You Can See Everything—a film about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes—reveals how conviction, spectacle and the manipulation of truth can sustain power.
There is a moment in the new documentary when the convicted fraudster finds herself defending the meaning of a single word: can. It is a small linguistic disagreement with enormous implications. Watching it, one begins to wonder whether the most revealing documentary about American politics this year has accidentally been made about a Silicon Valley executive.
Holmes is discussing her company's supposedly revolutionary blood-testing technology with filmmaker Nathan Fielder. She maintains that the machines can perform tests they demonstrably could not perform. Eventually, her explanation becomes clear. She meant they could perform those tests someday, once the necessary science existed. In Holmes's universe, the future can apparently be used as evidence for the present.
Anyone who follows American politics may recognize the technique.
The Art of Being Right
In You Can See Everything, directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, Holmes invites cameras into her home during the final weeks before beginning her federal prison sentence.
The apparent aim of this rather peculiar exercise is transparency, but the result is something considerably stranger, particularly with Fielder behind the camera. The comedian and filmmaker has built a career out of elaborate social experiments in which the line between sincerity and performance becomes almost impossible to locate. Pair him with a woman whose entire public life has been an exercise in controlling appearances, and the question of who is performing for whom becomes part of the spectacle.
Confronted with her conviction, Holmes maintains that she has done nothing wrong. She also appears to believe she has never lied, even casually. Fielder tries to establish the difference between what happened and what she says happened while Holmes keeps returning to her preferred account.
Eventually, he plays her Abbott and Costello's famous baseball routine, in which a misunderstanding over the name of a player becomes an elaborate exercise in talking past one another. Holmes seems unable to grasp the joke.
It is an almost perfect miniature of contemporary political discourse. Two people using the same vocabulary while apparently inhabiting different realities.
The comparison extends beyond Donald Trump, although his political career offers an obvious reference point. Across American politics, certainty is a prized commodity—admitting error can invite accusations of weakness and repeating a contested account can preserve the loyalty of an audience already invested in believing it.
When Reality Becomes a Public Relations Problem
The documentary's most revealing character may be Holmes's partner, Billy Evans, who presents the family's extraordinary openness to the cameras as proof of their sincerity.
Although the filmmakers are permitted into intimate domestic spaces (fair warning: Evans even appears naked in the shower), the whole thing doesn’t produce much clarity.
In one to-be-registered-as-mundane scene, Evans intervenes while Holmes is whisking eggs, apparently finding even her breakfast technique in need of executive oversight. There is something absurd about watching the disgraced architect of a multibillion-dollar blood-testing fantasy being micromanaged over a bowl of beaten eggs. Apparently, in this household, even an omelet requires a communications strategy.
We dare suggest there is a familiar political instinct at work: offer the audience so much spectacle that the central question becomes harder to hold in focus.
Holmes, after all, once turned this talent into a corporate empire. Theranos assembled a board featuring political heavyweights Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, men whose reputations suggested seriousness and authority even as the company's technology remained deeply questionable. Their presence helped make Holmes's extraordinary promises seem credible. And the more credible she appeared, the easier it became to attract more powerful believers.
It was a remarkably effective arrangement. Prestige substituted for proof, and everyone else's confidence became evidence that there must be something worth believing.
The Difference Between Belief and Truth
Of course, there are some differences to consider.
Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors, while political spin, however shameless, is not automatically criminal fraud. We're not trying to equate every politician who bends the truth with a convicted fraudster.
But we can't help but wonder whether Holmes actually believes herself.
Throughout the documentary, her certainty seems almost impervious to contradiction and Fielder cannot tell us whether we are watching a woman consciously manufacturing innocence or someone who has repeated her own account so often that she can no longer distinguish it from memory. Perhaps the distinction has even ceased to matter to her.
This is where the political resemblance becomes most troubling: a deliberate lie at least acknowledges the existence of a truth worth concealing. But what happens when a leader's conviction becomes its own evidence, when every contradiction is treated as further proof of persecution and when admitting error would mean dismantling the identity on which an entire following depends?
Holmes's story offers no definitive answer. She was convicted, sentenced and imprisoned, a reminder that reality can eventually impose consequences even on those most practiced at evading it.
Politics offers a less reassuring prospect: the courts can weigh evidence and journalists can expose contradictions. Voters can punish deception and yet none of these guarantees that an audience will stop believing a story it desperately wants to be true.
The uncomfortable question left hanging over Fielder's film is how often Americans mistake an absolute refusal to concede reality for the very quality they admire most in a leader: conviction.