Richard Brody of The New Yorker titles his review of Nathan Fielder’s recent documentary: “The Vertiginous Revelations of ‘You Can See Everything'”. To me, nothing was revealed. Everyone was “on script”, sometimes literally, for the whole film.
There has been too much quibbling and conceptualizing over “You Can See Everything”, I’ll give it to you straight: this is a documentary about awful people being uninterestingly phony for 3 hours. No one changes, no insights emerge. Fielder, with no story to tell, then fractionates the narrative into opposing truth claims. He fans the fire by manufacturing controversies over how much of the film’s contract Elizabeth Holmes knew about, and whether he was emotionally overinvested in her.
Reader, he was not. He admits as much. Perhaps a contrafactual will illustrate what this film could have been. Holmes has two modes: crying and lying. If the documentary really were to show everything, it would have shown the Salvadoran nanny that took care of the family’s children. Holmes would have answered with sentences and paragraphs, instead of soporific truisms. If her denials had had more substance we might have gained insight. Read the background on her case, read any interview with whistleblower Tyler Schultz. This was a tyrannical articulate CEO, not a naif. Fielder keeps hoping for a payoff that never comes. He can gaslight them as much as he wants, they are not going to go out of Stepford family mode, and any lack of self-knowledge is blamed on undiagnosed neuroatypicality.
When Holmes surrenders to serve her sentence at a federal prison, the film is essentially over. Fielder then resorts to re-enactments and parlor tricks. His tv schtick, which I like, of being an affectless demonic interlocutor, simply won’t work against Holmes and her long-term fianceé, Billy Evans. It works with ordinary folk, puffed-up bosses, conspiracy theorists.
Compare this movie with the Maysles brothers film “Salesman” (1969), also about horrible people, or people twisted by a horrible system. While there is a certain amount of grandstanding going on, you can see between the lines: the hangdog look, the overadmonishment by management, the throwaway lines. The closest we get to this is Holmes’ creepy unblinking head-quivering conversation with Fielder about how she is always genuine. There is a reason it was used to promote the movie. I tried keeping my eyes open without blinking for as long as she did in that scene. I did not last. And her slight nodding and tilting are body-language “tells” that indicate she is being manipulative. I’m dunking on Fielder for not applying more innovative pressure to get her guard down, but the truth is he is one of the best at cringe and I don’t think anyone else could have done better. There was just no way to wring a movie out of people with no depths, seen or unseen.
Side note: My writing is, and always will be, my own words and not AI.
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