“It’s just bullshit, baby, that’s all it is.”
- Chorus of “Bullshit Century, Pt. 2” by Dick Stusso
(click to listen)
I came home from a screening of You Can See Everything trying to discern what bin to put the experience in. The Nathan Fielder vehicle is either a non-fiction psychodrama or a reality show super-cut wearing a monocle. It might also be both. I don’t feel like I wasted three hours of my life, but I also can’t be sure the filmmakers didn’t just lay a big, fat, stinky egg and wrap it in packaging that says Cadbury.
On the one hand, it is excellent entertainment. I fully recognize the 4:3 cinematography genius and the atmospheric achievements. I marveled at the way Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim seemed to set out to make a serious documentary and the universe shook its head and said, “no, it shall be a farce.” And I laughed and I gasped in time with the crowd packed into auditorium one at The Culver Theater on a Sunday night.
But at the same time, annoying questions gnawed at me. The kind of questions that only occur to you when you’re not having a good time at the movies. Questions like “what’s the point of this,” “who cares,” “and why should it matter to me what happens next?” And yet, somehow, the answers were, in order, “I’m not sure,” “apparently me,” and “I may have just drank 64 ounces of lemonade but I don’t care if my bladder explodes like a citrus flavored Hiroshima, I am not leaving until I find out.”
In terms of determining “Did Dan like the movie,” those answers are as beguiling as trying to figure out how to summarize what it is I watched. You could call it a two-part TV special stitched together using a thread and needle called “contractual obligation.” In the first half, Fielder and a film crew document the 34 days leading up to Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of a blood-testing technology company whose inventions were outright shams and fabrications, self-surrendering for an 11-year federal prison sentence in connection with convictions for defrauding investors (but not patients). The second half of the film, which takes place years after the first, follows Fielder as he self-examines his experience with Holmes and her family, using increasingly postmodern means as he goes. The through-line is putting a measuring stick to how manipulative and deceptive Holmes and Billy Evans, her basically-a-husband-but-they’re-not-legally-married-for-financial-reasons-so-he’s-technically-her-non-husband-husband, actually are.
It is fascinating to watch Fielder interface with all of the deceit, but I did not come away with an understanding of Holmes or Evans or even Fielder. How could I? Fielder is playing a character. And Holmes does not want to be known. Emphatically. She wants to be liked, adored, admired. Desperately, desperately, desperately, and you cannot pierce the veil of a psyche that does not want to be seen, only to have its shadow pitied after failing to brute force its worship. Evans is no different.
The farther I get from the screening, the more the second half’s spectacle becomes disposable to me, even if I was just as wildly entertained and scandalized as every other viewer. But there is no special truth or insight to be found. Regarding its subjects, the film only asks “to what extent were these lying-liars-who-lie lying” and “to what extent are these deeply mental people untethered to reality” and the simple fact is I don’t care where they land on the ESPN power rankings for dishonest power couples. It’s like making a documentary about determining the sky’s exact shade of blue. Like you can do what you want, but did you know that 13.7% of American households are so poor they can’t afford food and—get this—one day we’re all going to die?
To me, the more important questions are things like: Is finance capitalism anything more than long-form improv if someone like Holmes can bullshit her way to a multi-billion dollar evaluation? Is it wise to let America’s healthcare regime be controlled by a cadre of people whose main skill in life is unironically playing games they teach at Second City? Lastly, and perhaps most aligned with Fielder’s interests, how does a person end up as simultaneously broken and malignant as Holmes? People are not born like this. They are built by culture, family, and trauma. That the film never explores these questions demonstrates a lack of intellectual rigor, even if it bats you over the head with its aesthetic rigor the same way Super Mario smashes Goombas with a sledgehammer.
Because the aesthetic really is the point. You Can See Everything is ultimately less interested in its characters and more interested in highlighting the artifice and limitations of the documentary format and journalism more generally. Its observations are not novel; they are things you can learn in any introduction to film studies course. You Can See Everything has the vision and style of an auteur but it’s an open question if it has any of the substance or human touch. Or maybe I’m just crabby because I still haven’t taken a piss after drinking all that lemonade.