes in delivery, and consider what those changes might reveal.
It’s acting class as forensic investigation, with the added complication that nobody can establish whether the original conversation was entirely truthful in the first place.
As they work through the scene, something fascinating happens to their respective sympathies.
Earlier, Seyfried seemed more inclined to give Holmes the benefit of the doubt, perhaps because inhabiting another person professionally requires a certain generosity toward the character. But her encounter with Evans has clearly left a mark, and Holmes’s hostility toward The Dropout, along with her inability to pronounce Seyfried’s name correctly, has worn away some of that goodwill.
Fielder, meanwhile, appears to have moved in the opposite direction.
After spending a month with Holmes, observing her children, witnessing her vulnerability, and experiencing the strange intimacy that comes from prolonged access to another person’s life, he’s become more sympathetic to her.
Seyfried notices something telling in his written reconstruction of the prison conversation. His memory is imprecise in ways that seem to benefit Holmes, leaving enough ambiguity in the dialogue for her to maintain that she didn’t know what Evans was doing.
Whether consciously or not, the filmmaker who began this project determined to penetrate Holmes’s elaborate defenses may now be helping maintain them.
This is where You Can See Everything finally earns its title, largely by demonstrating how spectacularly wrong that proposition is.
Cameras can record what people say and do, microphones can preserve every uncomfortable silence, and documents can establish timelines, financial transactions, and criminal culpability. We can collect the evidence, arrange it chronologically, cross-reference the testimony, and present the entire collection as though the accumulated weight of recorded information will inevitably reveal the truth.
Yet none of these things can definitively tell us what another person believes about themselves, particularly when that person has spent years constructing a public identity that may have become indistinguishable from her private one.
Oppenheim approaches truth as something that can be captured, preserved, and examined. Point the camera in the right direction, ask the right questions, gather enough evidence, and eventually the truth should emerge from the accumulated material. It’s the documentary filmmaker’s fundamental article of faith, the belief that reality, if properly observed, will eventually explain itself.
Seyfried represents a competing philosophy, one rooted in the peculiar ability of actors to manufacture an interpretation of reality through imagination. They invent motivations, inhabit contradictions, and bridge the enormous gaps between what people do and why they do it. The result may be factually incomplete, even technically fictional, while still illuminating something emotionally recognizable.
Fielder has access to the actual Elizabeth Holmes but struggles to understand her, while Seyfried understands how to construct a believable Elizabeth Holmes despite having barely encountered the actual woman. One possesses an abundance of facts without a satisfying interpretation, while the other possesses an interpretation built from observation, imagination, and the deliberate manipulation of human behavior.
Together, they approach something neither could reach alone, although the process raises the uncomfortable possibility that their collaboration might be manufacturing yet another convincing shadow on the wall.
There’s a temptation to dismiss this as another exercise in Hollywood congratulating itself on the profound importance of art, a favorite pastime of people who spend millions of dollars pretending to be other people and then give themselves awards for doing it convincingly.
But the film makes a more interesting argument.
We live in a culture increasingly obsessed with documentation, where everyone carries a camera, every public statement can be archived, and every scandal produces enough digital evidence to fill a congressional hearing. We have more access to recorded human behavior than any civilization in history, yet we remain remarkably susceptible to bullshit, manipulation, and our own preferred interpretations of reality.
We’ve convinced ourselves that possessing footage of an event is somehow equivalent to understanding it, a belief that has become especially ridiculous in an age when millions of people can watch the exact same recording and emerge with entirely incompatible descriptions of what they just saw.
Elizabeth Holmes built a multibillion-dollar illusion around the promise that technology could reveal what was happening inside the human body with a few drops of blood. Nathan Fielder has spent a documentary attempting something equally ambitious, using cameras, interviews, and relentless observation to reveal what is happening inside the mind of Elizabeth Holmes.
Neither project quite delivers what it promises, although Fielder eventually seems willing to acknowledge the limitations of his machinery, which already puts him several ethical light-years ahead of Theranos.
And perhaps that’s the film’s most worthwhile revelation.
Facts matter, evidence matters, and Holmes’s conviction doesn’t magically become questionable because she’s an odd duck who can’t follow Abbott and Costello. But facts alone don’t always explain the people responsible for them, and the assumption that every human mystery can be solved through sufficient documentation strikes me as one of the more spectacular delusions of our information-saturated age.
Sometimes understanding requires imagination, interpretation, empathy, and the willingness to entertain possibilities that cannot be conclusively demonstrated by a camera. Sometimes the actress pretending to be the fraudster can tell us something the fraudster herself cannot, and sometimes the most revealing thing about a person is the elaborate, expensive, thoroughly ridiculous spectacle everyone else must construct just to figure out what the hell she’s thinking.
Which brings me back to Plato, the shadows, and my sister.
She left the theater believing wholeheartedly in Holmes’s innocence. As we drove home, we chatted our way through the many unanswered questions the film had so carefully refused to resolve. I was fascinated by the machinery of the documentary, while she was trying to figure out whether the woman she’d just spent three hours watching had been railroaded by the government.
She went home, started watching The Dropout, and changed her mind.
The following text exchange occurred after she’d watched the first part of the series:
SISTER: I’m watching the drop out! She is a scammer!!
ME: Right? That documentary is a real mindfuck!
SISTER: She’s evil!! I was fooled!!
ME: But was she?
And there it was, the entire premise of the film reduced to a few text messages between siblings.
My sister watched a documentary featuring the actual Elizabeth Holmes and emerged convinced of her innocence. She then watched an actress pretending to be Elizabeth Holmes in a scripted dramatization and emerged convinced of her guilt.
The fictionalized version of reality had completely overturned her interpretation of the documented version, and both experiences had been constructed by filmmakers choosing which images, performances, and details would appear on the screen.
Which version was more truthful? Which shadows were more accurate? And why were we so certain that either experience had given us a privileged view of what was actually happening?
There’s an additional layer to all this that makes the entire enterprise even more deliciously perverse.
Fielder, a sort of modern Buster Keaton figure, started out as a kid fascinated with magic and comedy. His screen persona is itself a carefully constructed character, a version of Nathan Fielder designed to provoke particular responses from the people around him. He’s been manipulating the relationship between performance and authenticity for years, creating elaborate situations in which the audience can never be entirely certain how much of what they’re watching is spontaneous and how much has been engineered.
The much-contested New York Times quotation attributed to Holmes about creating a character to play herself becomes especially interesting when applied to Fielder, who has made an entire career out of doing precisely that.
He and Oppenheim filmed hundreds of hours of footage, which means that every moment we see represents a decision about what we won’t see. Every awkward pause, every revealing expression, every seemingly spontaneous exchange has been selected from an enormous collection of material and arranged into a narrative designed to lead us somewhere.
The title You Can See Everything is therefore an almost magnificent piece of bullshit, because we can only see what the filmmakers have decided to show us, and our understanding of the people involved is shaped by those decisions whether we’re conscious of them or not.
Opening up the process of a proposed documentary to the obvious machinations of cinema, theatrical performance, and reality television, Fielder has created a film that uses Elizabeth Holmes as the vehicle for a much larger examination of perception, interpretation, and our almost religious faith in the authenticity of recorded images.
We enter the theater expecting to learn something about Holmes, Evans, and the spectacular collapse of Theranos, only to discover that the real subject has been our willingness to believe whatever shadows happen to be dancing in front of us.
Plato imagined that one of the prisoners might escape the cave, discover the truth, and return to enlighten the others. Fielder seems considerably less optimistic about the possibility of escaping our own perceptions, and rather than dragging us into the sunlight, he hands us another set of shadows and asks us to explain why we’re so certain the first set was real.
I suspect that’s why the film has stayed with me, and why my sister’s abrupt reversal after watching The Dropout seems so perfectly appropriate.
We watched the same documentary, interpreted it differently, and then watched the interpretation change when another storyteller arranged another set of images in front of us.
Somewhere in all that manipulation, performance, selective memory, and artifice, there may be a truth worth discovering, but I’m becoming increasingly convinced that our ability to recognize it has a lot less to do with how much we can see than how willing we are to question what we’re looking at.
We’re all still sitting in the cave, staring at the wall, arguing about which shadows are real.
And the people operating the fucking puppets are making a fortune.
