At the crux of You Can See Everything, the blockbuster A24 documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Elizabeth Holmes, is a complicated question: Was Elizabeth Holmes as we collectively knew her—the black-turtleneck- and kabuki-red-lipstick-clad founder of Theranos—a fabricated persona, or was she a real, earnest version of Liz Holmes, the domestic mother and wife Fielder follows ahead of her imprisonment?
Early on in the film, Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, are discussing an interview with The New York Times that quotes her as saying an actor portraying her was “not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” Holmes argues that she never said that, a claim supported by Evans. They assure Fielder that they have recordings of every one of Holmes’s interactions with the journalist, Amy Chozick, and Evans is determined to have the newspaper correct the piece. It’s something that feels inconsequential at first—a small battle Holmes is eager to win as she continues the legal losing streak that will land her in jail some 30 days later. But as the film takes flight, and as the narrative presented becomes convoluted, complex, and completely astounding, this idea becomes crucial. (The paper never updated the piece, though, and continued to stand by their reporting when VF’s Rebecca Ford reached out.)
Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything.
Everett CollectionPrior to You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes the public saw was the image of an ambitious tech founder whose uniform existed in the same vein of the so-called geniuses before her. One is led to believe that the uniform provided ease to her busy life, that she was a woman beyond aesthetics. That she was put together, but did not try too hard. That she was past the male gaze that would subdue her to become a fashion victim. This may all very well be true, or not, but what is most evident is that Holmes had built Elizabeth Holmes to be a brand in tandem with Theranos.
You Can See Everything then becomes Holmes and Evans’s ambitious rebranding of Elizabeth into Liz.
In the film, when Holmes and Evans bring up The Dropout, the Hulu show depicting her rise and fall starring Amanda Seyfried, they claim the depiction caused extreme damage to Holmes’s public image. They frame it as the version of Holmes people know best, as if Holmes herself had not willingly posed for pictures and participated in magazine features and video interviews. They assure Fielder that she hates the famous photo of her holding a tiny vial (the Theranos nanotainer); that she never wanted to be in the spotlight, an argument debunked by John Carreyrou, whose investigation broke the Theranos story, in his analysis of the film for The New York Times. Carreyrou cites Holmes’s own texts to her partners from 2015 regarding the building of her personal brand.
And thus in You Can See Everything, there are no black turtlenecks or red lipsticks to be found.
Elizabeth Holmes in 2015 wearing her then-signature black turtleneck and red lipstick.
JP Yim/Getty ImagesInstead, Holmes presents herself as a beige cashmere-clad mother of two with messy hair who always has a baby in her arms. She is not Elizabeth Holmes, tech founder and cultural villain, she is Liz or Lizzie, a human, a victim—of public perception, of her ex boyfriend, or the culture. And a woman forced to trade her cozy home for a prison cell.
When Fielder mentions to Holmes that he feels insecure about the fact that he is not an expert on science, and he wonders if Evans and Holmes may rely on this to manipulate him or the narrative, she assures him that “the point of this is not to litigate the science,” that the film they’re making “is a human story.” It’s Holmes’s style, or the seemingly deliberate lack thereof, that does much of the heavy lifting in this regard.
Holmes is, at all times, self-fashioning as vulnerable. She cries and blushes and wears her emotions on her skin. Even when she is scanned to make an AI hologram of herself for Evans to show their children while she is away, she is at a state of domestic dishevelment.
It is all incredibly persuasive and does not come across as part of her deception until the final hour of the film when Seyfried joins in on Fielder’s adventure.
Seyfried’s reenactments of Holmes’s conversations with Fielder in You Can See Everything become crucial to the narrative of the film. Not because they fill in gaps in the story—at the heart of this film is the idea that neither Holmes and Evans nor Fielder, and by extension Seyfried, are reliable narrators—but because they affirm that Holmes, not just as she’s seen in The Dropout, but as the earnest, doting mother, is a character that she, too, can easily play.
You Can See Everything forces viewers to wade through layers of deception. But some of Holmes’s tells are worn on her sleeve.
Seyfried becomes both witness and participant in this story, but her acting illuminates a simple idea: that Liz Holmes, as she presents herself to Fielder, as an adoring mother and as a doting wife, is yet another persona Holmes is adopting, this time in her crusade to prove her innocence. You Can See Everything does humanize her, but perhaps not how she intended. It suggests that we can’t trust her, and that like many humans, she does tell lies, perhaps even to herself, which is a most human quality after all.
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