Full spoilers follow for You Can See Everything, which is in theaters now.
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” — The Usual Suspects
You Can See Everything is, deservedly, one of the most-talked-about films of the year, and is sailing past box office records for documentaries. The filmmaking itself is impressive, often surprising, and effective. But the movie’s staying power is as a social experiment about whether any of us truly know, care about, or communicate what’s “real” outside of our own interests. Truth exists on a spectrum in the world of this film, and it often feels like a game of narcissistic whack-a-mole.
We understand that co-directors Nathan Fielder (Nathan for You) and Lance Oppenheim (Primetime) haven’t delivered a definitive take on whether Elizabeth Holmes is a liar; according to the legal system and whistleblowers, she is, after her company Theranos was revealed to be, essentially, hawking a blood-testing machine that didn’t actually work. What the film is asking is whether Holmes understands that she is lying, or if she can discern the difference between what she wishes were so, and what is. It’s like crafting a “not guilty by reason of insanity” defense for fraud.
For years, pundits and armchair psychiatrists have speculated that Holmes has Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies, though she has no public diagnosis. Yet, in You Can See Everything, there are moments where Holmes appears to be neurodivergent in a way that reframes her entire story. That is to say nothing of the fact that her partner, Billy Evans, is (on screen, at least) wildly controlling, and the relationship often feels abusive. In the world of the film, Holmes sometimes appears as a victim and the most sympathetic character. So the questions become: was she manipulated by her original romantic and business partner, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, whom Holmes met when she was 18 and he 37? Is that pattern now playing out with Evans? Is she a narcissistic sociopath, or is she on the spectrum in such a way that inhibits her from reading social cues and understanding language nuances to a degree that she can lie, and not know that she is?
The first real jaw-dropping moment in You Can See Everything is when Fielder shows Holmes and Evans the famous Abbott and Costello sketch “Who’s on First?” She finds it funny, yet insists that she didn’t understand that the first baseman’s name was “Who,” which is the entire crux of the joke. As Fielder presses, she becomes visibly upset by her own confusion, and Evans sends her to bed like a child. Again and again, the film suggests that her discernment is inhibited, and she isn’t using language the way the rest of us do. Evans claims her brain simply works differently.
Fielder runs this experiment because a question arose earlier around Holmes’ wording in a clip he plays for her, in which she says the Theranos blood-testing machine “can” run the tests without clarifying that it couldn’t yet. Holmes and Evans bring the machine out of storage to demonstrate what she’d meant: it was possible for the machine itself to work, but the testing had not caught up with its capabilities. The implication is that what was seen as a lie was really Holmes’ failure to understand linguistic nuance. Could it be, we wonder, that this woman did terrible things, but also, that her actual neurological conditions have been misunderstood in such a way that her sentence isn’t commensurate with the reality?
Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz wants to disabuse us of that speculation. Talking to CBS, he said he almost jumped out of his seat during the sequence featuring the Theranos device because, according to him, that was not the machine they were using on patients, but a future version that was never completed. In his view, the film re-litigates Theranos just enough to sow doubt in the audience’s mind. This brings us to a broader point, one Shultz makes: this isn’t a documentary. What this is, is a very well-made film and a cleverly told story, one that, in ways the filmmakers are most certainly aware of, and perhaps some they are not, holds up a funhouse mirror to truth, and to all of us.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/everyone-is-running-a-con-in-you-can-see-everything
