You Can See Everything (Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim, 2026)

If the consolidation of the media industry doesn't result in the erasure or false scarcity removing the film and television from the first quarter of this century from public access, it's very possible that people in the future will look back on Nathan Fielder as one the indispensable voices, an accurate chronicler of the absurdity of our time. Since Nathan For You premiered in 2013, Fielder has been exposing the absurd, slight madness coursing through even the most mundane aspects of American life. His work embodies the concept of "cringe" in a way that no one else's does.

With co-director Lance Oppenheim, You Can See Everything is the new documentary by Fielder, centering on Elizabeth Holmes. Beginning in the last month before she surrenders herself to prison for the massive financial fraud that was Theranos, a company Holmes claimed was going to revolutionize blood testing technology and turn the multi-billion dollar industry upside down. It attracted enough investment to make Holmes a billionaire for a time, the youngest woman to ever become a billionaire in starting her own company. Theranos was never able to prove Holmes claims about its technology.

Despite the hub-bub and controversy around making a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, it's not really a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. Instead, Fielder and Oppenheim use the story of Elizabeth Holmes, her relationship with the father of her two children, Billy Evans, and the questions that surround the massive fraud committed in the name of the company she started to explore questions about perspective, perception, truth and honesty. Can you know what is true, and if so, how? How does your perspective shape your perception? Can you ever really know whether another person is telling you the truth? Can you know when you are, and aren't, telling yourself the truth about any of this?

There have been questions about Holmes as the subject through which to commit this exploration. They're not unfair. They do, however, not take into consideration the way documentaries like this tend to be made. It's likely Oppenheim and Fielder had an intent in mind at the start (however similar it may have been), and over the three years they spent making it, that intent shifted, revealed itself from the footage they'd collected. That does seem to be the case, considering they enlisted the help of Amanda Seyfried, because she previously won an Emmy for her performances Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout, and Seyfried comes into the movie at a point that's later in its timeline. Part of the way this documentary achieves its effect, the intent it's trying to convey, comes in interrogating that line between the way people now perceive Holmes as a result of the popular and critically acclaimed performance from Seyfried. It should be said, there aren't many examples of actors being so willing to interrogate their work, especially where these true life/true crime "docudramas" are concerned, and the degree to which she's willing to do so suggests an artistic integrity in Seyfried that seems hard to come by.

In the end, one can come away with questions about whether Holmes was a misguided young woman, who committed the fraud of faith or whether she is exactly the master manipulator and con artist she's been portrayed as in the press and media. But if they've come away with those questions only, they're missing the point. The evidence is, as it has been. The difference has been the influence of spending time with this person, in her life, staring at its circumstances and consequences. Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of these frauds. She was convicted of being a con artist essentially. Nothing presented in the three hours of the documentary, other than Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans saying so, contradicts the evidence already given to the public. There is nothing in the realm of what could be considered new evidence presented over the course of the three hour run time. In this way, what Oppenheim and Fielder have done, is demonstrate just how Holmes was able to commit such a massive con, on even people we the public should expect to know better, because so many people who would expect themselves to know better, are clearly being conned by nothing other than watching Holmes, and Evans, on the screen. It leaves open the possibility, at least from the perspective we get from the movie, that Fielder himself was even taken in to some degree.

You Can See Everything may be one of the most intuitive, demonstrative and insightful works of our time, for this reason alone, considering just how saturated in con artists the landscape of American culture is.

What Fielder and Oppenheimer have achieved with You Can See Everything is a rather astonishing accomplishment.

There is one genuinely valid criticism of it, which has been brought up in relationship to the journalistic ethics of the documentary form, and what it means that some audiences are leaving the theater believing Elizabeth Holmes just might be innocent of everything she's been accused of.

It seems to me though, this evades the issue at hand. The reason You Can See Everything is an astonishing accomplishment in documentary filmmaking, is what it reveals about us as an audience. It is a journalistic accomplishment, in this way, and that is clearly the intent. It's an intent that has also been meticulously approached and what we see has been expertly crafted to achieve it. With very few exceptions, I'm not sure I've seen anything else that approaches its success in this intent, and those other examples are not movies lodged in the general cultural consciousness. The one that jumps to mind is Sanctuary, from 2022. It's fitting that one of the leads of that movie, Christopher Abbott, appears in You Can See Everything, playing Billy Evans in the sections that are reenactments. Part of the point of Sanctuary is that the audience can't ever be completely sure whether they've seen a narrative played out in an organic sense, meaning what we've seen is meant to be the characters moving toward a resolution as they develop it together over the course of the film or whether what we've seen over the course of the film is the characters playing out an already agreed upon narrative that they play out with each instance of their meeting. Sanctuary was met with some critical success in its festival run, and enough box office to recoup it's production costs, with maybe some slim profit on top, but little else. It was an independent film, and this was its reception, specifically because it's not the kind of material, content and intent a more general mass audience is often presented with, and its engaging in a conversation with the audience part of the critical community and no small part of the broader movie going audience would refer to as being "up its own ass."

The problem isn't with Fielder, Oppenheimer or You Can See Everything. The problem is, this is a documentary one could describe with a phrase common to social media by saying "it escaped containment." When used in relation to social media, it means the post or content has reached beyond its intended audience, which is usually the followers of whichever user posted it. When something "escapes containment" in this sense, it means it's reached an audience beyond that of the context provided by the prior understanding of the perspectives, communication style and vocabulary of the user who posted it.

The broader context You Can See Everything is working within are the questions of things like perception, perspective, truth, and narrative. Escaping containment, in this case, means reaching beyond the audience with the experience of treating these questions seriously in anything beyond the theoretical. These days, they get truncated and summarized under the umbrella of "media literacy," but as is so often the case, truncating and summarizing them removes their depth, particularities, peculiarities, nuance and complexity. Outside of the college classroom or lecture hall, they're rarely given much consideration by the majority of the public, except by the people whose livelihoods are built on them, like college educators, artists, critics and the like. Their livelihoods being built in part on these questions or, in cases of people like myself, an inability to dislodge the obsession with them, which makes for familiarity. They are the world of the intellectual, a world most of our culture treats as produced by the privilege of navel gazing.

This is why I, personally, am suspicious of people (especially but not only of politicians) who use phrases like "kitchen table issues," to describe the material world as the only thing important to public life, and treat these questions as unimportant, and not worth the public's time. What we decide are "kitchen table issues," what our perspective and perception of them can be, is the product of narrative. If we don't interrogate our own perspective and perception, we never get to interrogating the narrative in any substantial way, and if we don't, exactly how much are we thinking for ourselves, instead of taking as gospel the narratives that are dominant around us? "No one cares about that," doesn't mean whatever that is doesn't matter and doesn't have some effect on the world we live in, and there's a relatively small percentage of the population who cares about the intricacies of questions of perspective, perception and narrative with an urgency and familiarity that produces the depth of understanding You Can See Everything is attempting to communicate to any audience that sees it.

That's not Fielder or Oppenheim's fault, and there really is no way to tell any story, be it a documentary, a narrative fiction in a movie or book, that's going to ask these kinds of questions, with the intricacy You Can See Everything is asking them, that they are going to be grasped by the broader, general movie going audience that is now being attracted to it by both the critical response and the fact that Elizabeth Holmes is the vehicle through which it is asking those questions.

Within every form of professional criticism of every medium of narrative storytelling, be it books, movies, television, there is a certain variety of something which can be elitism or superiority. It's expressed in the sentiment of different films, books, television and so on being created for as wide an audience as possible, and is referred to directly or indirectly, as trying to appeal to the "lowest common denominator." It's received by a good portion of that general audience as elitist and self serving, because really, it is.

It erases there are significant cultural, political, economic and as a result of all of these, educational realities that produce what's being referred to as "lowest common denominator." In these more elitist and self defined superior perspectives, it's a question of personal choice. "I expect something more than to have my basest understanding or least sophisticated instincts and ideas to be catered to," is what produces it. In truth, there are people, individuals who do exist making these choices consciously. That's not the only truth though. Personally, my grasp on the Spanish language has nearly completely diminished in the nearly twenty odd years since high school. At the time, that grasp was fairly strong. Lack of use has erased it. The same is true of a large portion of the population whose lives and media engagement avoid confronting the audience with the intricacies and complexities of questions of perspective, perception and so on. I certainly could have chosen to engage with media and the like which would have maintained or even added to my ability to communicate in Spanish, but there is also an entire set of cultural, political and economic forces that created the environment where I have to seek that out. I, like every other human being, make choices based on the factors at hand, and among those choices was to dedicated no small amount of time to the questions of perception, perspective, narrative and truth, and not to keeping my Spanish skills effective and easily brought to work. Do I see the way having those skills at hand would be good? Absolutely. Do I regret not having maintained and advanced them? No. I, like every other human being, have only so much time, and I wouldn't trade being able to speak Spanish fluently for the benefits of having made the choice to focus on maintaining and expanding my understanding and fluency in other things, like these questions of perspective, perception, narrative and truth.

The harder question is how would we incorporate the respect for the importance of the way narrative shapes our world into the culture and society we exist in? Why haven't they, up to now?

The thing that makes these questions hard, is what makes us collectively avoid many other important questions. It means, when we get down to it, imagining different goals and aims shaping that culture and society, which means imaging a culture and society very different from this one, and rejecting the narratives that have come to shape our lives, our society, our culture, our politics, our economics and so on.

What You Can See Everything does, is confront us, and the more fluent one is with the broader context of its questions, the more salient and incisive it becomes. When I look at the world we're currently existing within, they are among the most important questions we could be asking.