You Can See Everything is nothing more than a detailed study, taken far too seriously and thought over at great length, of a person who has no story worth telling. It is obvious that Nathan Fielder is out to push the boundaries of the documentary form and create something experimental, or even groundbreaking. Seen this way, Elizabeth Holmes is actually the least important part of the documentary. It’s all about Nathan Fielder and his vision. Holmes is, at bottom, a plain thief; she wants to come across as either crazy or sympathetic. Fielder, for his part, uses this skillfully, because he has a unique talent for engaging with odd characters, and for making even conversations with ordinary people strangely funny. He does plenty of both in this film. It is, of course, natural and expected for a director to do this. But the fact that the person being polished up and marketed as an interesting personality is a thief gets brushed aside again and again. He does so at the cost of turning the person whose story he tells into a pop-culture icon.
Of course, no one is entirely bad or entirely good. I would never say, “Holmes is evil, and I won’t hear any other view. Let’s stone her!” The documentary repeatedly stresses that its ultimate aim is to show Holmes’s human side, but I’m not sure it believes that itself. It is so wrapped up in defining Holmes as an “interesting” character and portraying her that way that it isn’t even concerned with the obligation of being a documentary, and therefore of being impartial.
I watched You Can See Everything a few days apart from Primetime. Both were directed by Lance Oppenheim (here he is a co-director). He seems to become here the very thing he so skillfully criticized in Primetime. Just as in Primetime we watch a television crew whose moral boundaries have blurred for the sake of a screen spectacle, here there is an approach that bends and twists a real event, a multimillion-dollar fraud, reality itself, into whatever shape suits its own narrative, and that is deeply problematic.
You Can See Everything builds its narrative on unease and uncertainty. So much so that if you watched it without knowing what or who it was about, or even just saw the trailer, you might think the person staring back at us with enormous bright blue eyes is not a fraudster but the reincarnation of someone who died thousands of years ago. That is how “interesting” Holmes’s behavior is. Yet I doubt this quality is truly part of her personality, which is why I used the reincarnation example. She is plainly playing someone socially inept, completely detached from the world, with a mind that is utterly blank. It is worth underlining the word “playing.” Fielder treats this supposedly strange woman like a lump of rock, carving her however he likes, shaping her any way he wants, and trying to extract as much from her as possible. What can you get from distilling a single grape for three hours? Only a few drops. Fielder’s effort resembles this.
In the name of creating mystery and allure, the film opens up a chasm between the subject it covers and the narrative formula it uses. It overturns all the rules of documentary filmmaking, which, admittedly, is partly its intention. But I would say it offers a highly subjective narrative for a documentary about a serious public case that cost millions of people dearly. You might object: “The cameras recorded everything as it was, naturally. How can you arrive at a subjective or objective judgment?” This is precisely where Fielder succeeds: he makes us forget that there is a camera in the room, and that the person whose story he tells is performing for those cameras. That is a remarkably successful example of manipulation. And I repeat: it is deeply problematic.
I feel that You Can See Everything could easily have been a fictional film about a documentary crew investigating a con artist’s story. Instead, for three hours, it forces us to look into the eyes of a woman who you feel is not interesting at all and has no story worth telling. Fielder and Oppenheim are under the same kind of illusion as when we believe the person we’re in love with is the best human being in the world. The sad part is that, at some point, we realize that person is not the right one. But whether they have realized it, I’m not so sure.
