The Most Shocking Thing About "You Can Watch Everything": Nathan Fielder's Sympathy for the Devil
Ever since the first trailer for "You Can Watch Everything" was released, if not since the film was announced, lovers of schadenfreude have been rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of Elizabeth Holmes getting more of what's coming to her. Especially knowing that Holmes and her husband Billy Evans are really looking to […]
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Ever since the first trailer for You Can See Everything was released, if not since news of the film broke, lovers of schadenfreude have been rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of Elizabeth Holmes getting more than she deserved. Especially knowing that Holmes and his wife Billy Evans actually followed Nathan Fielder, a natural skeptic, to make the documentary, there was an anticipated bloodlust, that they must have been fools to imagine they were doing anything but helping to set their own trap. It's not an entirely unfounded expectation: Holmes comes off as weird in the film as anyone appearing in a cinematic freak show could hope for. But the strangest thing about the film might be the fact that it at least suggests that the evil genius might be none of the things it's described as, but rather someone whose senseless act might not be so much an appearance as he is dealing with some sort of mysterious trauma that we can only guess at. RELATED STORY REVIEW 'April X': Connor Storrie bids his time in a mainstream sci-fi clone 'Silver Express' review: Miki Tanaka's sensitive early feature explores asexual, aromatic identity
In other words, this is a film with some sympathy for Satan, or at least—given the admitted uncertainty of its findings—the suggestion that sympathy is possible. Which might not be what you're looking forward to going into what looks like a hilarious 174-minute elimination. But the intentions of Fielder and his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, are right there in the first trailer that set the viewing world on fire. At the end of the scene, when, after several minutes of Holmes smiling and staring earnestly into the narrator's eyes, shaking his head as if he had some kind of anxiety paralysis, it is revealed that he stretches his left leg well off the couch to shake his baby. If you watched that teaser carefully, the filmmakers carefully laid out the entire film: massive amounts of IRL shock-and-awe comedy, along with poignant bits where Holmes turns out to be human...if still unfathomable. Popular in Variety
So let's set a countdown to how long it takes some soul on social media to call Fielder a "girl" for being exposed as a villain's manipulation. But this isn't a film meant to let Holmes off the hook, just to ask a few questions about where some of the invisible hooks in his impossibly strange life might be. It's a film that begins with the intention of offering insight into an unsolved mystery episode in the style of Leonard Nimoy or Robert Stack, with the idea that spending 34 days living with Holmes and Evans - and the years of further production after his incarceration - should surely provide some definite conclusions about his psychology and/or crimes. Instead, in the end, solving the mystery of UFOs seems like a simple task in comparison. Abnormal Psychology: This is the ultimate journey! But the idea that in the midst of that inability to respond, we can at least consider more of what makes him seem ridiculous and awful to some viewers… and is also what makes the film rich and watchable enough to deserve a Best Picture nomination.
If there's a pivotal moment for the film, it's a scene relatively late in the three-hour run that involves a sort of death between Fielder and a very famous A-List character that A24's appearance has asked viewers to consider a spoiler. (His name will be ubiquitous enough in the coming weeks, but for now we can respect the surprise.) After spending months intensively filming Holmes and his wife and immediate family, Fielder admits how confused he is—basically wondering if, against all odds, it's possible that he could be as innocent as taking seven days a week off. Upon hearing this confession, the very famous A-List personality does everything but literally slap Fielder, suggesting that she must be experiencing some sort of Stockholm Syndrome to be pulled by his act. At this point, some moviegoers actually stand and cheer for the A-lister—he's standing in for the audience at that moment, or at least standing for part of it, asking the performer/filmmaker to snap out of his delusions. But it's not just the various viewers in this scene. Anyone who watches the film may find his sympathetic and cynical sides roughly in balance.
Where Fielder finally comes to terms with how sincere or Machiavellian Holmes is is another unresolved mystery at the end of the film, perhaps even to himself. When I saw the film at its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival (following which attendees weren't allowed to record), Fielder basically said that she and the rest of the filmmaking team were still having trouble figuring out exactly what they had experienced during the making of the film — which is a fascinating puzzle, given that her husband had seen everything she might have about the title and that Holmes had seen them. My personal impression is that Fielder came away with the idea that Holmes was on a level, to the extent that someone who sometimes seems to have the idea of an artificial intelligence program on how a human behaves can be on the level. There are several possibilities that could explain how Holmes appears in the film: (a) He is a simpleton. (b) He's a committed sociopath who happens to be quite adept at playing the simpleton. C) Somewhere between those poles, she symbolizes a woman who throughout her life has controlled herself to the detriment of her intellect, will and emotional development in the dominance of men.
And what about those impossibly wide, unblinking eyes and that gentle Joker smile? Are these, as I've theorized all over the internet, signs of the individual at worst, or at best on a societal scale? Or just someone with a pretty face resting?
If you want to go down this interpretive path, the feminist lens is very powerful. Fielder and Oppenheim consider the moment early in the film where Holmes' father says he thinks things really changed for his daughter when she was sexually assaulted during her college days. Fielder in front of the camera delivers one of the silent reaction shots that is a staple of the film, and it never comes up again. The theme of her becoming a victim of powerful men continues – a bit when the topic of Theranos co-founder Ramesh "Sonny" Balwani comes up (though the retelling of past history doesn't take up much of the docu's running time), and when we get to the present day. Evans is as close to a villain as "You Can See All" gets, and he probably crosses the line and becomes one. He is even treated as a human being throughout the film. He's very outspoken about his intentions as a high-level devil, and it seems like he might actually like Holmes. But the steady stream of revelations about what she's up to in the last hour of the film makes Holmes feel like a woman with virtually no personal agency even before she goes to prison, let alone afterward, when she makes deals without his knowledge and behaves arrogantly and rudely.
Holmes may not be given enough credit for his misdeeds to suggest that he actually spent most of his adult years as a doll. However, her portrait of passivity in the face of an aggressive "let me handle it all" man never gets any less amazing as the film goes on...and it should ring at least a little bit real to anyone with first-hand experience of the human race.
Two scenes that explore Holmes' apparent — and shocking — naivety stand out. (None of these count as major "plot" spoilers.) When Fielder asks if he's ever lied, one of them asks the inevitable question about white lies. Even then, no, because Fielder almost begs him to admit that he understands the question and that he told a couple of people to protect a friend's feelings. Probably 99.99% of people would give up at that point—evil geniuses the most—but Holmes can't even admit to falsely complimenting a friend. Later, there's a wonderful scene in which Fielder uses Abbott and Costello's famous "Who's the first?" Explore the plot as a setting to explore how people's communication paths may explode directly into each other. Holmes hasn't heard of the movie, but after watching it, he says he sees what he's trying to say...which itself is a white lie, as he finally admits that he doesn't understand what's going on between Abbott and Costello at all, and it's at this point that you might start to wonder if he's somehow developmentally disabled.
Is he somehow stunted in his growth, but can he convince smart people to part with billions of dollars? Nothing is calculated here. And yet, intuitively, Holmes does not appear in this film as someone with the intellectual guile to pretend not to understand an Abbott and Costello scheme that has entertained millions, or to know what a white lie is. The mystery deepens.
But it's also possible that Holmes, for all her sins, and for all her Stanford education, is a simple girl—not naïve—suffering from an extreme case of not just serial male dominance, but the ultimate impostor syndrome. (This is something he certainly won't admit to, given the evidence in the film, mainly because he may never have heard of it.)
How people feel about Holmes after watching "You Can See Everything" may be the most divisive thing in America since... well, since Kelly Clarkson vs. Brooklyn Boutique, something that really shook us as a nation. But one thing is clear: In this era of quick hits and ever-shortening hot shots, Fielder and Oppenheim's luxuriously fast-paced look into one's soul is like salve, inconclusive or inconclusive. Is it possible that the more you learn about someone, the less you know how to think about them?
To take a cue from Shakespeare: "You can see all things" shows that there is more in heaven and earth than just one person than is dreamed of in any of our philosophies. We could do worse than the possibility of sympathy in the midst of those hours of head-scratching assessment.