By Caroline Huckeba
You can see everything is a documentary directed by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder that follows Elizabeth Holmes through the final 34 days before she reports to prison. Which, apparently, she chose to spend with Nathan Fielder by her side.
When Fielder first arrives, Holmes tells him that her husband showed her a funny video of him at a gas station. The video is presumably the one in which a gas station manager tells Fielder that, when he gets scared, he drinks his grandson's pee. It is a strange introduction to a body of work, to say the least. We can assume this was Holmes's first, and perhaps only, impression of Nathan Fielder.
Given the spectacle of Holmes, particularly in the wake of The Dropout, I expected a movie about Elizabeth Holmes. I was surprised to find that one of the film's central figures is Billy Evans, Holmes's husband, who has also become the voice of her X account while she is in prison. As the documentary unfolds, it becomes increasingly unclear how much Holmes knows about the extent of her husband's involvement in shaping her public image, or how much she is willing to let him do on her behalf.
The narrative is strong, built from footage filmed over three years. We watch Fielder and Holmes build rapport. We watch Evans nearly drive Fielder insane. And we watch a woman who might be the most confused person in the world, or the most manipulative, confuse the hell out of Fielder's mind and soul.
But the question is not simply Why did Holmes do it? or even Was she lying? Those are the questions that have already made Holmes a cultural fixation. Instead, You Can See Everything investigates the people caught in the orbit of someone like her.
It is interested in what happens when we try to understand another person, and what that desire to understand might prevent us from seeing.
In this way, the project feels unmistakably Nathan Fielder. There is an earnestness to it, though not the kind that asks to be taken seriously at the expense of comedy. It is earnestness at its most comical, the kind that emerges when someone follows a line of inquiry so sincerely that the absurdity of the situation becomes impossible to ignore. Fielder's willingness to keep showing up, keep asking questions, and keep trying to make sense of Holmes becomes its own kind of spectacle.
Throughout the film, Fielder and Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed Holmes in The Dropout, provide a human lens through which to view the chaos. They are willing to see the best in people. They feel empathy for people. They try to understand them as people, even when the circumstances make that understanding difficult to reconcile with what they have done.
And perhaps that is the film's most uncomfortable observation: the more human someone becomes to us, the harder it can be to see them clearly. Empathy can bring us closer to another person, but closeness does not necessarily bring clarity. Sometimes, the more we understand someone's feelings, fears, and contradictions, the easier it becomes to lose sight of the things we were trying to understand in the first place.
There is something almost perverse about watching people extend their empathy toward Elizabeth Holmes. We know what she has been convicted of. We know the damage at the center of her story.
The question is no longer whether Holmes deserves our empathy. It is what our empathy makes possible, and what it might obscure.
Fielder's project seems to understand that the desire to see someone fully can become a kind of blindness of its own.
We can spend years studying another person's suffering, contradictions, and motivations and still fail to see what is directly in front of us. We can mistake access for understanding, intimacy for truth, and compassion for clarity.
Perhaps you really can see everything. The trouble is knowing what you are looking at.