Nathan Fielder’s much-hyped documentary about Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is getting five-star reviews ahead of its US premiere this week. You Can See Everything has been called a “modern masterpiece” and “the movie of the year”. We’ve been warned it’s “like nothing you’ve ever seen” and “it will break your brain”. Variety has even theorised it will be the first documentary nominated for best picture at the Oscars.
Few details about the 174-minute movie have been revealed so far, but we know that Holmes invited an A24 film crew, including co-directors Fielder and Lance Oppenheim (Primetime), into her home 34 days before going to prison to serve an 11-year sentence for fraud. The ominous teaser trailer – featuring a mousy, unblinking Holmes claiming she has “nothing to deceive you on” – went viral last month and is possibly the most unsettling one minute and 17 seconds you’ll endure this year.
Unfortunately, Australian audiences will have to wait a few more weeks to see the full thing. The film doesn’t hit cinemas here until November 12. But you can (and should) use that time to properly familiarise yourself with Fielder’s work – to build your tolerance to his oddities like a drug.
This deadpan comedian and documentarian makes TV that necessitates a descriptor stronger than “excruciatingly cringe”. He once convinced a frozen yoghurt shop to sell poo-flavoured desserts. He manipulated a fatherless six-year-old into believing he was his new daddy. This is a man who became so doggedly obsessed with the steady hand of hero pilot Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger that he recreated and physically relived Sully’s life from birth, a process which included breastfeeding from the exposed nipple of a towering, and terrifying, puppet-mother.
Fielder’s work aims not just to rattle normies, but to freak out freaks. He needles at the root of neuroses so fundamental to the human condition that it may upend your grasp on reality itself. It’s hysterical, absurd, awkward and often profoundly moving – but you can’t just go in without a plan. It’s certainly not what Fielder would advise. Watch these shows first:
The Rehearsal (HBO Max)
In The Rehearsal, Fielder creates exceedingly elaborate scenarios, hiring a horde of actors and building full-scale sets to help participants “rehearse” for difficult moments in lives. In the first episode, he helps a man prepare to confess a white lie to his pub trivia team. By the end of the season, Fielder has entered the experiment himself, rehearsing for fatherhood and the complexities of raising a child in an interfaith environment. He tailspins deeper and deeper into rehearsal mode, almost Backrooms-style, by twisting and rewinding the rehearsal itself multiple times so he can rehearse being a more ethical director to the actor playing his fake child.
Once you’ve finished season one, you will probably find yourself asking some spiky ethical questions. You might think Fielder is mean-spirited or even kind of evil. Is this program emotionally damaging to its participants, and should I feel bad for enjoying it? Did I even enjoy it? This is your crossroads, your last exit off the Fielder freeway. You can choose to end it here, and if so, godspeed and good luck. Alternatively, well … your dark night of the soul is only just beginning.
Season two of The Rehearsal is perhaps one of the greatest artistic achievements in modern television history, and most effectively consumed by a viewer who knows almost nothing about it going in. I’ll just tell you this: Fielder is fascinated by commercial aeroplane crashes and the failures that precede them, and has some ideas about how to make in-flight communication between co-pilots safer and more effective.
Nathan For You (10Play, Paramount+)
The premise is simple: Nathan Fielder – who graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with “really good grades” – “helps” struggling small businesses with outlandish and absurd marketing ideas. As a Comedy Central production, Nathan For You plays more like a comedy, but there’s an underlying, uneasy persistence to his schemes that foreshadow what he explores later in The Rehearsal.
With his at-once egotistical and excruciatingly insecure vibe, Fielder has an uncanny knack for drawing out his subjects’ inner freak. “Oh, okay,” he says, presenting a neutral lectern before which his subjects espouse bizarre and disturbing ideas. In season one, episode four, an elderly gas station owner explains to Fielder – entirely unprompted – that he drinks his grandson’s pee when he gets scared. In season two, episode one, a real estate agent recalls a terrifying experience in Switzerland in which she was choked by a ghost, and later succumbs entirely to an on-screen exorcism.
These participants reportedly weren’t completely aware of the true nature of what they had signed up for, which might lead you to the same kind of ethical questions presented by The Rehearsal. But Fielder’s insane exploits are always subject to scrutiny, too. In one episode, a private investigator he’s been trolling spits, “you remind me of the Wizard of Loneliness … You have no friends, that’s why you’re the Wizard of Loneliness.”
The Curse (Paramount+)
The Curse, Fielder’s only fully scripted narrative drama, is our opportunity to see the comedian really act. He has said that the persona he presents on The Rehearsal is a genuine but specific version of himself. In The Curse, though, he’s really someone else: the neurotic husband on a house-flipping HGTV show alongside the vibrant Emma Stone.
Whitney (Stone) and Asher (Fielder) are wealthy white people who are desperate not to present to anyone as wealthy white people – or, worse still, gentrifiers. It’s hard to buck the assumptions, though, when their eco-friendly, modernist homes – the centrepiece of their HGTV show, Flipanthropy – are met with a collective eye roll from the people of Española, New Mexico, where Whitney and Asher are set to launch. Co-created and written by Fielder and Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems), The Curse is just as uncomfortable and squirmy as any other Fielder project. Fair warning: unbound by the limitations of reality in Fielder’s first entirely fictional project, The Curse does get extraordinarily bizarre.
How To with John Wilson (HBO Max) and other oddities
Fielder is also an executive producer of How To with John Wilson, a comedy docuseries with a Fielder-lite premise: off-camera host John Wilson attempts to share life advice while also dealing with his own personal issues. The show features lo-fi footage of New York City, from a loaf of bread hanging from a rail on the subway to a man hanging upside-down from some scaffolding and playing the flute. Anything can be a neat, whimsical metaphor for Wilson’s episodic lessons.
He covers topics including how to find a public toilet, how to watch birds and how to track your package, but you should keep your educational expectations low. The show is much more meandering and thoughtful. Wilson’s loose interpretation of any given topic is reminiscent of how Fielder always chooses the most convoluted way to explore his concepts and the oddities of the human condition.
Fielder is also known for his chaotic and meta persona online and on the media circuit. There was the unfortunate time Nathan’s Instagram posts were reported for multiple harmless pornographic “mistakes”. Then we have his moving dead-pan rendition of Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die and his dance to Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie – helpfully uploaded to his YouTube channel with the title “dance”.
The online announcement for the trailer of The Curse was a knowing parody of a flirty promotional clip for Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell’s romcom Anyone But You that was posted the day earlier. Fielder followed up with a Notes app statement saying he would not be pursuing legal action. In a later press appearance on Jimmy Kimmel, he dressed all in black with a beret and a cigarette, and forced the talk show host to contact The New York Times on air to correct a critical review.
We haven’t seen any of that high jinks yet in the lead-up for You Can See Everything, but hey, maybe all the crazy is on screen.
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