IF YOU’RE EVEN somewhat interested in movies, you’ve heard all about You Can See Everything (including from us at Men’s Health). In the week and change since the movie was officially released, the film—which combines unprecedented access to former Theranos CEO and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans with a meta-narrative threaded by co-directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim—has been discussed ad nauseam, sparking discourses about not only the facts realities of Holmes’s case and situation, but about the very nature of documentary films, language, and the truth.
And while the headlines of You Can See Everything are largely about the access to Holmes as a public figure and things she did or didn’t say, the reality is that it’s more of a Nathan Fielder movie than an Elizabeth Holmes movie. Fielder, who broke out with the docu-spoof series Nathan For You on Comedy Central before moving on to more surreal takes on similar subjects with HBO’s The Rehearsal and Paramount+ and Showtime’s The Curse, is at the center of the story all along, looking for something, anything, in Holmes and Evans as he talks to them. He’s searching less for the truth of the case—that’s already been investigated by the courts—and more for the truth of who Elizabeth is and why she’s behaved the way she has.
For a film of this structure to work, the person we’re along with for the ride needs to be someone we both understand and don’t mind spending that kind of time with. While You Can See Everything ultimately leaves us questioning everything we’ve just seen, Fielder, to his credit, is someone who makes the three-hour runtime an easy watch. He’s dry, yes—that’s his on-screen persona. But he’s also vulnerable and often humanistic. When he faces down Holmes, for example, in a scene where he shows her Abbott and Costello’s famous “Who’s On First?” routine for the first time, he reacts in a way most viewers could probably see themselves reacting.
Oppenheim did an interview with GQ, and he suggested that Fielder’s nature in the film makes him something of an emblem for modern men. “I feel like he's at his most masculine in You Can See Everything,” he said. “I'd always tell him, ‘You look so handsome in this.’ And I was just like, ‘I love being this close on your face. I'm so tight on your face right now and you look amazing.’ And he'd be like, ‘Dude, you could see my blackheads and my zits and stuff.’ I'd be like, ‘You look great. I actually think it makes you look better.’”
His quote alludes to the way Fielder carries himself in the movie: as something of an audience surrogate (at least during the first part of the film), and someone the audience can see themselves in. This marks a shift from Fielder’s previous on-screen personas, when he was a bit more of an on-screen joker or troll, egging his subjects a bit more into saying or doing something that will make them look silly. Here, he’s basically a blank slate for the audience to graft onto.
It’s interesting to read the quotes from Oppenheim, who last month also directed Primetime, a scripted A24 film starring Robert Pattinson. Pattinson, of course, is a traditionally handsome movie star, someone who’s played heartthrob roles like Edward Cullen in Twilight or literal superheroes like Bruce Wayne in The Batman. There’s, of course, a vision of masculinity in that. But when you look at someone like Fielder who is a normal guy—there’s even more of a mirror image being reflected to those of us watching in the theater or at home.
You Can See Everything understands the power in this unassuming parallel. Outside of Fielder, Evans is the only other male figure substantially present in the film, and he does partake in some more traditional expressions of masculine energy: He goes to the gym, he shoots guns in a range once he moves to Texas, and he even partakes in a shower scene of full-frontal male nudity as Fielder looks on. But it’s that parallel that Oppenheim implies is important—Fielder isn’t ever nervous or uncomfortable. “He's a very unconventionally hyper-masculine man,” Oppenheim said. “That's a compliment, I guess.”
The movie works because of the access we’re getting, and the way Fielder and Oppenheim set things up and draw us in and spit us out at the end. But it also works because Fielder so clearly knows who he is and understands who he is—blackheads be damned. And when the result is You Can See Everything, does anything else really matter?
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Evan is the culture editor for Men's Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn't.