you can and should see everything

Happy Saturday everyone, and happy Halloween to those who celebrate!

In honor of the spooky season, I got myself out of the house (rare for me right now) and went to the Cinema™ to see a truly haunting film: You Can See Everything. If you want to go in completely blind, do not read this!

image found on reddit

Jokes aside, You Can See Everything is a filmmaking feat, in my opinion. For those completely unfamiliar, it is a documentary about convicted felon, entrepreneur, and college dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, directed by comedian and Canadian Nathan Fielder in his directorial debut, alongside documentarian Lance Oppenheim, who recently released his first narrative feature film Primetime.

Honestly, I knew next to nothing about Elizabeth Holmes before seeing the trailer for this movie. I just saw that Nathan Fielder directed a documentary (already got me there) that seemed to have an unsettling tone and the classic reflective, moody blue color grading vis-à-vis Twilight. I originally felt like I had to know more about Holmes before seeing the movie, but good news! They really lay it all out for the audience. What I think is actually more important for this movie is having some context for who Nathan Fielder is.

For those unfamiliar, a quick rundown of Nathan Fielder: he is a comedian and satirist most known for his series Nathan For You, which he wrote, directed, and starred in. In Nathan For You, he plays a marketing and/or management consultant, a role that draws on his actual business background. He often works with business owners to help them get their businesses back on track or off the ground, but his ideas are all off the wall and ultimately unhelpful. In addition to the zany business comedy, we see Fielder reckon with his own personality and how he is perceived by others. In a way, he is almost self-actualizing as the show progresses over 4 years. Years down the line, after The Rehearsal, a show about getting hyped up for difficult conversations or situations, he basically became a certified commercial pilot as a bit. Much of his work is considered "cringe comedy" and centers around social awkwardness and human behavior.

Back to You Can See Everything, which he appears to have been working on in the background while working on other projects like The Rehearsal. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim were invited by Elizabeth Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, to document their lives in the month before Holmes was sent to federal prison with an 11-year sentence. The resulting film is a blend of documentary, metafiction (similar to Fielder's other work), and exposé.

When I made the joke about the movie being haunting, I actually meant it. Immediately after leaving the theater, it was like I got high. I was disoriented, bewildered, and at a loss for words. This film presents as a niche documentary, and it is, I suppose, but I think the trailer undersells it. I think that, in addition to being a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and her partner, this is a movie about making a movie. It is also about narcissism, manipulation, exploitation, wealth, power, control, empathy, and the challenges and unreality of being a human being. In the times we're living in, most people are desperately in opposition of AI, while people like Billy Evans are using it to make deepfakes of their wives. Everyone is fighting for their humanity to be recognized, including the ruling class. One of my favorite lines is said by Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed Holmes in a fictionalized/dramatized version of her story in the series The Dropout. In You Can See Everything, Fielder shows The Dropout to Holmes and Evans, and then shows his documentary footage of the couple to Seyfried, who then says, and I'm not sure if I have it verbatim, but something along the lines of: "She is no longer this thing in my mind."

I think the most compelling part of this film is that it introduces layers of humanity in a way that is ultimately upsetting. Holmes is actually correct about something: it is much easier for us to consider people like Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans as monsters. Just like it is easier to consider (sorry-not-sorry to go here) Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, etc., as "monsters" and not deeply disturbed individuals who are obsessed with power and control, and realistically are totally out of touch socially. It is not reasonable to project the diagnosis of a narcissistic personality disorder onto each of these people, and also unfair to "regular" people with a narcissistic personality disorder, but when watching You Can See Everything, one wonders: what is going on in these people's heads?

One of the most important themes is the clear disconnect between Holmes' mind and the rest of the world. The iconic "Why would I deceive you?" line from the trailer is a perfect hook because it depicts her as operating in a way that is wholly evil. What is not shown in the trailer, though, are the efforts of Nathan Fielder to unpack how her inner mind seems to distort her perception of the world and her understanding of language. Of course, we intuitively know that something is off when people completely deny their crimes, consistently asserting they did nothing wrong. But how is it that people can live so out of touch with reality? Well, we build our own realities, and Elizabeth Holmes has certainly built hers, which landed her in federal prison and bestowed upon her hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.

You Can See Everything is not just a documentary about a woman who committed fraud and caused people to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. (By the way, kind of fierce to scam billionaires. I wish I could do that.) It is an exploration into how we build our own realities, how people can challenge our perception of the world, how we must be willing to have our perceptions challenged, how stories are told, how narratives can be manipulated, how easily money and power can be accrued, transferred, lost, and stolen, and so much more. It is absolutely impossible for the trailer to do this movie justice. You Can See Everything is about seeing the bigger picture, how pieces of narrative fit together and can be shaped any which way, but must be taken apart piece by piece if we are to make any sense of the world.

Toward the end, Amanda Seyfried suggests Nathan Fielder lost his sense of objectivity a little bit. I think one of the greatest things about this movie is how it reveals how, sometimes, it can be so easy to have your mind changed. At other times, it can be impossible. For some people, like Billy Evans and Elizabeth Holmes, it seems like it would take years and years and the hard work of many friends, family members, and professionals to help them unpack whatever is going on in their minds. For people like Nathan Fielder, who are committed to exploring humanity and social behavior, every person presents an opportunity to learn more about the world. We may not like the world we see when we see people like Holmes or Evans, or Trump, or Musk, or Bezos, or Kissinger, or so on and so on. Sadly, that does not remove them from our world. In fact, I think it is absolutely imperative that we understand that these people are all a product of the world we live in, just as much as we are. Something is operating differently in their minds, but "othering" them into monsters only moves us further away from confronting the difficult reality that being human, being good, and creating change requires effort, determination, and a willingness to understand others.

Thanks for reading! Be kind to each other, and if you haven't already, consider watching You Can See Everything as soon as possible. Feel free to follow along on @composting.brainrot on Instagram to keep up with my blog. As always, thanks to UIC Radio for having me. :) Cheers!