Last weekend, filmgoers had the choice of two documentaries about the feral convergence of high-tech Silicon Valley business culture and old-fashioned con artistry that has brought our world to the brink of disaster. One is Musk, Alex Gibney’s four-hour deep dive into the life of Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire whose data centers are currently polluting Memphis’ air and depleting our drinking water. The other is You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s intimate portrait of Elizabeth Holmes, the biotech inventor who was convicted of fraud after it turned out her invention didn’t work.
Both films involved a significant time commitment, so I could see only one. Ultimately, I couldn’t bring myself to commit to Musk. I love you, Alex Gibney, but I’m afraid spending four hours staring into the howling void that is Elon Musk would inflict more psychic damage than I’m currently prepared to absorb. Plus, Oppenheim’s recent foray into fiction, Primetime, absolutely ripped, and the trailer, which showed Fielder confronting Holmes about her honesty in extreme close-up, was certainly intriguing.
But if the main reason I chose You Can See Everything was to protect the remains of what I laughably call my sanity, then I chose unwisely. There is nothing simple or sane about this film. I was passingly familiar with Fielder’s schtick of transforming transient autistic obsessions into engaging comedy-doc hybrids. But I don’t think that, when he decided to make this documentary, he was prepared to run headlong into his neurodivergent evil twin.
Elizabeth Holmes agreed to give the production unfettered access to her life for the last month before she went to prison to serve an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars. The title, You Can See Everything, comes from a text Holmes sent Fielder. The first question that pops to mind is, why would anyone do that? Fielder himself asks the question early in the film, and decides to see how far he can push it. When will they tell him to stop shooting? How close is too close? The very first shot in the film is not of Elizabeth Holmes, but of her partner Billy Evans, who is telling someone on the other end of a phone call about the documentary. Soon, we are seeing him naked in the shower.
Most films want you to become so absorbed in the experience that you forget you’re watching a film. Fielder and Oppenheim’s goals are exactly the opposite. They are constantly reminding you that you are watching a film. Holmes and Evans might have originally thought they would be starring in a fly-on-the-wall-type doc like Grey Gardens, and for a little while, it seems like that’s what’s going on here. Even after everything that has happened — up to and including an award-winning Hulu limited series, The Dropout, casting her as the biggest liar on the planet — Holmes is still trying to convince people to invest in her blood-testing technology. Only now, she’s working the phones while trying to keep a fussy baby asleep. Her trademark black turtlenecks, chosen to emulate Steve Jobs, have been replaced by frumpier new-mom clothing.
But soon Fielder is stepping out in front of the camera, and before you know it, he’s calling his subject “Liz.” Seemingly disarmed by his subject’s apparent candor, he starts to wonder if she knew she was lying, or if she truly believed that her Theranos machine could diagnose any disease known to medical science by only examining a single drop of blood. But every time he tries to pin her down, she slips away from him. Probing her sense of objective truth, Fielder shows her Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine, and asks if she understands why it’s funny. She says she does not. But is she telling the truth, or is she just that committed to the bit?
Once Holmes goes to prison and filming wraps, Fielder still can’t understand what he saw while in her little California beach cottage. So he brings in Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed Holmes in The Dropout. Who better to help him get inside his subject’s head than the actor who won an Emmy for pretending to be her? But despite the elaborate lengths they go to, the truth always seems tantalizingly beyond their reach.
I think one key to understanding late-stage capitalist phenomena like Holmes and Musk and AI is philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt’s book On Bullshit. What’s the difference between a lie and bullshit? When the liar tries to deceive you, he recognizes that truth exists, even if it must be concealed. But the bullshitter does not care either way. If the bullshitter can get you to do what he wants by telling you the truth, that’s what he will do. If the bullshitter thinks he can get you to do what he wants by telling you a lie, he’ll do that. Words are weapons to the bullshitter.
Elizabeth Holmes, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump are bullshitters. They’ll say anything to get what they want, and in the moment, they will even believe it is “true.” When that lie no longer serves them, they will move on to another “truth,” which they will believe as long as they need to. AI chatbots are bullshit machines incapable of perceiving truth. Their only “goal” is to spit out a series of words which will elicit a thumbs up from the user.
Fielder and Oppenheim twist the medium of documentary film into impossible shapes as they probe the line between truth and fiction. When he tries to show Holmes Seyfried’s portrayal of her in The Dropout, I thought of the Maysles brothers filming Mick Jagger while they showed him footage of the murder in the crowd at the Rolling Stones’ infamous Altamont concert. When Fielder pulls out his laptop to show Seyfried a cut of the film that we’ve seen up until her introduction, I thought of the Soviet documentary masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera, where director Dziga Vertov spliced footage of the film being edited into the film itself. But most of all, I thought of Orson Welles’ F for Fake. The great director began his 1973 swan song by assuring us everything we heard for the next hour was the truth. But the film was 88 minutes long, and ended with Welles gleefully admitting that everything after the hour mark was pure fiction. To paraphrase Picasso, art is the lie that tells the truth.
You Can See Everything
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