The word disruptor is a vividly descriptive one, and it’s almost always applied to an individual. But it doesn’t have to be. Take the rule-busting, category-smashing, one-of-a-kind-because-you’ve-never-seen-anything-of-its-kind “You Can See Everything,” a movie that in one weekend has turned the movie landscape topsy-turvy.
“You Can See Everything” is such an unprecedented cinematic wild card that as you watch it, the very question of what it is makes the movie itself a disruptor. It’s a documentary…made by a prankish cringe comedian…about a notorious white-collar criminal…that plays as a piece of hangout-movie vérité…until the actress who played the white-collar criminal in a TV series actually shows up…at which point the psychodramatic circus is just getting started.
This past weekend, “You Can See Everything” made $15 million on 800 screens (complete with 2,000 sold-out shows). That made it the most successful opening for a non-music documentary since Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” 22 years ago. Yet even those numbers don’t tell the story of how “You Can See Everything” has injected itself into the cultural bloodstream — and is reconfiguring the movie world. People are rushing to see it almost as a kind of mission. Audiences are alive to it; the film is so full of revelation and new-paradigm entertainment value that people often say it exceeds their expectations. This, in a word, is everything a great movie should be: an experience unlike one you’ve had before, one that lures and enthralls you, and that leaves you feeling different when it’s over.
The film’s box-office numbers are likely to shoot up in its second weekend, when it expands to a full national release. And there’s every chance that the numbers could continue to go up for a week or two after that, the way they did with “Obsession.” The excitement that surrounds “You Can See Everything” rhymes with the out-of-the-box quality that drew people in hordes over the summer to see “Obsession” and “Backrooms.” This was a new kind of audience: a new demo, a new consciousness, a crystalization of the possibility that we might be on the cusp of a new “film generation.” That’s an old term (from the 1970s), one that desribed how the first generation to grow up with movies as their transcendent art form embraced them in a new way, like rock ‘n’ roll — not just as entertainment or even as art but as a fundamental expression of who they were.
Watching “You Can See Everything,” people see themselves reflected in the post-ironic deadpan of Nathan Fielder, who is 42 and represents, from his television shows, a novel mode of fucking with people that’s intricate in its cleverness yet bizarrely honest. Having his close-up conversations with Elizabeth Holmes, he’s wily and detached, but he’s also a straight-shooter, asking rigorous questions about what we want to know: how Holmes could have lied the way she did, and, if she claims (as she does throughout the film) that she wasn’t lying, how she could possibly believe that. The movie, in a sense, is a cosmic meditation on lying. (Holmes sounds as monomaniacal, and as hard to fathom, in her systematic delusions as Donald Trump.) I think the Elizabeth Holmes showcased in “You Can See Everything” is a quintessential example of the human being as corporate performer — she’s doing a dance of put-on earnestness, and her act is so good that Fielder meets his match in attempting to unmask it. The film is an almost dreamlike duel of egos.
By making a movie in which he and his directing partner, Lance Oppenheim, literally didn’t know where they were going, Nathan Fielder has given us a documentary drama that’s all about discovery. That’s what gives “You Can See Everything” its cathartic existential entertainment value. Like “Pulp Fiction,” it seems to be doing nothing less than reinventing what a movie can be. And the outpouring of adoration — and ticket sales — is already so undeniable that I think it’s all but certain that “You Can See Everything” will wind up being the first documentary to be nominated for best picture at the Oscars.
Here’s how that would work. Right now, the film is still forging its path, but I’d wager that it has a solid shot of being named best picture by one or more of the critics’ groups (the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the National Board of Review, and so on). That would establish its credibility as a work of cinematic art. The Oscar voters aren’t beholden to the critics, but they often follow their lead. It’s been a long time, in fact, since these two pools of tastemakers existed in any true opposition. (I know more than one critic who thinks that it’s the job of year-end critics’ voting to move the needle on the Oscars.) Voting aside, the movie is sure to top many critics’ 10 Best lists, and by the time that happens it will likely have made $100 million at the box office. Its mainstream cultural status as one of the best pictures of the year will, at that point, be undeniable. And if and when it’s nominated for best picture, that will be a ground-shifting moment.
But here’s why I think “You Can See Everything” is also a serious contender to win. This is not an Oscar odds column, and I’m not going to try and parse the chances of “You Can See Everything” next to every film that’s been floated as a contender, from “La Bola Negra” to “Artificial” to “Project Hail Mary” to “I Play Rocky” to the yet-to-be-seen “Dune: Part Three.” But I will use “The Odyssey” as a front-running standard bearer.
In many quarters, “The Odyssey” has acquired an aura of inevitability. It’s the big-vision version of what movies can be, and at a casual glance it connected on every level: with the critics, at the box office, as a must-see cultural phenomenon. At the same time, I think it’s a vulnerable front-runner (in a way that the last Christopher Nolan Oscar movie, “Oppenheimer,” was not), because there are a great many people who are less than in love with it.
If “The Odyssey” wins, it will not be a surprise. It will feel very much like a traditional Oscar victory, the least disruptive one possible. But we are now in an era of disruption — and, quite strikingly, we’re in a year when disruption (from AI or wherever) isn’t just threatening the film industry. It’s looming up as one of the forces that could save it. By the time of Oscar night, “You Can See Everything” may have emerged as the year’s quintessential example of what a movie can be: an ecstatic disruption, an adventure of the spirit, one that wakes you up and startles you, that makes you want to see it again (I’m still working up the courage to go a second round with “The Odyssey”), and one that unites the audience in the feeling of having experienced something uncanny. Something we haven’t seen before. The reason I predict “You Can See Everything” will triumph at the Oscars is that anyone who votes for it won’t just be voting for best picture — they’ll be voting for the future.