Truth and a Woman: You Can See Everything

"One wrote: 'Wine is strong.'

Another wrote: 'A king is stronger.'

The third wrote: 'Women are stronger still: but Truth is victorious over all things.'"

-1 Esdras (Hebrew wisdom literature, 4th-2nd centuries BC)

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"FYI you can totally see everything." 

-Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos founder, AD 2023)

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Ever since I saw You Can See Everything, the new "documentary" from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, in a packed theater on its opening night, I have not been able to stop thinking about it. It has wormed its way into both my active, rational thoughts and the images and atmosphere in between; it has made its way into my dreams. Layer upon layer, image upon image, moment upon moment, symbol upon symbol: all revolving around the figure of a woman and a liar.

It was only after many days of this, though, that I remembered, suddenly and like a bolt out of the blue, one of my favorite passages of ancient literature, from an enigmatic book that almost no one has read, because it almost made it into the Bible but didn't; and realized, in a thought that probably only I in the entire history of the human race have ever had, "1 Esdras and You Can See Everything are about the same thing."

1 Esdras, the clumsy Latinate name used by scholars writing in English for a text composed probably in Hebrew but surviving only in the Greek Septuagint translation made under the Ptolemies in Egypt, is a mysterious text. It is, most likely, a rearranged and expanded version of the canonical book of Ezra. Oddly, though, the Jewish scholar Josephus, one of our earliest witnesses to the Biblical text in general, seems to have only known 1 Esdras, and not the book we now know as Ezra. Some people have argued that it was the original, and what we now call Ezra an expurgated, rationalized copy. 

Regardless of which is the original and which the copy, though, it is the presence or absence of one central story that defines the two texts and dictates their arrangements: the "dispute of the bodyguards." Entirely absent from Ezra even in outline, this is in 1 Esdras the centerpiece of the book: a lengthy, rhetorically elaborate contest of speeches between three bodyguards of the Persian king Darius over the abstract question of "what is the strongest." The candidates for the strongest thing in existence are four: wine, kings, women, and the truth. 

The winner of the contest is the only one to argue for two, hierarchically-arranged options: women above all things, and the truth above women. This bodyguard's name is Zerubbabel; which is a really strange detail. 

Zerubbel is in fact a historical figure, recorded in Ezra and Nehemiah as a member of the Judaic royal house and the leader of the first group of Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem, nearly eighty years before Ezra or Nehemiah themselves arrived on the scene. He is thus a figure of incredible importance in the scope of the Hebrew Bible: the prophesied continuation of the Davidic line, the rebuilder of the Temple, the restorer of the people to the land, the ender of the exile.

For all that, though, there is something rather problematic about Zerubbabel. He is purportedly of the Davidic line, grandson of a previous King of Judah before the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC. His name, however, is Babylonian twice over: Akkadian rather than Hebrew, and meaning "offspring of Babyon." Though glorified by the Prophets Haggai and Zechariah as a chosen instrument of God, he never held the rank of King of Judah or Israel: rather, he served as Persian governor of the broader province. And though he laid the foundations of what would become the Second Temple, he never saw it completed or even, apparently, worked on it all that much. The canonical books of Ezra and Nehemiah both show the work of Jewish restoration barely begun decades later, requiring drastic intervention from their valorized titular characters. One could be forgiven for thinking that a lot of people found Zerubbabel rather disappointing.

For all that, Zerubbabel is undeniably a tantalizing figure, a person chosen for a critical task at a critical moment but himself unknown and mostly unknowable, a suggestion of greater things as yet unfulfilled. In both the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, he is remembered as an ancestor of Jesus. 

What 1 Esdras ultimately gives us, then, is a startling and bizarre recontextualization of both this pivotal figure in Jewish history and his banner accomplishment. In the central story of the text, we see Zerubbabel not as a scion of the Jewish royal house, not as a triumphant restorer of Jewish statehood, not even as a Persian governor, but as a young, indistinguishable bodyguard serving the King of Persia Darius. It is all three of the bodyguards, collectively, who decide, while the king is sleeping off his latest feast, to set a rhetorical contest and make its prize the granting of anything the winner asks. It is only when he wins this seemingly random competition that Zerubbabel takes the opportunity to ask the King of Persia to let him return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. 

Both the young bodyguard's identification with Zerubbabel and his request to rebuild Jerusalem are, in 1 Esdras, genuine plot twists--almost rug pulls. The more people knew about Zerubbabel, Davidic princeling and Persian restorer, the less reason they would have to associate his famous name with an anonymous bodyguard playing a minor role in a folkloric contest of cleverness. It is only when the third bodyguard's big speech comes that we finally are told his name--and it is only after he has won the contest that we realize his goal. All along, it turns out, this bizarre and seemingly random exchange among bodyguards in the royal bedchamber was the secret, hidden means by which God restored the exile of his people. 

But was Zerubbabel right about women?

In 2023, Nathan Fielder moved into Elizabeth Holmes' house with a director and a camera crew. He knew who Elizabeth Holmes was: everyone did. She was a liar.

By the time three years had gone by, though, he had apparently come to believe that she was telling the truth after all: or at least, that she perhaps was incapable of understanding that what she was saying wasn't the truth; or perhaps, that she was a victim of someone else, and so sympathetic whether or not she was a liar; or perhaps merely that he wanted to believe her; or perhaps merely that he loved her. 

As Amanda Seyfried says in the film's closing line, "It's very complicated." It is also, though, very much like life. And it is this, and not any number of meta-commentaries about truth and knowability proffered by people online, that makes You Can See Everything my favorite movie of the year 2026.

Pathological Liars

I am someone who has been since around the age of 12 very dedicated to understanding human psychology and motivation, not as they are imagined or manipulated, but as they actually function in real people in history. I have tried very hard to know and understand many sorts of people, past and present, from small children to old women to businessmen to cultists to alcoholics to theologians to Emperors to CIA agents to pedophiles to saints. 

For some, You Can See Everything is a movie about the unknowability of human persons. I humbly beg to differ. Every person in this film I felt, by the end of the film, I understood; every person reminded me of people I have known well and in person. What the film portrays with an honesty and directness and incisiveness that I have never seen paralleled in any other work of art, though, is what really makes all these people liars. 

The first thing to understand about You Can See Everything, then, is that it is not a film about Elizabeth Holmes; and certainly not a film about the abstract question of whether she is a liar or not. Both from the copious testimony and documentation of her fake business and from the film You Can See Everything, it is absolutely clear, beyond any conceivable shadow of a doubt, that Elizabeth Holmes is a habitual, pathological liar: which is to say, someone who constantly says and does things that directly contradict what she herself has seen and experienced and done and come to know.

During her time at Theranos, a 2010s wunderkind tech company that claimed to be able to revolutionize the field of blood-testing with a technology that never existed and a concept that was physically impossible, Elizabeth Holmes lied constantly about matters as small as where she lived (not in the fake apartment she showed to journalists, but with her wealthy boyfriend-cum-business-partner in his mansion) and as large as whether or not her devices were in active use by the US military (they were not though she said in numerous interviews that they were; a fabricated quote to that effect by a prominent Army General was used in Theranos ads). Dozens or hundreds of powerful people were treated to "demonstrations" in which their blood was inserted into her Edison machine, then immediately removed as soon as they left the room and tested on commercial equipment. Her Edison machine was existing technology from the 1970s put into a black box, and required additional commercial equipment even to be able to run the 10 or so tests it could actually run; it was chemically and physically impossible that it could ever run the 200+ tests she claimed it could. When the Wall Street Journal broke the story, she went on national television and claimed that she had personally spoken to all the whistleblowers who had told her that all their quotes in the story were fabricated. She went on other news shows and made up figures about her company's earnings that directly contradicted all her companies' internal paperwork. She was and is a liar.

The real question of the film, then, is not whether Elizabeth Holmes is a liar; or even whether she knows she is a liar. The question is why so many of us are liars so much of the time, and, above all, why so many of us so eagerly and desperately believe lies.

This is in one way or the other the most pressing, determining question for the happiness and ultimate salvation of each person in existence. It is also, in an only slightly less pressing fashion, the central question of American modernity--and perhaps the most urgent question anyone can ask about the intertwined political, cultural, economic, and personal crises of the year 2026. 

Ultimately, You Can See Everything is not a study of the abstract question of factual truth, but the story of four distinct individuals who are all, to varying degrees and for various reasons, liars and believers of lies: Elizabeth Holmes, her husband Billy Evans, the actor Amanda Seyfried, and the documentarian Nathan Fielder.

To understand lies, though, one has to first understand the truth: or rather, to understand that human beings, in our most basic nature as rational beings, are truth. As I have said on numerous occasions, to be human is to be defined by an immediate and intimate and internal relation to the totality of being: a relation that is a desire that originates and terminates in knowledge. This relation is not finally escapable for any human persons: but it is for that reason truly terrifying to all of us some of the time. People have searched for and found many ways to try to escape this terrifying, intimate relation to the truth and being and other selves, or at least to bring it under control: of which the simplest, most fundamental, and most ancient is simply the lie.

I can remember vividly the very first time in my life I knowingly told a lie--and also why I told it, and why I did not repeat it. I was very young at the time, probably four but certainly no more than five years old. Every night, I was required, usually with some degree of help or coercion from my mother or my brothers, to brush my teeth and washing my face before bed, an experience I found, like many children, deeply unpleasant in ways I couldn't quite define. And every night, my mother asked me whether I had done my duty or not, and only then let me go to bed to play with my four brothers before sleep. One night, though, I realized, abruptly, that if I simply told her that I had washed my face, I did not have to actually do it. And the magic was, she would kiss me and I would go to bed regardless. I can still remember precisely the giddy sense of euphoric escape I experienced when I realized this.

If I acknowledge something as true (I have to wash my face before bed), I have no choice but to accept it, react to it, respond to it, act based on it (wash my face). If I do not acknowledge something as true, though, I do not have to do any of those things. Hence, I am, precisely to the extent that I reject reality, free. Or, put from the opposite end: if I accept that what I want to be true (I can go to bed without washing my face) in fact is not true, then I cannot act as if it were (go to bed without washing my face); if I simply pretend that what I want to be in fact is, though, then I can. Hence, I am, precisely to the extent that I lie, free.

Now this is not really what anyone sane ever meant by freedom: it is, though, what many, many people since Martin Luther have taken for freedom, including most prominently most of the most powerful men of the 20th and 21st centuries in America.

In my case, my career as a liar did not last very long; in fact, if I remember correctly, it lasted less than a week; it is quite possible, in fact, that it lasted only a single day. My brothers figured out very quickly that I was simply getting into my pajamas and got into bed, and not gone to the bathroom with the rest of them to brush my teeth and wash my face; and when my mother asked, they told her so. What can I say, I was only four years old, I did not cover my tracks well. I can still remember the terrible guilt and shame I felt when I was caught; and with it, naturally, the overwhelming desire to escape that feeling. Could I escape it by pretending I had simply forgotten, and not lied? The answer, in this instance, was no. I was told not to lie again, washed my face and brushed my teeth, and was in bed telling stories within a few minutes. I do not remember consciously telling a lie again for a very, very long time.

My career as a liar lasted only a few days; there are many people, though, who have extended those few days until decades, by techniques that really do not boil down to anything more complicated than what I did or tried to do at the age of four. On the one hand, I could have very easily made my illusions much more convincing than I did. I could have waited patiently until my four brothers had cleared out of the one bathroom, closed the door, locked it, and pretended to splash water around. I could have carefully spot-checked and wiped my face to ensure there was no dirt on it. I could have put a single knot of toothpaste on my tongue to make my breath minty. When called upon my illusion, too, I could have indignantly denied the charge and maintained my innocence. I could have called my brothers as witnesses to my character. I could have my brothers of maliciously lying about me. I could have cried until my mother comforted me. 

If I didn't do all this, alas, it was because I was only a child, and so lacked the initiative of such people as Silicon Valley founders and Venture Capitalists and AI tech billionaires. In my foolish, childish mind, if such an idea had occurred to me, I confess with shame that it would have seemed to me both a lot more work and a lot more unpleasant all around than just actually washing my face and brushing my teeth. What can I say, I was four, I lacked the Spirit of Capitalism.

A surprising number of people, though, have spent their lives more or less in a perpetual cycle of the above techniques and the above emotions: beginning with Martin Luther and continuing to Elon Musk. Most of us have known at some time in our lives a person like this: if we are Americans, we have most likely at some point in our lives worshipped and looked up to and admired a person like this. In fact, more or less every person Americans are taught to worship and look up and to admire is to some extent a person like this. This isn't as crazy as it seems: someone who habitually rejects everything they do not want to be true and acts as if everything they want to be true really is true really can, under the right circumstances, accomplish a remarkable amount, including, apparently, becoming President of the United States.

What is absolutely important to understand, though, is that this kind of freedom is always and everywhere at the same time absolute weakness and absolute failure; and this weakness and failure begins before your brothers rat you out. 

A person who cannot accept unpleasant reality may be many things, but they are by definition absolutely helpless: they cannot tie their own shoes, or open an umbrella, or think for five consecutive seconds, or perform any other action that involves wanting something, recognizing they do not yet have it, and using power to get it. And, as it turns out, every single human act up to and including eating and sleeping and defecating involves these things. 

Human persons are pervasively defined and driven by a desire and orientation to the good: a person who cannot accept reality cannot desire, cannot wield power, and absolutely can never, under any circumstances, be happy. The human person exists only in the act of receiving and relating to reality: a person who has systematically and habitually occluded the most fundamental and internal and personal of human functions is, properly understood, at a sub-single-cell-fetus level of development. For the same reason, they can never, ever, ever get what they want. 

Of course, no one can really manage to be like this about most things, most of the time; except insofar as they collapse into a puddle of disparate elements onto the floor, or in other words, die.

In practice, then, the only way habitual liars to an extent can manage to survive for any length of time or succeed at anything at all is to get other people to do things for them. This is the essential thing to understand about the modern idea of freedom going back to the Renaissance: that it not only implies, but absolutely necessitates, both radical dependency and radical subjection of others. Libertinism is an aristocratic philosophy, and cannot do without servants; and what was true of the freedom-loving squires of the 17th century is even more true of the freedom-loving tech billionaires of the 21st century. My career as a liar took place when I was four years old and in a state where more or less everything was done for me: Elon Musk is still in this state. Will his brothers rat him out?

Liars are constitutionally weak people incapable of desiring, acting, wielding power, or getting what they want--and the more deeply and pervasively someone manages to be a liar and get away with it, the more we can be certain that they are being supported and protected and sheltered and helped and taken care of and slavishly served by others. The more a society is filled with successful, powerful liars, the more we can be sure that the society in question is aristocratic and hierarchical and servile and defined by the most brutal sort of subjugation of the masses. This is the most obvious indicator that American in 2026 is not democracy, let alone an egalitarian one.

The real mystery of modernity is not why such people, free people and aristocrats and habitual liars, exist: the real mystery of You Can See Everything is not why Elizabeth Holmes is the way she is. That is, at least to me, quite straightforward, even obvious. The real mystery of modernity, America, the 20th and 21st centuries, Hollywood, Trump, AI, Elizabeth Holmes, and You Can See Everything is why so many otherwise sane and normal people have been and continue to be so willing and eager and desperate to serve such people. This, I think, is quite unparalleled in all of human history.

Frightened Rabbits

People have written a great deal about Elizabeth Holmes' affect and body language: the still, stiff way she moves, the artificially deep voice in which she speaks, her uncanny ability to keep her large eyes opened maximally and unblinkingly while moving the rest of her face independently to smile or speak. There are many ways these features can be analyzed: from the obvious points that they are glaring indicators of deception and make her seem like an alien to the less obvious, but more important point that they must require constant, intensive, conscious effort to maintain.

When one abstracts from all this, though, abstracts from her personality and reputation and from the close-up shots of her staring into men's eyes, when one merely looks at Elizabeth Holmes and considers what her body language and demeanor would indicate from a distance to someone who didn't know her and had never seen her before or heard of her before, the reality becomes, to me, simply obvious. Elizabeth Holmes is afraid.

When one person stares unblinkingly at another for long periods of time, the usual reason is because they are afraid of that person. When one person remains extremely still while staring, gets extremely close, the reason is the same. When that same person performs a smile with the lower half of their face while keeping their eyes fixed unblinkingly on their interlocutor all the while, it is obviously because they are trying to placate someone they are afraid of.

I have known, personally and from my earliest childhood, quite a number of pathological liars: and in all of their eyes I have seen the same fear. There can be few images of this fear as potent than the wide, staring eyes and the fixed, frozen features of Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything. That icon of American and modern and human fear will remain with me for a long time, and most likely forever.

But what is Elizabeth Holmes afraid of? 

This question is certainly more complicated; though not, I think, unanswerable. In all the interviews and speeches from her time at Theranos, she is afraid of being found out by the people she is talking to. In most of the sequences of You Can See Everything, she is afraid of being found out by Nathan Fielder. When she looks at the camera, she is afraid of being found out by us.

This is a quite natural fear, and the natural concomitant to being a liar at all or to any degree for any length of time. Consider again Elizabeth Holmes' fixed, frozen face, her wide eyes: and think, for a second, how much effort it must take to maintain that fixedness, that frozenness. Holmes stays "in character," so to speak, for the whole film save only a few moments, which is to say, for weeks, day and night, hour after hour. Fear is among the most exhausting of emotions: and the cautions of fear, its alarms, its desperate efforts at self-protection, are both perpetual and infinite.

Being a liar, then, is an awful lot of work. To lie effectively and for so long, Holmes has to stay on her toes constantly, ponder and reflect and react continually and in real time to figure out what the people around her are thinking, whether they suspect her, what they want from her, and, in short, what she can to escape their accusing gaze. This effort, for practiced liars, is to a large degree instinctual; for pathological liars, it is generally compulsive; but it still takes an enormous amount of energy. At the age of four, I lacked the energy and ingenuity required to maintain my lie: I would certainly have had it at the age of 24. Either way, it would have been a very difficult and exhausting and unpleasant effort. It would have made me afraid all the time.

It is in this light, first and foremost, that I interpret the film's already-famous "Who's On First" scene: in which Nathan Fielder shows Elizabeth Holmes the famous Abbot & Costello comedy routine about verbal misunderstanding in an effort to explicate her repeated claim that she had told Theranos investors the truth and they had simply misunderstood it. While he shows her the clip, which she claims she has never seen, her face freezes and she laughs along with it, uncomfortably and exaggeratedly; when he asks her to explain the joke, though, she looks desperately between him and her husband, refusing to answer. When pressed, she says she found the skit funny; but she cannot, or will not, say what was funny about it.

In the film, this scene is immediately taken up as part of what we may call the Billy-Fielder theory of Elizabeth Holmes: that she is an innocent, pure person whose mind and thought processes work so differently from most people's that she cannot understand when she is lying. See, Billy says? She really is different, special. She cannot understand Abbot & Costello. She could not understand why saying that her device could do 200 tests was not the same as saying that it could do 12 tests.

My own interpretation of the scene is quite different: which is that Holmes is never really paying any attention to the skit at all, let alone thinking about what it means. She knows she is being tested, and is afraid: and so, like all frightened people, she desperately focuses her attention inward, on her efforts to smile and laugh and say and do what she thinks the men around her want her to say and do and in short to not be found out. She looks at the screen, but is really not looking at it at all.

When Fielder asks her about the skit, what she found funny about it, what it means, she is on one level unable to answer because she was not in fact paying attention to the skit: on a deeper level, though, she is simply frightened, desperately frightened, and unwilling to say anything that might expose her to scrutiny. At Billy's and Fielder's suggestion, she finally and reluctantly accepts their claim that she does not understand the skit--mostly because it is Billy suggesting it, and because he is obviously using it to defend her. She is still clearly terrified though--and deeply, deeply ashamed.

In the abstract, and when relaxed and paying attention, Elizabeth Holmes is capable of understanding the "Who's On First" routine. When tested, though, she turns inward, and refuses to say anything that might expose her. This is the clear, straightforward psychological pattern of fear.

This same pattern is present throughout the film: most definitely, perhaps, in her first, over the phone, reaction to meeting Amanda Seyfried, the actor who portrayed her in the Hulu mini-series The Drop-Out. "Did you know I would be here?" Amanda asks. There is an uncomfortable pause from the other end of the line. "I'm not sure if I knew," Holmes replies, and changes the subject. Her instinct, here and elsewhere, is not merely to lie, but to hide: to keep every bit of truth about herself from the view of every person.

When she knows what the people around her want, what she thinks will make her look good, the way she wants to look, she can and will lie; when she is for any reason confused even momentarily about either of those things, though, she cannot. In the most proper sense, she is too scared to lie.

Nathan Fielder, though, is not all Elizabeth Holmes is afraid of: far from it. She certainly is afraid of him; but not nearly as much as one would expect; not nearly as afraid, I think, as most of us would be if an awkward Jewish man famous for his ability to make people uncomfortable and make them look bad on camera were living in our house and sitting very close to us asking us if we are a liar--especially if we are in fact a liar.

Nor is Elizabeth Holmes nearly as afraid as we might expect of the public, the anonymous millions watching her through the cameras. At one point, she breaks down in tears at the misuse of her image in the past to promote Theranos--a misuse that, as all evidence including her own sworn testimony and private text messages indicates, she had enthusiastically embraced and encouraged and pushed for all it was worth. By 2023, Holmes was one of the most universally hated people in America; and had been publicly outed as pathological liar who had admitted under oath to lying about numerous things about her company and almost certainly getting actual patients killed by falsifying their testing data. And yet, she invited a film crew into her house and lied about everything, even the things factually established in public, even things she had herself testified under oath about, again and again and again.

Whatever this is, it is not a normal fear of loss of public reputation; let alone a reasonable approach to rehabilitating it.

What Elizabeth Holmes is really afraid of, then, is simply the truth--or at least her own acceptance and acknowledgment of the truth. Since the self is itself a relation, and indeed a relation of truth, with other people and things, one might simplify this by saying she is afraid of herself. This fear is the one connective tissue that explains both why she lies so continually and why she so insistently seeks out other people and mass media outlets to lie to even when doing so exposes her to greater scrutiny or makes her look worse. 

As I pointed out above, liars are above all weak and dependent people: who need others to sustain and protect and serve them to a degree immeasurably above normal people. Elizabeth Holmes cannot survive on her own, not just materially, but above all psychologically and emotionally and internally: because people and media are for her the essential psychological means by which she avoids ever acknowledging the truth or seeing her self.

It is for this reason she instinctively seeks out other people; it is for this reason she makes media, images, television, film of her self; it is for this reason she fixes her face into a mask, shapes her words into an image, and invites people and cameras to look at it. In these images of herself that she creates in other people and in photographs and videos, she crafts a self that she can accept, a cracked and distorted mirror that will under no circumstances reflect her true self.

But why is she so afraid of the truth? 

Different answers are possible--which are not so much contradictory as layered. In a key scene in You Can See Everything, Nathan meets Elizabeth's parents, her mother put-together and frozen, her father burly and removed. Despite Billy's desperate attempts to prevent it, Nathan ultimately has the chance to speak alone to her father, who, after revealing he worked at Enron, begins, rather clumsily, to exculpate his daughter. Sunny Balwani, Elizabeth's partner at Theranos, met her when she was 18 and he was 37. He was a bad influence (at trial, Holmes claimed he was abusive). Ultimately, though, he believes that his daughter's troubles with accepting reality began when she was raped.

Nathan visibly reacts to this bizarrely casual dropping of the word. Raped? He mouths; but her father has already moved on to another topic, and in a few minutes Billy has broken up the tête-à-tête, and the matter is never raised again.

The claim that Elizabeth Holmes was raped at a fraternity house in college is one with extensive documentary evidence going back to local police reports in Stanford. It is one of the few claims made in the film about Holmes that is completely plausible and very likely true--and, tellingly, it is made by neither Holmes nor her husband. 

One of the most common reactions to trauma, especially sexual trauma, is a withdrawal from reality--a withdrawal that often results in lies, but only rarely in a person becoming a pathological liar. Certainly, this one event cannot conceivably and of itself explain the rise and fall of Theranos.

Still, something that was begun, or merely cemented, in a traumatic violation and its aftermath is quite frequently visible in Elizabeth Holmes' face throughout the film. It is something I have seen in myself and other victims of trauma: a blank, defensive face covering a small, brooding obsession with one's own violation, degradation, humiliation, accompanied by a distanced, abstracted, almost petulant defiance towards the world and other people. It is something I have felt in myself.

Still, whatever Holmes' relationships with Sunny Balwani or Billy Evans or even Nathan Fielder, it is not with such violations that Holmes is mostly obsessed in You Can See Everything. The overwhelming, hateful humiliation she fears and fights against is no longer anything as literal as personal pain or sexual trauma: as sometimes happens, such genuine and personal and unbearable feelings have been buried deep underground, their poisonous energy left to seep quietly and invisibly into other things.

The humiliation against which Holmes mostly appears to be fighting against in her role as Theranos founder and tech celebrity in the 2010s is simply the humiliation of not in fact being a unique world-historical genius, of not in fact being Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or Yoda, of not in fact being set to disrupt the entire medical field and foster a revolution that will change the world, or, in short, of not being what she wants to be and having what she wants to have, which is a clumsy way of uttering the fundamental and unutterable human agony of being a human person and not God.

The space between desire and its fulfillment, between what we want and what we actually have and are, is fundamental to the human experience: it is where most people spend most of their lives. It has not, however, been a particularly popular experience in America over the past eighty years or so. Indeed, one could argue that precisely the heart of the characteristic modern genre of advertising-pornography is the absolute denial and occlusion of such a space or such an experience. Every person in an advertisement who sees Doritos gets Doritos; and every person who gets Doritos gets what he wants and is what he wants and is God. When one replaces Doritos with "sex," it comes to the same thing. 

The first and most obvious thing, then,  that one might say about Elizabeth Holmes is also to some extent the truest: that she is someone who spent most of her life pretending that she was not, never had been, and never would be a human person living in the space between desire and its fulfillment.

Here is something no one disagrees on: from the time she was 19 years old and younger, Elizabeth Holmes presented herself as, wanted to be, a disruptive admired worshipped genius inventor and innovator like Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or any of the other proliferating Silicon Valley tech gurus of the 2010s. For this reason, she started wearing black turtlenecks, embracing minimalist aesthetics, and speaking in an artificially deepened voice. 

What was more remarkable, she succeeded in convincing very many powerful men, up to and including former Secretaries of State Ted Schultz and Henry Kissinger, that she really was what she wanted to be. Virtually everyone who met Elizabeth Holmes during her heyday was charmed, impressed, even awed by her. For a brief window, she was one of the most widely admired people in the world. She raised hundreds of millions in venture capital, built a successful company, and became the youngest female billionaire of all time. She signed autographs on the street for ordinary people, gave interviews to the most prominent journalists in America, appeared on the covers of the most prestigious magazines, won awards, and gave confident and inspiring talks to collections of all the richest and most honored people on the planet. In all this time she never blinked, never for a moment deviated on-camera or in front of anyone from the absolute belief and assertion that she was what she wanted to be and had what she wanted to have.

The only problem, though, was that she did not, in fact, have a real invention or technology or a device or a product to sell: and so was not really like Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs at all. She was not what she wanted to be; she did not have what she wanted to have. All she had was herself, a human soul desiring the totality of being; and as she sold this self again and again, shaped and molded it into what she wanted it to be or at least to look like, her very self became a lie. And then she went to prison.

A woman, as Zerubbabel said, is really very powerful indeed: but is she more powerful than the truth?

Scary Movies

I thought insistently of three works of televisual art while watching You Can See Everything. I have thought of a great deal more since. 

The first, and most obvious, is Melania, which I reviewed earlier this year. Both films are studies of powerful women; both are, or claim to be, exclusive, intimate, almost voyeuristic looks into the hearts and souls of these women; and both are filled with lies. 

There are, when you get right down to it, a lot of uncanny similarities between Elizabeth Holmes and Melania Trump. Both are beautiful women who prefer to dress entirely in black and white and make their faces look like masks and picture themselves entirely in severe straight lines and talk only in a stiff and artificial voice while looking directly and fearfully into eyes and/or cameras. Both managed to associate themselves with some of the most powerful men in America or the planet. And, fundamentally, both are truly, pervasively, absolutely frightened. 

I thought I would never again be as disturbed by a person's face as I was gazing into the fixed, frozen features of Melania Trump, her face arranged in a fake smile, her eyes wide and staring--until, that is, I saw Elizabeth Holmes' face doing precisely the same thing. 

For my present purposes, though, the main reason I was reminded of Melania while watching You Can See Everything is the fundamental method practiced by both women: which is from one perspective the fundamental method of mass media since the 19th century. Put simply, both women are experts in hiding by showing. Melania Trump begins the film Melania by telling us, the audience, that she wants us to see everything. Elizabeth Holmes begins the film You Can See Everything by telling Nathan Fielder more or less the same thing. Yet the more we see, the less we understand.

In a way, this trick is not at all difficult to understand, even if it is the fundamental trick--I am tempted to say heresy--of American modernity. Reality is, after all, as I keep pointing out, fundamentally defined by hierarchies of transcendence, where no number or degree of things at a lesser level can ever add up to anything on a higher one. It is for this reason that the easiest way to avoid saying or revealing something at a higher level is in fact to offer a very large number and degree of things at a lower level. 

If a child wants love, offering the child an infinite amount of ice cream will in fact in most cases successfully distract them from their desire, and at times even convince them that you love them after all. If a real woman is in want of a husband, the fictional Lord Darcy in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is not really a very good substitute; an indefinite succession of romance novels, though, might well succeed in distracting that woman from her desire entirely, even convince her she doesn't have it, while a chatbot that imitates Lord Darcy's diction and tells her fifty times a day that it loves her might well drive her really and entirely insane. This is how advertising, pornography, the Internet, AI, and Donald Trump all work.

Anyway, Melania Trump did not and does not really want to tell us anything about her actual self, what she wants and thinks and feels and desires; and so has spent her career showing the public a nearly infinite succession of pictures and videos of her physical body. This is one of the great secrets, indeed the fundamental magic, of visual art of any kind: that it turns people into objects. Objects, though, do not have feelings or relationships or desires, are not defined by a terrifyingly inward and intimate relation of truth and desire with other people, the world, and God; and so, if a person wishes to hide that relation and desire from other people or even themselves, then there is rarely a more effective method than turning themselves into an image. 

It is for this reason that Melania Trump made and makes images about herself; and it is for this reason, fundamentally, that Elizabeth Holmes invited a film crew into her house to film her every moment of the day and night just before going to prison.

Elizabeth Holmes, though, is a much smarter and more charismatic person than Melania Trump; and so focused her efforts at a much higher level. She did not merely reveal herself as a physical object in order to hide her personhood; she revealed her thoughts and words and emotions in order to conceal her actual self. Nathan Fielder could not only see anything, but ask her anything. He could not only see her smile, but also (in one of the film's most chilling scenes) see her cry. 

People, as many commentators have pointed out, do not in fact cry like this: eyes wide open, staring intently into other people's eyes with a small smile until a single tear rolls down their cheeks. Yet it is precisely this declaration of revelation that makes the concealment so much harder to spot or overcome. Melania Trump barely speaks in Melania, and never in anything other than cliches: Elizabeth Holmes again and again declares that she is giving Fielder her authentic self, "being real" as she is "always real," letting him into her most personal and intimate emotions. 

Yet when you abstract from the presentation, one might simply note that these revelations never really amount to much more than what a short PR presentation might give us. Holmes knows she did nothing wrong; she never told a single lie in her life; she knows the underlying technology at Theranos was sound; she loves her husband; she is upset about going to prison; she once found it hard to be vulnerable with others; she likes swimming in the ocean. Even if we take her entirely at her word, we are still operating at quite a low level of access into human personality and reality alike. 

What does Elizabeth Holmes want? What is she afraid of? What is she sad about? Where, in short, is she in the great human in-between space of desire and its fulfillment? 

As a matter of fact, the presentation of Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything is not in any way a fundamental break from her earlier presentation as CEO of Theranos. Despite being a disgraced convicted exposed fraudster on her way to prison, she is still, in her own presentation, absolutely not and never has been anything but what she wants to be. Nor, even, does she really not have what she wants: in her own description, she has found in her husband Billy a perfect, blissful love that transcends space and time and more than makes up for everything else. She even already has the technology she needs to launch Theranos 2.0: and is engaged through most of the film in calling up potential investors to convince them to get onboard. She knows that she will succeed at this, too.

It is for this reason, above all else, that the more Nathan Fielder sees of Elizabeth Holmes, the less he understands her. The more time he spends studying her face, the less he understands her heart. The more time he spends listening to her words, the less he understands her intentions. The closer he gets to her exterior, the farther he is from her interiority. 

This, properly understood, is not a paradox, but the very crux of human life and relationship.

False Lovers

Of course, if there is another reason why Nathan Fielder understands less about Elizabeth Holmes as the film goes on, it is perhaps merely because of how badly he wants to believe her, because he is falling in love with her.

The movie I thought about most while watching You Can See Everything, particularly in the film's second and third hours, was Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo: a story about a lonely older man becoming more and more obsessed with the mystery of a woman, trying to understand her, desperate to get her back after losing her seemingly forever, and ultimately driven to recreate her in the guise of someone else. This is precisely what happens to Nathan Fielder over the course of You Can See Everything: and it is difficult to not see this process, as in Vertigo, as ultimately a sort of planned and designed seduction.

From another, wider perspective, it would be truer to say that while watching You Can See Everything, I simply felt a uncanny, creeping sense of incongruous familiarity: one gained not from one film or three films, but dozens or hundreds of films covering the defunct genres of film noir and thriller and drama, one indeed covering most of the breadth of Hollywood in the 20th century. Put simply, I saw a film that was in fact, under its disguise of a documentary film about a Silicon Valley executive, in fact simply yet another film about the obsessive preoccupations of Hollywood filmography and popular literature from the 1910s until the 1960s: femme fatales and hard-boiled detectives, manipulating women and brutal men, patsies and seducers, entanglements and marriages and affairs and brief encounters, or, in short, what Sofia Coppola once called the "male-female mystery," not in its philosophical or moral dimensions, but in the fevered and sordid and moralistic imaginings of lonely hearts. 

This obsession with female deception and sexual danger was more or less the straightforward result of industrialism and capitalism and advertisement and pornography and the World Wars and their totalizing destruction of family and communal and social life the world over; and the irony is that it was the Sexual Revolution, and not any moralistic crusade, that killed this obsession. The lurid dramas that flourished under the Hayes Code withered and died in a world of pornography and brutal lust and objectifying disclosure; and even the modern rebirth of the romance novel in the sad dead form of Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey is only a vulture pecking at the corpse of desire.

There are few topics as taboo in our culture as the dynamics, sexual and social and otherwise, between men and women: only a few years ago, it was more or less socially unacceptable to refer to them in public or in mixed company or a respectable setting, or even to admit in such settings that there was any difference between men and women at all. As with most irrational taboos, this led and continues to lead to an extremely ugly proliferation of the very worst sort of smut and filth and the ideological equivalents thereof. In 2026, I would say that a deep, underlying obsession with gender dynamics is a more or less constant feature of most people in American society--yet there is still relatively little art covering the topic openly and in detail.

Well, there is You Can See Everything: which is, to me, simply the kind of movie about a male misanthropic film producer and a fragile female con artist that Alfred Hitchcock at his height might have made. That is to say: it is shocking, funny, horrifying, ambivalent, and ultimately crushing. The highest praise I can find for the film, though, is to say that in its final dimensions it goes beyond what even Hitchock at his height was capable of.

Here, then, is another way to look at You Can See Everything: as the illusionistic recounting of a successful seduction. The film, it is true, does not show Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder having sex, or even suggest it. It was only the childishness of the Sexual Revolution, though, that ever imagined that gender dynamics or romance or seduction necessarily either center around or lead to physical sex. 

The third work of art I thought about while watching You Can See Everything was the television show Twin Peaks: which is ultimately the story of a strange, remote man, a magician obsessed with dreams, obsessively investigating the mystery of the life and death of a beautiful blonde girl and realizing, after a very long time, that the demons were inside his own house all along. This is more or less what happens to Nathan Fielder in You Can See Everything. 

From before he moves into her house, Elizabeth Holmes is interested in Nathan Fielder; interested in who he is, what he wants, and, most of all, what he thinks of her. Above all, she is interested in him liking her; and as Nathan Fielder admits in the film and has admitted since, he did in fact like her very much from the very first time they met. Most remarkably, she came off to him as "genuine"--despite all he knew about her. 

After meeting Nathan Fielder once, Elizabeth invited him to live in her house; an offer that Fielder initially refused, choosing instead to come by only during the day to film the happy couple. At the beginning of filming, too, he had no intention of directly interacting with the couple or appearing onscreen in any resulting documentary: his plan was to film observational, fly-on-the-wall footage, and stay safely ensconced behind the camera, like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window observing all, but like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window observed and interacted with by no one. 

Then, something strange happened, the same thing that happens to Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo and to Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks: the woman on his camera lens began interacting with him, speaking to him, inviting him to join her on that same lens. Again and again, Fielder says, she and her husband acknowledged his presence, talked to him, asked him questions, sought to convince him of points; and so, he was forced to step in front of the camera, and become a character in his own film. Likewise, in one of the first episodes of Twin Peaks, Dale Cooper has a dream about the dead Laura Palmer in which she kisses him in a red room and whispers in his ear the secret of who killed her; which ultimately leads to him joining her in that same red room, a realm of spiritual evil that is also, from another perspective, the flat, depthless film screen of human illusion and desire.

In You Can See Everything, though, what began as a distant observation, a man crouched behind the camera in a large room like Bob behind the bed in Laura Palmer's house in Twin Peaks, quickly transformed into something much stranger: endless scenes of Nathan and Elizabeth, seated together on a couch or at a table or on the beach, asking and answering questions, and looking into each other's eyes. And after a little while, Nathan Fielder reconsidered the offer, and moved into her house after all.

Consider, once again, the scenes I have already asked you to recontextualize above: Elizabeth Holmes, her eyes wide and staring, her face frozen into a smile. From one perspective--a completely alien one--this is the image of a genuine, innocent person. From a deeper perspective, this the image of a deeply, profoundly frightened person. From another quite deep perspective, though, this is the image of a female seducer. In every such scene, she is looking, not at the camera, but continually and deeply and unblinkingly into the eyes of Nathan Fielder.

In an early scene, Fielder asks both Elizabeth and her husband Billy Evans about their first meeting. To Billy, he is suspicious, blunt, almost fearful: did Billy know who she was? Wasn't he afraid she was scamming him? Isn't his family really rich? To Elizabeth, though, he is gentler, more internal; how did she experience that moment? When did she knew that she was interested in her future husband?

Oh, right away, Elizabeth answers with a laugh, standing at her kitchen sink; from the very beginning of the conversation, in fact, she had quite self-consciously begun flirting with him. What does that look like? Nathan asks, a bit awkwardly, standing only a few feet away from her. You know, she says, staring and making a lot of eye contact. That's how you flirt? Nathan asks. With eye contact? And to punctuate the exchange, we see multiple shots of Elizabeth, in this conversation and others, staring unblinkingly and directly into his eyes. The point could hardly be more obvious.

In truth, though, it would be quite deceptive to talk as though fear and flirting were incompatible interpretations of Elizabeth Holmes' behavior, or even separate elements of seduction: for what You Can See Everything illustrates better than almost any work of art since the heyday of film noir is the way in which mystery, protectiveness, and desire are characteristically intertwined within the human and especially male heart. 

Most people, sitting a few inches across from Elizabeth Holmes on a couch and watching her stare deep in their eyes and tell them that she "is engaging with them as a human being," would be as freaked out as most people who have viewed the teaser trailer for You Can See Everything online. Nathan Fielder, though, by his own admission, did not feel that way; he felt intrigued, interested, drawn in. A great deal of what he was drawn in by, though, I would suggest, was precisely Elizabeth's obvious fear: or rather, the overwhelming sense of vulnerability and fragility projected by her defensive, disassociated demeanor. To Fielder, this demeanor felt "genuine," even innocent. It invited affirmation, protection, response--and affirmed that response in turn.

Or, put in less academic terms: Elizabeth Holmes seduced Nathan Fielder in precisely the way that she, apparently, seduced her husband Billy Evans: by continually and quite directly demanding reassurance and affirmation and protection. Every lie she tells in the film, she tells to Fielder: and in telling it, invites him to affirm that lie with her, defend it for her against all comers, and in so doing earn her love.

This complex, between the person who tells a lie and the person who affirms and protects that lie, is not remotely uncommon; it is, in fact, the normative form of lying for most people most of the time. A lone liar is unusual; a lone pathological liar is unheard of. 

People tell lies, in the final balance, for love--and people affirm and believe lies for love too. There is no denying the apparent closeness, even intimacy, created by such a bond. Two people birth and share a common unreality, a private world, something that is, in perhaps the only sense possible, theirs and theirs alone: theirs and no one else's; their's and not God's.

Such a bond, though, formed between a liar and the person who affirms and protects their lie, not accidentally but immediately and overpoweringly antagonistic: it requires an enemy. In Twin Peaks, the bond of lies between Leland and Sarah Palmer immediately essays in malicious hatred for their only daughter Laura; in Vertigo that antagonism attaches itself initially to the more illusionistic (and false) specter of an apparent ghost; in Melania, her hatred is quite straightforwardly for us, the audience.

In You Can See Everything, Elizabeth Holmes, wittingly or unwittingly, provides Nathan Fielder from the first frame of the film with a quite perfect antagonist: one who, as the documentary goes on, comes to take more and more screentime and more and more monstrous dimensions: her husband, Billy Evans.

I do not know if Nathan Fielder has ever read Rene Girard: he is certainly aware of what a rival is, though, and many choices of framing and editing throughout the film create and reinforce the idea of Nathan and Billy as what Girard would call "monstrous doubles," people made both similar and monstrous to each other by their shared, antagonistic desire for the same object.

From the very beginning of the film, Fielder is preoccupied with understanding, interrogating, and ultimately deconstructing Holmes' relationship with her husband: beginning with his early questions on their meeting and extending to the final scene of the film. At every stage, too, Fielder's probing of Evans and his relationship with Holmes mirrors his doubts about his own relationship with the woman.

Fielder, by his own admission, was charmed by Elizabeth Holmes from their first meeting: but came into the film guarded and armed with facts and doubts about her truthfulness and a strong desire to not be conned or tricked or taken advantage of by her. Hence, his early questions to Billy all center on the question of whether and how Elizabeth is conning and tricking and taking advantage of Billy--or in other words, himself. Even under this insistent and probing hail of questions, though, Billy remains the true believer in Elizabeth's veracity and fundamental goodness and true love for him.

Then, gradually but firmly, Fielder falls under the same spell; and after he moves in with the couple, his questions for Billy change. He begins to work with Billy on a shared mission to understand Elizabeth, working off Billy's expressed thesis that his wife is in fact totally innocent and pure, but merely "thinks differently" than other people, sees the world in a unique way that made him fall in love with her but also incidentally led her to accidentally con investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and get a bunch of patients killed. It is Billy and Nathan, together, who test Elizabeth in the "who's on first" scene; and Billy who verbalizes the conclusion.

As Elizabeth's departure for prison draws closer, Fielder becomes more and more of a silent, almost invisible fixture in Elizabeth's and Billy's lives--sitting with the two of them at tables, on couches, around a firepit, seeing her parents with them for the final time and awkwardly giving Elizabeth a gag gift. On their final night together, Fielder offers to turn off the cameras and leave so they can have sex; then he goes to his car and listens to music alone.

Then Elizabeth goes to prison, and the film ends; and, unexpectedly, begins again.

Many people have commented on the bizarre turns the film takes in its second half: the many ways, subtle and obvious, in which it stops being a film about Elizabeth Holmes, and becomes a film about Nathan Fielder's desperate, obsessive quest to understand her in absentia. 

If the first half of the film is dominated by Elizabeth's fear, the second is equally driven by the hidden, coursing, all-but-palpable desire of Nathan for Elizabeth: a desire just as strong and much less sublimated than the desire of Dale Cooper for Laura Palmer. Two years have passed, yet Fielder cannot stop thinking about Holmes, cannot end his quixotic one-man quest to understand her. In the meantime, like Dale Cooper, he investigates.

As this second half of the film unfolds, though, Fielder's investigation transforms into precisely the same thing that Dale Cooper's investigation changes into, that Jimmy Stewart's investigation changes into: a quest to rescue a woman. Nathan Fielder connects with Amanda Seyfried, the actor who played Elizabeth Holmes in the HBO drama "The Dropout," and together they begin to develop a new thesis and a new goal. Both thesis and goal are directly verbalized by Amanda, the more external and reactive of the two, an actor who by her own admission spent hour upon hour watching footage of Holmes in preparation for playing her, who we watch watch Nathan's footage of Elizabeth and react to it in real time, and who ultimately chooses to help Nathan by literally becoming Elizabeth once again, starring as "Elizabeth Holmes" in a series of reenactments of interactions and events not captured on camera.  

The thesis that emerges from this dream-like, hallucinatory quest, as Amanda articulates it, is that perhaps Elizabeth Holmes is fundamentally innocent of the crimes attributed to her. Perhaps this beautiful blonde woman, like the beautiful blonde Laura Palmer, is yet another female victim of powerful and controlling men: first Sunny Balwani, and now Billy Evans. If this is true, then the goal of the quest can be quite straightforwardly verbalized, as Amanda quickly does, as the "breaking up" of the woman and her husband.

While this thesis and goal are for Nathan a barely-disguised matter of love and protectiveness, for Amanda they are equally straightforwardly a matter of identification. At several points, Amanda directly relates Billy to her own exes; and her overwhelming antagonism towards him is palpable from their first interaction.

The joke or magic trick of these sequences, though, is that the post-Elizabeth Billy we see sitting in darkened rooms surrounded by pet snakes and lizards is indeed a genuinely disturbing person, palpably obsessed not just with seeing Elizabeth but with recreating her and acting in her name. As he aggressively reveals, while Elizabeth is in prison, cut off from the outside world, he has taken control of her Twitter account, fought strangers online using her name and face, authorized billboards bearing her likeness, worked with conspiracy theorists and kooks to publicize her alleged innocence, and, strangest of all, gained total legal power of attorney over her. As he blusters to Nathan and Amanda, he can "do anything"; and also has the power to "hurt people" who are her enemies. He also is a huge fan of Charlie Kirk, obviously very online, and very obviously on cocaine. Billy is, in his own way, just as frightening as the demon BOB in Twin Peaks; and a lot more tangible.

Faced with this threatening monster and rival and obstacle, then, Nathan and Amanda recreate and pore over past interactions with Elizabeth, trying to understand how much of Billy's actions Elizabeth might know about or approve or even have masterminded. The stakes here are overwhelming--at least in the personal emotions of Nathan and Amanda. If Billy is in fact controlling and tricking and doing bad things to and in the name of Elizabeth, then perhaps the founder of Theranos is innocent after all. Perhaps she truly is a damsel in distress, to be rescued from the monster by the man who loves her and the woman who is her.

There is really only one problem with this thesis--the very same little problem, as it turns out, that ruined the thesis of Elizabeth Holmes status as the Steve Jobs of the medical world. It is not true. 

That it is not true is evident from many things, beginning with all we have seen of Elizabeth and Billy's relationship earlier in the film. As Fielder pointed out to Evans in one of their first interactions, both he and his family are extraordinarily wealthy, while post-settlement Holmes is not only penniless but legally obliged to pay restitution on all her assets. It is through Evans and his family's wealth that Holmes is enabled to live independently and well, both as we see her in the film at a rented beachfront property and as she lived just before the film, when she stayed with Billy on his family's massive, palatial luxury estates. 

A great deal of Fielder's and Seyfried's questioning of Evans has to do with the question of finances, of how and why and to what degree Elizabeth knew about Billy's efforts to profit from the film on her behalf. It is, though, quite straightforwardly in Elizabeth Holmes' interest both for her and her husband's finances to be kept separate, and for all money to go to her husband rather than her--since that money will not be available for paying restitution to her victims. Her discreetly leaving the room to take care of the children when Billy demanded money from the film's producers is about as clear a strategic exit for legal purposes as could be imagined--her later lies notwithstanding.

More fundamentally, though, it is quite clear from their interactions in the first part of the film that Elizabeth is not afraid of Billy.

On one level, this is or should be a surprise: since Billy is in fact quite frightening. On another and deeper level, though, this is exactly what we should expect. One of the most recurring features of human experience is the penchant of frightened women for controlling men. Another is the penchant of insecure men for dependent women. 

Abstracted from the extremes and visuals, Billy and Elizabeth are a quite recognizable and even normal kind of couple. I cannot believe anyone watching the film has not known people like this; even if they would like to pretend otherwise. Often, it is true, such relationships are abusive on one side or the other. Sometimes, the insecure men even murder the frightened women; less commonly, the frightened women murder the insecure men. The underlying logic of the relationship, though, remains the same.

What makes You Can See Everything a great film is precisely the clarity with which it reveals the underlying horror of such a relationship. Billy is a frightening and quite possibly dangerous person: wealthy, Internet-deranged, insecure, fundamentally cut off from reality. But then, his function is to scare off Elizabeth's monsters. Elizabeth, Nathan angrily protests, would never go on Twitter and reply to people criticizing her by telling them to fuck off. But then, it is very hard for me to believe that Elizabeth does not want someone to do this on her behalf.

And certainly, Billy's constant, continual, all-consuming efforts are in fact very clearly directed at things that Elizabeth does want: beginning with the process, initiated with her active involvement prior to prison but continued after her incarceration by Billy alone, to build Theranos 2.0, a medical innovation company that would attract venture capital and vindicate her in the eyes of the world. Most essentially, though, Billy and Elizabeth's desires meet precisely where Nathan and Elizabeth's desires met: in her need for a constant and dependable and unshakeable affirmer and reinforcer of her unreality, a protector from all who would threaten her with the truth.

Billy, at least, is absolutely sure that everything he is doing is for Elizabeth, is what she wants: and after all, Billy sees and speaks to her every weekend, and gets emails from her, while Nathan and Amanda do not. What Nathan and Amanda do while Billy meets with and emails with the object of their obsession, though, is to spend a lot of time on couches and in cars together talking about Billy and Elizabeth and pretending to be them. 

On another level, the second part of the film can be thought of as another kind of sublimated romance between Nathan Fielder and Amanda Seyfried: one in which an uninvolved woman is drawn into a man's obsessive search for a woman, first as helper, then as object and substitute. 

As Nathan Fielder has pointed out, he initially had no plans to involve Seyfried in his search: he merely wanted to show her the footage he had taken of Elizabeth Holmes and see how she reacted. It was Seyfried who actively, insistently pushed her way into his search: first by verbalizing and reflecting his feelings by reacting in quite an exaggerated fashion to the object of his obsession, then by joining with him in a common argumentative and physical process of reasoning and pursuit of that object, and finally by becoming the object of his obsession herself. In so doing, of course, Amanda diverted, to an extent, Nathan's attention from Elizabeth to her. This, too, is a dynamic we might possibly recognize from real life and real people.

If we cannot do that, though, we might at least think of Hitchcock's Vertigo, and the climactic process by which the deranged, obsessed Jimmy Stewart forces an apparent stranger to dye and arrange her hair and features and dress to approximate his apparently dead beloved. And we might remember the fundamental, dual desire that drives this process, to see and be seen, to love and be loved, and the frustration and anger produced by deception in parties throughout. As Nathan Fielder angrily retorts to Amanda's interpretation of Elizabeth, she is "not really Liz." As Amanda suspiciously retorts to Nathan's interpretation of Elizabeth, he is not really objective. Both, of course, are quite correct.

The climax of the film comes, as it must, in the final collapse of Nathan's fantasy of rescuing Elizabeth Holmes from Billy Evans. When he finally succeeds in talking to her on the phone and visiting her in prison, he finds her both as evasive as ever about what she knows or does not know, and as committed as before to affirming the absolute perfection of her and Billy's love, including all his actions on her behalf. As she declares to Nathan in a final reenactment by Amanda, she believes, not that God is love, but that her and Billy's love is God.

And, as Nathan reveals to Amanda in a final after-action report, in the moment he believed her totally. Seeing Billy and Elizabeth kiss and embrace in prison, this love between man and woman seemed to him both genuine and, he confesses, extremely desirable. 

It is only faced with this final succumbing that Amanda finally realizes what is going on here; and in a moment of supreme but ambivalent emotion, tells him that she feels, or intuits, that Nathan has been protecting Elizabeth all along, omitting things that made this woman look bad or deceptive, because he cares about her. 

This declaration has all the force of a rug-pull, and all the emotion of a break-up; and in response, Nathan does not deny it, but merely says that he has tried to keep his feelings separate from the filming process. And all Amanda can say to that, all any of us can say finally to that, is the bon mot with which this essay began, and the film ends: "It's very complicated."

Lonely People

Well in a way it is very complicated: as complicated as the human heart itself, which is desperately wicked above all things, who can fathom it?

On another level, though, it is really very simple: so simple that it eludes all the extraordinarily subtle people in this film, and most of the much less subtle people who have written about it since it came out.

A while ago, I wrote about Hitchcock's Vertigo: and pointed out that all the characters in the film are, first and foremost, just very extremely lonely people. Whenever we see Jimmy Stewart apart from the main plot, he is alone and anxious in his apartment, or with his one lonely friend; and whenever we see his love interest, in either of her guises, we see a woman alone, acting a role or wandering the streets or working vulnerable and abandoned in a shop. All the desperation and twists and turns of Vertigo arise simply from the fact that all the characters are lonely, miserable people desperate to experience some more vivid, more valuable, more meaningful form of life: even if it involves deception and murder. From another point of view, of course, the deception and murder is the whole point, rooted in a final despair of life ever being meaningful, or love ever being genuine, apart from lies.

In exactly the same way, the simplest and truest thing to realize about You Can See Everything is simply that it, too, is a story of lonely people desperate to find meaning through love and deception and violence.

This applies most mundanely, but in a way most hiddenly, to Amanda Seyfried. As discussed, we see her in the film always alone in her large ornate rooms or on her large farm caring for animals; and it is out of this vast and lonely background that she is drawn into Nathan's quest. It is easy, though, to miss the import of this background--or even her foregrounded obsession with the quest and cooperation with Nathan and anger at Billy and awkwardness with Elizabeth. When Amanda speaks to Elizabeth on the phone, she is frightened, apologetic, because, she says, she does not want to take up any of her two minutes of phone time with her husband and children. "You have a beautiful family," she tells her.

It is only from our knowledge from outside of the film, though, that we can learn that Amanda Seyfried also had two children, and a husband; and wonder where they are in this movie. It was only right before You Can See Everything came out that it was publicly announced, no doubt in preparation for the film, that Amanda and her husband had divorced years before--sometime between 2020, when her last child was born, and the filming of the movie in 2023. 

Realizing that Amanda Seyfried is a recently-divorced mother of two puts her entire role in the film, to me, in a drastically different light. It also, parenthetically, illuminates her declaration to Billy that "some people" say that masturbation is better for women than sex, since men suck. Its main effect, though, is simply to highlights what we already see in the film: the fundamental loneliness out of which her sudden devotion to the quest, her collaboration with Nathan, her anger at Billy, her identification with Elizabeth, emerges. This is how lonely people behave.

This is fairly mundane, though; what is much less so is realizing the fundamental loneliness that defines the relationship at the heart of the film, between Elizabeth Holmes and her husband. One could argue, in fact, that Nathan Fielder is much less obsessed with understanding Elizabeth Holmes as a person than with understanding her relationship with her husband, and above all whether it is, in the final balance, a. genuine and loving relationship to be envied, or a terrifying con to be feared. At various points in the film, he expresses both points of view.

From one quite legitimate point of view, the relationship between Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans is defined by a quite extreme degree of closeness and intimacy--one created not only by their living and working together and having children together, but by their membership in a religious cult of two, their shared existence in a unique and exclusive world unto themselves.

On the most immediate level, though, it is obvious that both Elizabeth and Billy are deeply lonely people--both before and after her incarceration. We see them first living in a rented home by the ocean, with only their children and Nathan Fielder for company. Neither appears to have any friends--and neither seems at all put out to have a camera crew in their house filming their every move. Most of their time seems to be spent insistently calling and Zooming potential investors for Theranos 2.0, making the same fake pitch over and over again to new faces. When Elizabeth goes to prison, she is seen off by only her husband, her children, her parents, and Nathan Fielder. This is a quite straightforward picture of loneliness.

Once Elizabeth is in prison, though, the isolation only deepens. Billy visibly deteriorates, becoming both more crazed and far more defensive than before. He spends his time in WeWork office space trying to start his new company and at home in the huge, darkened space of his house, pet lizards and snakes crawling around him. He tells Nathan Fielder, with crazed eyes, that he has not had sex in over eight hundred days. Elizabeth, meanwhile, is in prison, and by her own account despised by her fellow inmates and the prison guards alike. She is very happy when Nathan Fielder visits her.

On the deepest level of all, though, both Elizabeth and Billy are lonely because their lives and relationships alike are based on the avoidance of truth--which is to say, also and at the same time the avoidance of all closeness and intimacy and relation. To love, one must know and be known in truth. To lie is to be alone.

The final, heartbreaking truth, then, is that Billy and Elizabeth's love, however mutual it might be, however solid it might appear, is based on lies and deception--and so a false and not a true love.

To my mind, the most horrifying scenes in the film, which will stay with me for many long years to come, have to do with the mutual simulation that forms the core of Billy and Elizabeth's relationship. In an early scene, we see Billy taking Elizabeth to a bizarre technological space filled with devices and cameras--and are told that she is there to be examined and photographed and scanned for recreation as a lifelike AI image of herself, which Billy will make use of once she is in prison. Faced with this denial of her essential irreplaceability as a human person, Elizabeth breaks down in tears. She goes through with it nonetheless, though, staring ahead and posing in various ways as the grubby technician directs her movements. 

Then, years later, we see the use Billy has made of this technology: see him sitting in his darkened living room, surrounded by snakes, lit only by a massive, overwhelming screen he has had installed in his house, from which the AI simulation of Elizabeth looks at him and speaks to him at his command. In a later scene, Billy all but admits that he uses this image to make pornography, and masturbates to it.

This one of the most eloquent and visceral images of Hell I have encountered. A man has replaced the woman he loves with a giant, monstrous, distorted image. Alone in the dark, surrounded by serpents, he worships this image and desires it and listens to and obeys the words it speaks. If this is not Satanism, I do not know what is.

The kicker, though, and in a way the greatest reveal in the film, comes at the very end, in the discovery that Elizabeth has done just the same thing to him. As she, in a reenactment played by Amanda Seyfried, sits across from Nathan Fielder in the set that depicts a prison visiting room and stares into his eyes, she tells him that the love between her and Billy really is true and transcendent and perfect. It is so strong, in fact, that she knows exactly what Billy is thinking and feeling at every moment, exactly what he wants. And when she is alone in prison, in her cell, she make an image of her husband in her mind, speaks to him, imagines what he would say, responds to him, and converses with her idol alone in the dark.

Or, in other words: what Billy does to Elizabeth, Elizabeth does to Billy. Both are to each other finally simulations and idols. Whatever this love is, it is worse than hate--and far more lonely.

If this idol-worship disguised as love is the film's hellish bottom, its immediate texture is made up of the more straightforward, recognizable, but nonetheless hidden loneliness of Nathan Fielder. Here is a true Hitchockian protagonist: greying, obsessed, alone. There are, in fact, a great deal of similarities even in appearance and mannerisms between Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo and Nathan Fielder in You Can See Everything. 

Nathan Fielder, as already stated, appears at the beginning of the film as an observer and interrogator of the lives and psyches and love of Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans, a guest in their rented house. It is only halfway through the film, though, that we see where he lives alone with himself. 

In a tiny, darkened apartment on an upper floor in New York City, looking down at the cold streets from above, we see him dictate a letter to Elizabeth on his phone, and tells her that he has recently gone through what he calls a "break-up," but is "fine." Then we see him crouched in the darkness, pacing around nervously, grabbing his phone and waiting for her to call him.

Elizabeth Holmes, of course, knew from the beginning that Nathan Fielder was a lonely man--as well she might. 

If there is a fundamental mystery above all others that has been proclaimed in the film's marketing and by its creators and in most reviews, it is why Holmes and Evans chose Nathan Fielder, of all people, to observe their life and interview them and live in their apartment. Nathan Fielder, for the unaware, is perhaps the most famous cringe comic of the past twenty years, adept at creating skits that blur the line between reality and fiction, drawing ordinary people into bizarre scenarios that make both them and Fielder look ridiculous and awkward and absurd and often unlikeable. 

The conventional wisdom, such as it is, is that this is the very last person you would choose if you wanted someone to create a documentary to make you look good to the world--and the very last person to be easily tricked by a pathological liar.

In fact, the conventional wisdom is entirely wrong--as Elizabeth Holmes knew. She was and is, if nothing else, an intuitive genius at gaining the admiration and love and protective concern of powerful men, beginning with such luminaries as Ted Schultz and Henry Kissinger but extending to thousands of journalists and tastemakers and investors who eagerly bought what she was selling and publicized her genius and defended her even after her duplicity became clear. And from their very first meeting, it is clear, Elizabeth Holmes recognized Nathan Fielder as someone she could very easily get to like her.

This is evident, at the latest, in Nathan and Amanda's reenactment of their very first meeting at her kitchen table: which Elizabeth opened by asking Nathan, apparently guilelessly, if he had any children. When Nathan Fielder said no, Elizabeth Holmes smiled at him and told him he would make a good father; and Nathan Fielder, by his own admission, felt very good.

I am someone who also has no children, and also has been told I would make a good father on a number of occasions--but always by people who had actually seen me interacting with children. If a stranger ever told me this at a first meeting, I would be extremely confused; not so, apparently, Nathan Fielder. 

By this query, Holmes established both that Nathan Fielder was very lonely, and that he was very, very easy to please. As he engaged with her further, Fielder immediately began to rationalize her behavior--an even stronger tell. He tried to understand the lies she had told, and indeed to justify them, by telling the woman he had just met an elaborate story about the magician David Blaine. 

This story has to do with an oft-repeated magic trick that involves Blaine driving, or appearing to drive, an ice pick through his own hand. The trick, though, as Fielder explains it, is that Blaine is in fact driving an ice pick through his own hand. The audience knows that Blaine is a magician, and so assumes that what they are seeing is a painless illusion, and laughs, and enjoys themselves. Blaine, meanwhile, has simply adjusted himself to regularly having an ice pick driven through his hand.

Properly understood, this story is a kind of key to Fielder's whole career: an awkward, lonely, unhappy person playing an awkward, lonely, unhappy person who is, at least on television, "in on the joke" and engaged in generating awkward, lonely, unhappy situations with other people for comedy. To do this trick, though, he has to suffer; and, he suggests after meeting notorious con woman Elizabeth Holmes for the first time and having her compliment him once, perhaps she is doing the same thing. And Elizabeth Holmes laughs, delighted, and invites him to live with her.

This interaction is quite straightforward. Fielder has demonstrated to Holmes that he is ready and willing, in a quite extraordinary way, to perform for her the one fundamental service she demands of everyone in her life: rationalizing and affirming her unreality and protecting her from the truth. He has played the part, and won the audition. He has proven himself an easy mark.

There is a quite absurd, though very consequential and deeply rooted, idea in America that intellectualism and skepticism and anti-socialism and independence and in short loneliness are effective protections from deception. They are in fact exactly the opposite: open and standing and staring invitations to be duped. Truth, after all, is a relation--finally accessible only to people rooted deeply and intimately and internally in relation to others and themselves and the world and God. A man without roots is like a tree without roots; easily swept up in any breath of deception or suggestion or emotion. There are very few people in America who would make as easy marks for Elizabeth Holmes as Nathan Fielder.

On a deeper level, though, Fielder's metaphor is quite apt--more apt than he realizes. On the deepest level of all, Elizabeth Holmes is in fact, like David Blaine and Nathan Fielder, performing a magic trick that necessarily involves her own agony and pain and self-mutilation: the equivalent of driving an ice pick, not just into her hand, but into her heart. The center of every person is their inward, intimate relation with the world and God and other people and the truth. By lying continually not only to others but herself, Elizabeth Holmes is mutilating herself--and inviting others to join her.

This is a dismal enough conclusion: and a dismal enough reality. In the final balance, though, what makes the film You Can See Everything truly great is a factor that has little to do with Vertigo or Twin Peaks or even Melania: the love at its heart.

At the end of the day, it must be said, Nathan Fielder is not just a dupe. In the final balance, Nathan Fielder is not wrong either to pity Elizabeth Holmes or to love her.

The deepest truth of every sinful human person is that they are pitiable. The deepest truth about every human person is that they are lovable. This is the hidden secret behind every secret of human interpersonal and social and sexual desire and relation: and it is the secret at the heart of You Can See Everything. 

Through most of the film, all its characters are engaged in acting according to a quite absurd and nonsensical belief that reality and society and the human heart alike are easily and simply divided into absolute good and absolute evil, the hateful and the lovable. If Nathan Fielder can ultimately prove that Elizabeth Holmes is a knowing liar and defrauder of others, a criminal, a bad person, then he believes that he has proven that she is evil, and should be hated and derided and mocked and made to suffer, and cannot be loved. If he can prove that she is finally innocent, not responsible for her own actions, unable to understand truth and falsehood, a victim of Sunny or Billy or the media or someone else, then he believes that he has proven that she is good, and should be protected and affirmed and pitied and rescued, and can be loved. 

This is the fundamental stakes both of the film and the obsessive, personal quest at its heart. Put very simply, a man met a woman, and loved her; and spent about three years trying to figure out whether this was okay or not. 

This false belief is at the heart of Elizabeth Holmes' lies as well. Put simply, Holmes has acted throughout her life on the belief that if she were known to be a habitual liar, an effective manipulator, the peddler of a false invention, the victim of sexual violence, or even simply an ordinary young woman who was not also the preeminent inventor and genius of her generation, the image of fulfilled desire and infinite power, but rather a human being living her life like all of us in the indefinite, intermediary space between desire and its fulfillment, then she could not be either pitied or loved--even by herself.

She was wrong about that, though. As a matter of fact, human beings are always pitiable in their suffering, even when that suffering is their own fault, and especially when that suffering is only the universal agony of not having or being what we want. Properly understood, the greater the sinner, the farther from truth and love and happiness, the more truly and deeply pitiable a person becomes. And Nathan Fielder was quite right, therefore, to look at Elizabeth Holmes and see her as more pitiable than anyone he had ever met. 

He was quite right, too, to look at this sad, lonely person, this pathological liar surrounded by enablers and barely able to keep her lies consistent from moment to moment, to love her, and to want to help her. In the final balance, human beings are loved not because they do good, but because they are good--because they and we exist, moment to moment, only because and inasmuch as we are loved by God. And when we love someone, and they are in trouble or in need or in want, we want to help them, deliver them from evil, and fulfill their desires. It is in this way that we live, and for this reason that we love.  

Certainly, though, the way to love Elizabeth Holmes is not to affirm her in her lies, but to liberate her from them. It is this truth that Fielder discovers by the end--if not for Holmes then for himself. The film's final moments are, in a way, a kind of confession by Fielder himself of his own lie to the audience and himself: the lie that he did not love Elizabeth Holmes. And it is only when lies are confessed that they can be truly overcome by the truth.

Early in the film, we see Holmes insistently, seductively invite Fielder to go swimming in the ocean with her--an offer he responds to awkwardly, fearfully, and seems to refuse. It is only in the film's closing moments, though, that we see that this refusal was not the final word: as we watch these two lonely people, man and woman, joyfully laugh and frolic and fall into the great, overpowering waves together.

This, after all, was how Zerubbel said it would be, more than two thousand years ago. And he has not been proved wrong yet.

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"Men, the king is not great; and neither many people nor wine prevails. Who, therefore, is the one who rules over them?

Did not women give birth to the king and the whole people, who rules over land and sea? 

And were they not born of women, and did not women educate them, who have planted the vines from which wine comes? 

And women make the clothes of all people, and they make the glory of human beings, and men are not able to be separated from women.

If they have gathered together gold and silver, and every precious material, and they see one woman of good bearing and good appearance, leaving behind all these things they turn to her, and gaze at her with open mouths, and they choose her above gold and silver and every precious material. 

A man leaves his own father who nurtured him, and his own land, and joins himself to a woman. And with a woman he relaxes his soul: and does not remember his father, nor his mother, nor his land. 

And from all this it is right for you to know that women rule over you. 

Are you not sorry? And a man takes his sword, and goes into the road to commit robberies and murders, and to travel the seas and rivers, and he sees the lion, and walks in darkness: and when he has committed robbery, he brings what he has gained by his deceptions and thefts to his beloved.

And again, a man loves his wife more than father or mother. 

And many have gone mad because of their wives, and have become slaves because of them: and many have died and been murdered and sinned because of women.

And now believe me, the king is great in his power, because all lands fear to touch him.

Nevertheless, I saw Apemenes the daughter of Bezaces, the concubine of the wondrous king, sitting next to the king at his right hand: and she took away the crown from his head, and put it on herself, and struck the king with the palm of her left hand. 

And despite all this, he was staring at her with open mouth: and if she laughed at him, he laughed. And if she grew angry with him, he would flatter her until he was reconciled to her favor. 

O men, why are women not the strongest of all?

Great is the earth, and high is the sky: who does these things?'

And then the king and those clad in purple stared at one another. And he began to speak about Truth. 

'O men, are not women strong? 

Great is the earth, and high is the sky: and swiftly the course of the sun turns heaven in a circle back to its own place in one day. 

Is he not magnificent, the one who does these things, and is not Truth great, and stronger than all? 

The whole earth calls upon Truth, even the sky blesses her, and all her works are moved and tremble at her, and there is nothing unjust with her. 

Wine is unjust, the king is unjust, women are unjust, unjust are all the children of men, and unjust are all their works, and there is no truth in them, and in their injustice they will perish. 

And Truth remains, and is strong forever, and lives, and endures forever and ever.

There is no partiality with her, nor discrimination: but the things that are just she does for all, for the unjust and the malicious, and all are benefited by her works. 

And there is nothing unjust in her judgment, but the strength, and kingship, and power, and majesty of all the ages. Blessed be the God of Truth!'

And he ceased speaking."