This essay contains spoilers for “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder’s new film about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
As I watched Elizabeth Holmes tell Nathan Fielder that she has never lied in her entire life, I kept thinking back to one time I’m pretty sure she lied to me.
During the height of Theranos mania in 2015, I interviewed Holmes on stage twice in a matter of months in my role as a health reporter at Forbes. The first was just before the publication of the exposes by journalist John Carreyrou that resulted in Theranos’ unraveling. The second was weeks after the Food and Drug Administration took an action that meant Theranos could no longer market most of its tests.
So I have to do something Fielder’s “You Can See Everything” never does: Get a little technical. The FDA forced Theranos to stop offering almost all of its finger-prick tests by saying that the container the company used to hold blood samples, called a “nanotainer” by Theranos, was not approved. This was a fast way to yank most of its tests at once.
I asked Holmes about this; my memory is she said there was another version of the container that would address the FDA’s problems. (I couldn’t find a video of the session online.) Contemporaneous articles say that she did talk about another container onstage. She also claimed that more patients than ever were using Theranos’ tests.
No new “nanotainer” ever surfaced to allow the finger-prick tests to relaunch. It’s one of many slippery statements that Holmes pushed during the Theranos saga. Theranos dissolved in 2018.
Among the others: that Theranos devices were deployed by the military (they were not); that she lived in a condo alone, when she lived in a mansion with Theranos executive Sunny Balwani; that Theranos had endorsements from major pharmaceutical companies, when it did not; that the Theranos machine, the Edison, could do just about any blood test, when an outside study of Theranos tests showed they gave “out of range” results more often than major testing labs, especially when it came to cholesterol tests.
The movie treats these misstatements as more debatable than they were. My favorite moment to use to demonstrate Holmes’ willingness to massage the truth was the American Association for Clinical Chemistry meeting in 2016. She got up in front of a crowd of scientists to present a new version of the Theranos machine that was supposed to overcome the problems with the earlier model. Researchers were aghast, because what she presented was a jury-rigged prototype that couldn’t do tests Theranos had claimed the earlier model could do.
So watching the movie, I had a similar reaction to Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz, who found himself wanting to yell at the screen at one point when Holmes misled Fielder. I wish Fielder had called Carreyrou who, by the way, thinks the movie should win an Oscar.
Simply: there are facts here, and they’re being brushed aside. Don’t get me wrong: I loved the movie. But I hated myself — and everyone else — for loving it, because I felt like that love demonstrated exactly why Holmes can seem to have such an eerie power over people.
I can hear a chorus of Fielder fans complaining that technical accuracy was not the movie’s point. That this was a character study, and that documenting her ability to convince people to believe her is the whole point of the film. And there is truth to that.
Fielder’s techniques, to most people, reveal Holmes to be both a skilled manipulator and likely guilty. But breezing by the technical stuff also seems to leave some people missing the evidence. And that’s not great.
Longevity influencer Bryan Johnson wrote on X about a screening he was at: “Most entered the evening unequivocally believing Holmes is guilty and many left unsure what just happened.”
“You Can See Everything” appealed to my own artistic sensibilities. It had a whiff of modernism, of Faulkner or Kurosawa, where various perspectives never quite coalesce into a single reality. Everyone seems to see something different.
The people I was with saw the actress Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in a miniseries and reprises the role here, as a hero; the journalist Ashlee Vance tweeted that she is Fielder’s second “evil” character.
Is Holmes’ partner standing by the mother of his children or manipulating her? Fielder has said that the film crew could not agree on exactly what happened. And the film documents that well.
But that makes me question the value of art. I’ve called this Holmes’ “super power” — an uncanny ability to influence the people she speaks to, and I’ve experienced it myself. (She spun me.) Shultz, the Theranos whistleblower, described it to me in an interview in 2022.
“She was so good at it that even I, who was working with this product that was clearly not working, could go have a five-minute conversation with her and walk away feeling like my work was changing the world,” Shultz said. “How did she do that to me? Even though you knew it was coming, she could still do it.”
I think Holmes takes advantage of our societal confusion between authenticity, or speaking one’s own truth, and honesty, in which one speaks the truth. Holmes often seems wholly authentic, as if she believes what she is saying. But that doesn’t make it so.
We have trouble now with what was once common sense: that some people say untrue things because they believe them, and those are the people we can trust least. And — here is my key concern — I don’t think seeing this kind of film inoculates us against manipulation.
With this kind of manipulator, it’s probably best to look away. But we can’t. We see that eerie stare and we are caught up — we even see it happen to Fielder. I wish we could all just not look.