What happens when a person whose entire public identity has become synonymous with deception agrees to let a documentary filmmaker into her life?
Nathan Fielder aimed to find out.
The filmmaker and comedian behind Nathan for You and The Rehearsal has produced a documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes titled You Can See Everything. Co-directed with filmmaker Lance Oppenheim and distributed by A24, the film was made in secret over the course of three years and recently premiered at the Telluride Film Festival.
The premise alone is remarkable.
Thirty-four days before Holmes was scheduled to report to federal prison, she invited a skeptical film crew into her life. Holmes had been convicted of defrauding investors following the collapse of Theranos, the blood-testing company that once made her one of the most celebrated entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
It’s not the first time the person in front of the camera has aimed to “set the record straight” about the way the world sees her.
When Everyone Knows the Story
Elizabeth Holmes has already been investigated, dramatized, parodied and analyzed.
Millions of people watched Amanda Seyfried portray her in The Dropout. Documentaries, podcasts, books and countless articles examined Theranos and Holmes’ carefully constructed public persona.
So what could another documentary possibly reveal?
Nothing perhaps except a backstage look at how the mask was made.
Fielder and Oppenheim apparently remained involved with the story for years. Fielder reportedly spent extensive time around Holmes and her family, while the filmmakers later visited her in prison.
The result appears to exist somewhere between psychological study, performance, and so-called cinema verite or observational documentary.
That territory is familiar to Fielder. His work frequently places people inside constructed situations and then waits to see what happens when those constructions collide with quirky human behavior.
Despite featuring a wealth of memorable characters over the years, Elizabeth Holmes may be his most fascinating and infamous subject yet.
The Camera Doesn’t Automatically Reveal the Truth
Documentary filmmaking is sometimes treated as though pointing a camera at reality will reveal the truth.
But is it really that simple? People change when a camera enters the room. They perform. They shield themselves. They construct stories about who they are and why they make the choices they make. In a strict sense, their reality is theirs and theirs alone.
Great documentary filmmakers understand that — sometimes the most revealing moment is not when someone’s performance disappears. It is recognizing the performance itself. It is the cracks in the presentation of self that reveal deeper truths and become most interesting.
The early footage from You Can See Everything suggests Fielder understands this tension intimately. Holmes insists that she is being genuine. Fielder keeps questioning what “real” actually means.
For me, her face in that sample footage is horrifying. It’s like someone painted a happy clown face on a child. The overly bright and enlarged eyes, the rigid, inflexible smile, the raised eyebrows, possibly signaling alarm. Intuition tells me this was a woman forced to play happy face roles since childhood, maybe because her own realities were too difficult to face. Someone who likely cannot distinguish between her subjective reality and consensus reality.
The exchange gets to the heart of documentary filmmaking. When a filmmaker asks, Is this person telling me the truth? It’s often not the content of their answer that reveals the truth but the way the subject answers the question.
Here are a few of the important questions the filmmaker must ponder:
- What does this person believe to be true?
- What story have they constructed about themselves?
- How is their presentation of self congruent with and different from others’ perceptions?
- What IS reality from their point of view?
- And what will happen when that story gets challenged?
At Warrior Films, I have spent decades telling stories about people confronting parts of themselves that can be difficult to face. My work has repeatedly explored transformation, responsibility, trauma and the complicated process of understanding one’s own life.
My five-film Veterans Journey Home series, for example, follows Veterans confronting experiences that refuse the glorified Hollywood (and Pentagon) portrayal of battlefield heroism. Their journeys typically involve grief, fear, rage, shame, trauma, only leading to the possibility of growth once the demons are put to rest.
These films are obviously very different from Fielder’s project. But they share an important belief about documentary filmmaking: The most interesting human stories rarely fit neatly into categories of hero and villain. Documentary can create a space where contradictions remain visible.
Someone can be dangerous and responsible.
Someone can be sincere and unreliable.
Someone can desperately believe the story they are telling while the audience experiences something entirely different.
The filmmaker’s responsibility is not necessarily to resolve every contradiction. Sometimes it’s sufficient to stay with the story long enough for the audience to see something they could not see before.
Joey Skaggs: Bullshit and Balls is a film I started but never finished in the mid 1990s. Joey was a self described media hoax artist. He created what today we would call fake news. He delighted in fooling mainstream media into believing his fabrications were real. They took his outlandish theatrical events on face value, each more hilarious than the last. But to me he was more entertainer/raconteur than artist, and a deeply wounded one at that. When he sensed that I was less than fully sold on his own justifications for his creations he refused to cooperate further. If given the chance to finish it, I believe the film would have revealed how Joey’s various poses and personas became a survival mechanism originating in his childhood.
Documentary Should Make Us Uncomfortable
There is another reason Fielder’s project deserves attention. It sounds uncomfortable. That is increasingly rare. Modern media encourages immediate black and white judgment. A person becomes a hero, villain, victim, fraud or exploitable meme, and the story quickly settles into a familiar shape.
Documentary has the ability to resist that impulse. The films, and their makers, can be patient. We can sit with someone for hours, months or years. We can allow silence. We can discover, and eventually, reveal contradictions without immediately explaining them. And we can force audiences to spend time with people they might otherwise quickly judge and dismiss.
Many films of Errol Morris are a fine case in point. Take “The Fog of War” – an extended interview with Robert McNamara. The film is as interesting for what this potential Vietnam war criminal doesn’t reveal as for what he does.
The same is true for Marcel Ophuls films like “The Sorrow and the Pity.” That film lays bare the rationalizations that ordinary French citizens made to justify widespread collaboration with Nazis during WWII.
Films like these do not excuse harmful behavior. They seek to understand it. Learning what drives people into obfuscating or abhorrent behavior is not absolving them. At their best, the films do something truly unsettling and subversive – they show us how we too can become mild-mannered monsters like these, self-justifying abhorrent behavior.
You Can See Everything is described as an intimate portrait before it became a three-year journey into something far stranger. Early reactions from Telluride suggest that the finished film deliberately blurs documentary, reenactment and performance by subterfuge.
That sounds like classic Nathan Fielder.
But it also points to something larger happening in nonfiction filmmaking – a revolution, one that might have begun in 2012 with Joshua Oppenheimer’s masterpiece “The Act of Killing.” Rather than conducting standard interviews, Oppenheimer challenged former leaders of the 1965–1966 Indonesian death squads to re-enact their own mass murders in the style of their favorite American musicals and gangster films. See this film if you haven’t. It’s a landmark of 21st century cinema.
Audiences have become extraordinarily media literate. They understand editing. They recognize manipulation. Documentary subjects understand personal branding. Everyone knows when the camera is on.
At the same time, audiences are still highly prone to manipulation. Look no further than all the AI slop on YouTube generating legions of fans. Or the millions who adore Michael Jordan’s “The Last Dance” – the “documentary” series made by his own company with no aim other than self-promotion.
It’s Curtains is a feature comedy script I wrote about similar themes. Though the idea for the film started as a commentary on Reality TV, it ended up focusing on audiences themselves who all too often become deeply invested in the pabulum they ingest and end up joining herds of rabid fans.
The next generation of documentaries will no longer be able to pretend those realities do not exist. The camera itself will increasingly become part of the story. Fielder is advancing one more step down this path.
Regardless of what You Can See Everything ultimately concludes about Elizabeth Holmes, I remain interested in filmmakers willing to ask difficult questions without knowing exactly how those questions will be answered. I rely on them, and on myself, to lead us through the maze of constructed artifice – becoming thicker with each passing day – back to a recognizable consensual reality.
You Can See Everything opens in theaters October 16.
