How 'You Can See Everything' Is Hollywood's Revenge on Big Tech

Along with "artificial," "mask," and "social reckoning," storytellers are finally turning to engineers.

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Life may be too short for long grudges, as the quote goes, but it's still long enough to do a little justice.

This weekend, A24 screens Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything , the Elizabeth Holmes documentary that's already creating a buzz among moviegoers after previously stunning critics. The opening follows last weekend's release of Mus k, The Social Reckoning and the debut of Artificial at the New York Film Festival. All four films struggle with the alphas of technology trying to remake our lives in their own image. And they do a kind of revenge that is inevitable and improbable at the same time.

You know the alpha types - those speakers on CNBC or in your college WhatsApp group who say there is a solution to everything, even things you didn't know were a problem. Actually, they don't say there is a solution - they say there is a solution, which should help you right there. Never get involved in a ground war in Asia and never trust someone who turns a verb into a noun. He's probably trying to sell you something behind his puffy jacket

Far from the usual risqué Hollywood look, these reality-based docs and dramas center on three figures deeply relevant to our current landscape: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman. (Add any one of those and we might think it's a Donald Trump state dinner.) The fourth figure, "All You Can See Holmes" with husband Billy Evans, is less relevant, but the pair epitomizes the Silicon Valley attitude that lingers and prevails even when half of it is sitting in a Texas prison: that anything can be achieved with a little talk.

But it's not just the filmmakers' decision to center these figures, it's how they approach them that matters. Musk spends four hours meticulously analyzing the methods by which his subject gains power and the surveillance and even possible election fraud he uses to do so. The calculation shows that Meta intends to stir up our anger and division for his own profit.

Synthetic, which hits theaters this Christmas, may be the most poignant. Ostensibly a procedural account of Sam Altman's rise to power at OpenAI, Luca Guadagnino's drama (complete with an Oscar-level performance from Andrew Garfield) brutally rips off his investors and even employees—including engineering prodigy Ilya Sotskur. After Altman assured him that everything would be done in a focused and responsible manner, Sutskever joined and made the scientific progress of OpenAI possible. Ugh

Audiences might justifiably see how Sutskever's safety-first mentality is affected by Altman's soft-spoken accelerationism (as it happened in real life). But we might also want to note how the very fact that we're watching this account represents its own kind of triumph, as the safety concerns that Sutskever is anxious to silence play out in the very theater in which our outrage takes place. Of course, winning the P.R. war is not the same as winning the Wall Street war. But it's not separate from it—not least because companies need so much consumer acceptance to pull off their financial coup.

Even as Musk was released in theaters across the country, the front pages showed how Musk's SpaceX appeared to manipulate the Starshield in a way that limited Ukraine's ability to fend off Russian attacks, a man who in real time became a close relative of Gibney's political oligarch.

In all these films, one cannot feel a kind of writer's revenge. Aaron Sorkin sits down to tell us how angry he is about what Zuckerberg has done in the 15 years since he last met him, and Zuckerberg can't answer. Or Gibney, as he puts it, illuminates the power Musk wields over all of our lives, with no recourse but to demographically attack the social platform he owns. (X, TikTok, Meta, and YouTube all initially declined to promote the film; at least the latter two did.) Altman, meanwhile, was left to say, "I don't think they're looking for precision," something he did for Vanity Fair on Artificial's release day, clearly concerned that precision is exactly how we'll perceive it.

In all of this we have some great drama - if you haven't booked your ticket to the YCSE rumble, go out and do it now - but also the latest twist in a larger meta-drama, with a lowercase m, between artists and Silicon Valley, a photo arc from human storytellers to professors and computer code vendors. Tech leaders thought the magic of the LLM had rid us of the whole professional wordsmith thing forever. These writers and creators don't come so fast. After all these years of hearing about (and sometimes now the idea of) artificial intelligence coming to Hollywood jobs, some of the people who work in them are finally getting to say their piece and everyone is listening.

The storyteller's sudden leveraging of Fielder's face, which for any desperate Holmes or Evans would imperceptibly turn to doubt and disbelief, becomes literal, showing that not only does he know he's being fed, but that he and co-director Lance Oppenheim have the power to enter the room. Besides, Holmes and Evans seem to know it too. At one point, Evans walks into a secondary interview of Fielder to try to stop it. You could almost smell the algorithmic impotence in the face of human vitality.

In that moment of greater vibration, it ... Transcinematic message of the four films - Engineers may live on our screens and even addict our brains, but storytellers have something even more powerful: they can feel us. The people who shape these four narratives all sing the same chorus—that much of what they do (and human thought in general) cannot be outsourced to a machine. "I'm not particularly charismatic or good-looking, but I wrote this movie as a last-ditch effort to warn humanity," screenwriter Simon Rich told the NYFF audience. (The final season of Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King's return also boldly smuggled in the theme of Hollywood vs. the Machines.)

Perhaps the most surprising part of this rise of filmmakers is that it has also turned Hollywood studios into what they have been for a long time, probably since the 70s and all those Vietnam protest films: good guys. Amazon thought it could silence the outcry by dropping Artificial. Instead, he just sidelined himself. And now Neon (who chose Artificial), Sony (The Social Reckoning), HBO (Musk) and A24 (You Can See Everything) all proudly dominate the tech industry. It is not for nothing that these four studios also have the smallest participation in Silicon Valley. (Though A24's deals with Google DeepMind, hardware maker Sony, and HBO, which is now funded by Larry Ellison, show how such entanglements won't be easy to escape in 2026 either.)

Artificial intelligence creates a lot of memeslop and cost reduction. Anyone who comes out of these movies thinking that the great battle of automation has been won in Hollywood, let alone the world, is naive or delusional. But it would be equally false to emerge into the light of day and think that the films don't matter at all, that a powerful injection of anti-oligarchic humanity doesn't flow through the collective blood or change social views – that lingering resentments won't really be resolved in very constructive ways.

Incidentally, this vindictive quote comes from Elon Musk, who (contradicted by Shad's litigation pedigree) is now heavily victimized himself — and by the same truth-seekers and storytellers he thought he had dispatched when he bought Twitter. Talk about a good solution.

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