In You Can See Everything, the bewildering new documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, Billy Evans barely blinks and rarely smiles. He sniffs constantly, slams Celsius and Spindrift, and watches YouTube videos on the concept of apoptosis. His low, fried voice is comically similar to Fielder’s, who slinks between corners and hallways in the San Diego beachfront rental where Evans, his wife Elizabeth Holmes, and their two infant children resided in the days leading up to Holmes’ incarceration. Fielder and Oppenheim’s camera set-up, laments Evans, is messing up the WiFi.
In one notable scene, Holmes tepidly whisks some eggs, her hands trembling, before Evans swoops in and takes the bowl in order to whisk with proper vigor. As Holmes explains to Fielder, Evans, the son of prominent California hoteliers, doesn’t think she is doing a good job. Throughout the film, Evans speaks for Holmes, who shrugs and follows his every direction. He believes in his wife and in the mission (a new health-tech startup that, like Theranos, involves a miniature diagnostic device, a working prototype for which the couple plans to engineer remotely, while Holmes is in prison). After Holmes fails to understand why the classic Abbott and Costello comedy bit “Who’s on First” is funny, Evans, with all the affection of a zookeeper, explains to Fielder that her mind is "just different," as though Holmes were an exotic creature whose language only he can interpret. Holmes is sitting right beside Evans, whose loyalty, at least until her sentence begins and the movie’s subversive second act takes flight, is absolute.
Holmes, with her unconventional mind and difficult circumstances, is a singular 21st century figure, and Evans functions as her protector and spokesman throughout the film, the mastermind behind her attempted rise from the ashes of public humiliation. The on-screen dynamic seems controlling—one person notes later in the movie that no woman wants to see another woman in a situation like that—but the couple’s experience of their love gives no indication of trouble. Holmes inhabits a version of reality that differs substantially from the one commonly understood in the court of public opinion and the law itself. She is met in this reality by Evans, who wraps her in the warm embrace of a big, bad bully. He is rich and handsome, too, something Fielder points out in an early scene before Evans comically deflects and runs off to the gym. The implicit question: Why would a man like that be with someone like Holmes?
Evans’ belief in his wife’s reality is so total, the world they’ve constructed together so airtight, that Fielder—for all his meddling—cannot quite pierce it. The director is skilled at exposing the gap between how people see themselves and how the world sees them. With Evans and Holmes, however, that gap is the very thing that makes their bond so impenetrable. The gravitational force of their love almost pulls Fielder into its orbit, making the director and his prying questions a foil against which Evans’ can demonstrate the totality of his devotion. There is something admirable in her ability to inspire his care, which she accepts completely. But Evans, too, gets something out of their arrangement.
Holmes’ apparent incompetence allows Evans to assume the role of the perfect savior, a contemporary chivalrous ideal embodied in Silicon Valley’s concept of the agentic man, who believes that any problem can be solved with enough resources and willpower. Holmes gives Evans a gift in the form of a big problem, and Evans seems happy to dive in, taking responsibility for everything from scrambling eggs and raising children to burnishing his wife’s sullied reputation. Later in the movie, he’s even revealed to have taken charge of Holmes’ lapsed X account, tweeting aggressively under her name while claiming Holmes, unable to speak for herself from the confines of a prison cell, approves of it all. But when Fielder confronts Holmes about this and another, presumably more egregious act of betrayal, her blank, wide-eyed stare and ever-bobbing head suggest that she is completely unbothered. Evans’ behavior is framed—in both their accounts—as the product of a profound intimacy. She needs him, and he loves to be needed. Fielder, by the end of the film, seems convinced, or maybe even cajoled by Holmes himself.
The love may be real, but it is convenient, mostly in the way it supports Holmes’ claim that it was her ex-boyfriend Sunny Balwani who truly masterminded the Theranos fraud. But the question of Holmes’ innocence is less central to the film than the question of her consciousness. Is her passivity calculated, or not? Does she realize she is once again hiding behind a rich, assertive man? Does she realize anything at all? The film can’t answer these questions, but it does bring them to the surface, asking its audience to hold Evans’ sincere loyalty and Holmes’ complicity at once. In this way they are almost ironically trad: the powerful girlboss turned submissive mother and wife who outsources her ambition to her scheming, hyper-masculine custodian. They collaborate in a mutually beneficial paternalism, one in which Holmes gets to remain unfairly misunderstood and Evans gets to be her hero. Her innocence becomes an inexhaustible resource fueling his own sense of purpose.
But in protecting her, he also shields Holmes from confronting what she’s done and taking the accountability that might redeem her. Their kind of love is only enough in a closed world – one where the messy reality of investors and patients, the inquisition of a curious filmmaker, and the judgment of the masses isn’t taken seriously. A deeper love might demand more of both. In Evans’ case, it would ask him to sacrifice his savior fantasy for the sake of truth.