The Strange Power of You Can See Everything

In other words, why would a woman invite awkward, deadpan, cringe-comedy king Nathan Fielder and his film crew to infest her home and family life? At such a terrible time, he’s hardly a comforting presence. And even the most cursory googling will reveal the sort of media figure Fielder is and the agonizing lengths he goes to in probing the most uncomfortable and often bleakly funny areas of human interaction.

If Holmes wants a documentary showing her in a warm and cuddly way that might improve her public image, perhaps even a path to a post-prison comeback, there are countless hacks in the world of documentaries who’d be happy to oblige. But consider the first filmmaker Holmes and Davis approached: Errol Morris of (1988), . (1999), and (2003). Morris is, or once was, the most uncomfortably probing media-maker, the one who came up with the “three-minute rule,” the length of time the director and his camera stare at the person being interviewed after asking a question. Morris claimed he’d determined that no one can withstand three full minutes of silent staring — it cracks the strongest — the most wary, reticent, secretive interviewee will start spilling their guts.The Thin Blue LineMr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, JrThe Fog of Warother

You see the pattern here. Though Holmes claims she had no clear idea who Nathan Fielder was, it seems clear that did. It may be whole point of this documentary was to create the clash of the titans, to pit Holmes’s wide-eyed unbroken gaze to a documentary filmmaker who thinks he can out-stare her, break her down, get her to confess to lying, fraud, cynical manipulation. And if he can’t do it, well — that could stand as a kind of “reasonable doubt” in the public mind.somebody

According to John Carreyrou, the journalist who broke the Theranos scandal, Holmes had previously Morris in 2016 to make “sleek Theranos commercials at the height of her pre-scandal fame.” Post-scandal, she approached Morris about making the documentary. Morris was interested, and inquired if Carreyrou would be willing to participate, saying, “I see it as a ‘he said, she said,’” scenario. Carreyrou flatly rejected this characterization, saying, “That’s not how I see it. There are basic facts, and those facts show Elizabeth Holmes committed fraud.”hired

Again, according to Carreyrou, Morris later indicated that, though he didn’t dispute Holmes’s guilt, he “wanted to explore the theme of self-deception.”

Obviously, we’ll never know what Morris’s version would’ve looked like beyond the certainty of the epic stare down. But Fielder and Oppenheim’s film, which premiered a scant six weeks ago at the Telluride Film Festival, caused an immediate sensation. It was quickly slotted into theaters and marketed on its extraordinary preview, showing Nathan Fielder — whose flat probing stare is well known to those who’ve seen his remarkable cringe-comedy television series and  — facing off in a close-up stare down with Elizabeth Holmes, whose own big blue-eyed stare, absolutely unblinking, seemed to make it a mysterious attempt at offering up proof of her own purity and honesty. Look at how transparent those eyes are, like a newborn baby’s!Nathan for YouThe Rehearsal

This image of Holmes’s face drawn from the film went viral. And in , it becomes the main site of interrogation because, for one thing, her ability to stare at such length is physically bizarre. If you try it yourself, you quickly find how painful it is not to blink for, say, a full minute. Actors adopt the unblinking stare as an extreme performance device that is guaranteed to weird out audiences — Anthony Hopkins used it to play Hannibal Lecter in . The comedian Josh Jackson has a whole stand-up built around that mad, impossible, unbearable stare of Elizabeth Holmes.You Can See EverythingThe Silence of the Lambsroutine

Holmes poses a challenge to film’s supposed capacity to reveal what can’t be seen with the naked eye. Early film theorists, seeking to define the compelling new medium, used to expound extensively on the power of the filmed close-up of the human face to show us what no one could see in real life. Projected far beyond life-size, the close-up seems to show us every slight movement of facial muscles, every passing shift in expression. The old province of painting, “capturing the soul of the sitter” posing before the all-seeing eye of the artist, seemed to have given way to this far more revealing mechanical media form.

goes far beyond the intensive, mesmerizing interactions of Fielder and Holmes, continuing past the point when Holmes goes to prison and becomes almost entirely inaccessible. Her partner and the father of her children, Billy Evans, becomes the subject of filmed interrogation, in addition to one more startling figure I can’t name because it’s a spoiler. But safe to say, each of these new subjects of the documentary, who are also performers before the camera with agendas of their own, shift the ground of interrogation in such dramatic ways, audiences are exclaiming aloud, often in unison, as they’re swayed this way and that in shockingly emotional twists and turns.You Can See Everything

Fielder and Oppenheim are not in the least shy about deploying several devices from the world of scripted filmmaking, including genre conventions drawn from gothic melodrama, suspense films, and the paranoid conspiracy thriller. For example, the tense, thrumming score by Ari Balouzian, who worked with Oppenheim on , also out this month, deliberately evokes , a film about a man whose fantasy obsession with a woman finally drives him insane. Late in the film, “the ticking clock,” one of the tritest conventions of suspense films, becomes a driving force in keying up the audience to a fever pitch of angst.PrimetimeVertigo

You can recognize all these conventions as they appear and still be swept away by the power of . I was so dazzled by the film that I could think of only one director, Alfred Hitchcock, who was better at making audiences fully aware of his films’ artifice while still manipulating their emotions as effectively as if they were the most naive of viewers.You Can See Everything

Which gives rise to the question — as you round into hour three of , even more enthralled than you were in hour one — what are Fielder and Oppenheim trying to accomplish here? It certainly goes far beyond the question of whether Elizabeth Holmes is a lying grifter or not, though many critics and commentators seem stuck on that basic question. As she seems to draw even Fielder into a more and more emotionally addled relationship — and as you begin to wonder how much Fielder is at least partially that addled state for the purpose of further addling you, the viewer — you start the -like spiraling into undecidability that is both deeply uncomfortable and yet hypnotically irresistible.You Can See EverythingVertigoperforming

What is this power of persuasion that some people possess, so potent it seems to warp time and space around them? It’s a question that troubled ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians as they grappled with the dangers of sophistry. How much are Fielder and Oppenheim seeking to both study and demonstrate it through cinematic manipulation? How much are you, the viewer, implicated in your own constant shadings of the truth and outright lies and impromptu performances in order to grease the wheels of your own difficult passage through life, surrounded by other fibbers, scammers, and playactors? If Elizabeth Holmes’s face comes to horrify you after you’ve gazed at its infantile blankness long enough, and if Nathan Fielder’s deadpan also begins to agitate you, what is your own face doing as you present it to others out in the world?

For Halloween horror viewing, look no further than , a film that only grows eerier in the days after you’ve seen it, drawing viewers back to the theater to determine whether they really saw what they thought they saw. It’s truly one of a kind.You Can See Everything