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***The audio version of “You Can See Nothing” is below at the end of this review.
Saturday night was date night with Mrs. Redneck, but instead of going to the shooting range which is our favorite way of keeping our marriage alive, she insisted that we see a much lauded “documentary” that she’s been anticipating with great interest for several months. Everyone (at least the notoriously hip NPR crowd) seems to be talking about You Can See Everything.
Because I’m an obedient and dutiful husband when it comes to the high-maintenance, iron-willed Mrs. Redneck, particularly when she is insistent/persistent/nagging, I obliged with an awkwardly inflected “sure, I’d love to go” response that masked a certain degree of secret trepidation. I suspect that most of you can well-imagine that The Redneck Intellectual is not exactly an NPR kind of guy. No self-respecting redneck could be. Truth be told, I only went to hold her hand in the darkened thee-ay-tur, just like, ya know, back in the day. It’s all about the simple pleasures.
Over the course of the last few years, the Mrs. has followed the interesting and sometimes bizarre case of Theranos and its Founder/CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. Marketed as a “meta-documentary” (whatever that is), You Can See Everything, was billed as telling the true, behind-the-scenes story of Ms. Holmes and her energy drink boyfriend, Billy Evans.
For those of you who don’t know the Holmes-Theranos story, here it is in a nutshell.
Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 when she was 19, after dropping out of Stanford. Theranos was a medical diagnostics company, and Holmes claimed that she and her company had invented and developed a state-of-the-art medical device that could perform hundreds of accurate blood tests from a drop or two of blood drawn by finger prick. Holmes claimed that the data from her low-cost test could be beamed up to the cloud, evaluated and processed, and then sent back to earth, providing nearly instantaneous results. Holmes claimed that Theranos’s device represented nothing less than a scientific revolution that rendered traditional blood-testing methods obsolete.
Holmes and her team raised more than $700 million from investors, and Theranos eventually reached a valuation of $9 billion. The 20-something Holmes then launched a marketing campaign, starring herself of course, that portrayed her as a cross between Madame Curie and Steve Jobs, Jonas Salk and Mother Teresa. And then of course there was this iconic photo that just about sums up everything you want to know about Elizabeth Holmes’s ambitions.
Amazingly, she amassed a board of directors that included famous personages, such as:
Henry Kissinger — former U.S. Secretary of State
George Shultz — former U.S. Secretary of State (he helped recruit others)
William Perry — former U.S. Secretary of Defense
James Mattis — retired Marine Corps general (later Secretary of Defense)
Sam Nunn — former U.S. Senator
William Frist — former U.S. Senator and heart/lung transplant surgeon
And then the bubble burst. The device did not perform as advertised—not even close. Theranos employees started talking to reporters, and a Wall Street Journal exposé in 2015 sent the company into a downward death spiral. Days later, the company came under the regulatory eye of the FDA, followed by criminal indictments, and investors were sent running for the hills. The company collapsed in 2018, and Holmes was convicted by a jury in 2022 on four counts of fraud and conspiracy for having deceived investors. She was sentenced to 11 years in jail and started serving time in 2023.
That takes us now to my mini review of You Can See Everything. I’m not going to review the whole film, just the first half. Frankly, the second half is just too stupid and dishonest to recount, so I won’t waste your time or mine.
I begin with my conclusion: You Can See Everything is the most infantile, cynical, abusive, lobotomizing, cringey, idiotic, despicable, vile, and disgusting film that I’ve ever seen. And that was the diplomatic version! If you’d like me to be less diplomatic, please do let me know and I’ll try to speak more directly. I’m a worse person for having seen this waste of $24 and three hours of my life which I’ll never get back, but the good news is that I’ve borne the cross so that you don’t have to.
Now back to our film. You can see the trailer here:
You Can See Everything is a pseudo or faux “documentary” co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. Fielder is more than a co-director, however. He’s also the self-anointed star of the film. He’s in virtually every scene, and he play-acts the role of the brooding, cynical, postmodern reporter whose only motive is to get to the truth and expose Elizabeth’s guilt through playing handwringing, parsing, word games.
Fielder’s theatre of the absurd is an exercise in Derridean deconstructionism and Foucaultian post-structuralism. It’s a pretend documentary that seeks to deconstruct the meaning of truth, critique binary oppositions between fiction and non-fiction, and, most of all, it hopes to drown you in its cynical slime. The unintended consequence of this film is to illuminate our intellectual and moral zeitgeist in the worst light possible.
As a “documentary,” you learn nothing about how or why Holmes started Theranos, you learn virtually nothing about Theranos’s development of their wonder device, and you learn nothing about the trial in which Holmes was found guilty of defrauding customers and investors. Instead, you get to hang out for four weeks with a neutered ménage à trois of self-absorbed, millennial strivers at a California beach house. Can you imagine anything more tedious or interminably boring!?!?! In the end, the film is a cross between François Truffaut’s 1962 Jules et Jim and Robert Klane’s 1993 Weekend at Bernies II.
The self-promoted premise of this not-true-to-life “documentary” is radical transparency but in a dark, shadowy, brooding, film-noir sort of way. But there is nothing transparent about this fictional account of reality other than the utterly depraved worldview of postmodern millennials and millennial postmodernism. The whole thing has that edgy, avant-garde, NYU film-school vibe to it. It’s all about being clever, all-too-clever.
Here’s the storyline.
Thirty-four days before she is about go off jail to serve her 11-year sentence, Elizabeth Holmes and her live-in boyfriend, Billy Evans, invite Fielder and his film crew into their home virtually 24-7 right up until the moment she goes off to prison. Half of the film (and yes, I’m calling it a film rather than a documentary) is set at the couple’s rented Del Mar, California beach house. The couple has a toddler and a nursing baby, who, you might think, deserve the full attention of their self-obsessed parents.
Let’s stop right there and ask the obvious question: Who does that? Seriously, what kind of human being would want a film crew and a creepy interlocutor encamped in their house ‘round the clock as they’re about to experience the worst moment of their lives? Normal people would, of course, want privacy. Normal people would want to spend every remaining second with their children, but we’re not talking about normal people. We’re talking about postmodern millennial narcissists.
Every scene of this tawdry melodrama screams, “Look at me, look at me, look at me! I’m important, don’t ya know?”
See teaser here:
Shoot me!
The film pretends to captures the thoroughly banal banter of ordinary life (yawn), but the heart and soul of the movie is the dialogue between Fielder and the Thespian couple. But of course nothing in this film is ordinary or real. The whole thing is staged. Every scene has a “lights-camera-action” feel to the dialogue and body language. Nothing is real and nothing is believable. It’s all performative, including if not most especially, Fielder’s performance.
Holmes comes across as a dimwit; Evans appears as a weak tea, 21st-century Raskolnikov (think of Raskolnikov’s crazed look and his protection of his sister in Crime and Punishment), and Fielder dons the look of a dark and brooding pervert who watches Evans take a shower with full frontal nudity. Yeah, “you can see everything” alright, as if to say: “see, we’re really being transparent,” so believe us. The scene is fully staged, which means, in the words of my old friend, the Bronze Age Pervert, it’s totally “fake and ghey.” Fielder is diddling with the audience and himself.
At this point, I knew the movie was as fraudulent as Theranos.
The most important scenes in the movie concern the threesome’s all-too-brief conversations (one of which takes place with Fielder in bed with Elizabeth and Billy) about whether Holmes defrauded customers. When Fielder presses Holmes on how she portrayed Theranos’s capabilities and whether she was being honest or not, she focuses on a single word: “can.” She uses “can” as a future-tense hypothetical suggesting that her investors don’t understand her deep meaning. In a lobotomized, innocent, waifish kind of way, she tells Fielder that when she told customers her miracle device “can” run hundreds of tests from a single drop of blood, she only meant to say it could do so in the future once the necessary chemistry was developed for each test. Somehow all the really smart investors mistook her to mean that Theranos had already developed the chemistry to go along with the device performed the tests successfully. She never told them that explicitly; she just assumed that they would intuit her deeper meaning.
Naturally, Fielder finds the distinction evasive if not dishonest. At this point, our director-cum-star (and Fielder has very much made himself the star of this movie) is prompted to show Holmes and Evans the famous Abbott and Costello routine, “Who’s on First?” The point here is to show Holmes how her parsing of words is knowingly circular and unconvincing, if not fraudulent. Holmes insists that she’s never seen the routine or even heard of it, which strains the limits of credulity. And then, after watching the scene, she plays the fool and acts as though she doesn’t get the joke, and she certainly doesn’t see how it’s related to her story. At this point, Billy jumps in to explain to Fielder how Elizabeth’s reaction is an example of how she “thinks differently.” That’s putting it one way. It’s more likely the case that she’s lying or simply doesn’t think, but no one believes the latter.
The second half of the film begins when Holmes reports to federal prison in Bryan, Texas. At this point, with Holmes in prison, Fielder recruits the actress, Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the Hulu series “The Dropout,” to role-play Holmes by recreating past interactions between Fielder and Holmes that may or may not have happened.
At this point in the film, most audience members realize that they’ve been played. Just like the tv show “Seinfeld,” You Can See Everything a movie about nothing.
You Can See Everything is a symbolic motif for millennial postmodernism. Holmes, Evans, and Fielder represent a unique generation in world history that grew up with wealth, were always told that they’re special and important, that the norms and rules that apply to ordinary people don’t apply to them, that reality doesn’t really exist, that lying is in accord with non-reality, that their unique role in human civilization puts them beyond good and evil, and that a documentary about their lives is no less fake. Nothing is real but somehow everything is transparent. The only thing that is transparent in this fan fiction film is that it makes clear just how vacuous and self-serving postmodern millennials really are.
This fictional account of the lives of Elizabeth Holmes, Billy Evans, and Nathan Fielder really should have been titled, You Can See Nothing. The fact is we really do see nothing because the souls of these people are an abyss of emptiness. It’s a journey into nothingness. There’s no there, there!
Watching the whole movie was like being dragged through all nine circles of Dante’s Inferno or swimming in a Lagos (Nigeria) sewer. When I left the theater with Mrs. Redneck, I felt dirty and angry. When I got home, I immediately had a shower to wash off the filth.
My strong reaction to this movie is, in part, informed by the fact that I know these kinds of people all too well. They’re the product of America’s most elite universities. They inhabit Silicon Valley and the world I live in, which is among the reasons why I hated this movie so much. Just as Elizabeth Holmes ruined Theranos, so her academic paramours are ruining what could and should have been the pinnacle of Western civilization.
In sum, You Can See Everything is a movie about nothing worth seeing. The whole thing smacks of cynicism, deception, performative banter and word games, and late-stage cultural decadence, in which Holmes, Evans, and Fielder hold up mirrors to themselves so that they can see themselves and smile rather than looking through windows into the emptiness of their own souls. The film provides no insight into Holmes’s fraud and the damage it did, and no trace of common human decency, such as remorse, shame, privacy, or even responsibility to and for one’s children. Quite unintentionally, the movie is the autobiography of a “look at me, look at me, look at me” generation of denatured, power-lusting eunuchs, who want to cosplay their pretend trans-historical importance. But in the end, there is only the polished vacuity of a generation that was taught to like itself first and foremost and that lying in the pursuit of fame and fortune is ok. (This applies to Fielder as much as it does to Holmes and Evans.)
Yawn!
Thanks for reading and/or listening.
Audio Version:
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