A new fan's guide to the unreal world of Nathan Fielder

Surprised by the hype surrounding yet another documentary about Theranos swindler Elizabeth Holmes? It's all about this experimental comedian.

So, you might be asking yourself, why advertise the upcoming film You Can See Everything, another documentary about Holmes that's three hours long?

This excitement is thanks to Nathan Fielder, one of the film's directors. (Fielder directed the documentary with Lance Oppenheim). Fielder is a cult-favorite TV auteur whose fans have been anticipating his showdown with Holmes since rumors of a meeting in prison surfaced last year.

Now that Fielder looks ready to break through the box of obsessive fans and conquer the movie theater, you should get caught up. This will be no ordinary documentary: Fielder is a career high on unreality, causing confusion wherever he goes. To give you an idea of ​​his analysis of Holmes, here is a summary of his unusual and captivating style.

One of the reasons Fielder makes sense as a partner for big tech's most notorious swindler is his own history of corporate chicanery. In his hit TV series Nathan for You (2013-2017), he designed and executed quirky advertising gimmicks for struggling small businesses. (While he jokes that he "graduated from one of Canada's top business schools with very good grades," the fact remains that he did graduate, unlike Holmes, who graduated from Stanford University.)

Andrew Bricker, associate professor of English at Ghent University and academic coordinator of the Democratic Literacy and Humor Research Project, wrote in an email that it's important to recognize that Fielder has always played the same altered version of himself throughout his career, never reassuring us of who he really is.

Bricker says Fielder "has made the borderlands of personas and people so vague, so indeterminate, so indefinable that none of us are quite in on the joke."

Bricker explains that Nathan for Tou and Fielder's upcoming HBO series, The Rehearsal, sees him as "a sort of problem solver of sorts, someone who has what I sometimes call an engineer's brain, who sees the world entirely through a simplified basic framework of problems and solutions, even if the solutions themselves always lead to Maroboros-style problems."

In fact, Fielder, in his steady role in Nathan for You, looks for very complex solutions, and when he sets his mind to it, he goes out of his way to execute any particular plan. For example, to help an international exporter avoid the high costs of shipping smoke alarms, he comes up with a plan to market them as musical instruments. He then creates an instructional DVD on how to play it, assembles a band to record an original song featuring the machine playing loudly, and features the song on the local news, all to legitimize the tariff evasion.

Fielder's campaign for Nathan included a careful reading of the relevant laws to eliminate responsibility—he went viral by opening a coffee shop called Dumb Starbucks—as well as clever deceptions and media manipulation. He staged a video of a pig saving a goat from drowning in a pond at a petting zoo, successfully tricked social media users and news stations into thinking it was real, and founded Summit Ice, a non-profit winter clothing brand that stands up to Holocaust denial, which catapulted him into the mainstream.

Holmes, of course, spent years playing off investors and the press with savvy PR, presenting himself as a future Steve Jobs in order to present a bogus breakthrough in medical science. If anyone can understand the scope and scale of duplicity required to make the world believe in a product that doesn't exist, it's Fielder.

Awkward, maybe neurotic... and bad?

Early in his career, Fielder ventured into the business world with a recurring spot on the CBC satirical news program This Hour Has 22 Minutes. His segment, "Nathan on Your Side," was a send-up of local consumer advocacy research and an early showcase for Fielder's wit, as seen in a 2008 report in which he pretends to be a customer in an electronics store and invites a salesperson to send him an MP3 player, but constantly "rejects these attempts because he rejects them."

Throughout Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, Fielder has relied on this haunting effect to maximize the awkwardness of his conversations with everyone he encounters. Though polite and unassuming—many of his fellow Canadians speak to him—he allows heavy silences to linger, makes uncomfortable eye contact and never breaks, no matter how funny it is. One situation may be that Fielder is also adept at repeating what someone else has told him, in a way that emphasizes its absurdity.

With these tics, Bricker says, Fielder often surprises his interview subjects and prompts them to make surprising confessions.

Holmes is an ideal target for this approach to poker. Keith Rehnbohm, professor of film at Lawrence University, has written about the ethics and skill of the HBO series The Rehearsal, which follows Fielder as he creates elaborate simulations of critical life events to better understand human behavior. Rennebohm writes in an email that Holmes the con is something of a final test of Fielder's methods.

According to Rehnbohm, Holmes is "a woman whose notoriety rests solely on her apparent ability to completely ignore reality." Because of that, Rennebaum expects Fielder's skills as an enforcer and motivator to "probably get their hardest workout in this matchup."

Bricker says that "we're about to see a strange Frost/Nixon land, where both interviewer and subject inhabit almost exclusively semi-fictional personas in public"—Fielder as a mad social scientist, Holmes as an inventor ahead of his time.

But while Holmes may deserve aggressive scrutiny, some critics fail to appreciate how Fielder brings ordinary, unsuspecting people into his comic plots, occasionally allowing them to seem a little silly or shaky while he remains. Just as your appetite for horror comedy determines whether you laugh at Fielder's scenarios, the shows are a litmus test about questions of conscience. and empathy have become. Is he taking advantage of the working class people and background operatives drawn into his intricate web of control, or is he simply reflecting back to us a dysfunctional society?

This tension, along with Fielder's preoccupations and general behavior, has led to much speculation about whether he has ever been diagnosed with a mental illness. The exercise led viewers to theorize that Fielder was on the autism spectrum or otherwise neurotypical. Fielder confirmed this discourse in the second season of the series and underwent an fMRI brain scan that could have hinted at such a diagnosis, although he did not disclose the results.

Others use the word "sociopath" when discussing Fielder's work, but not always in a negative sense. As one X user noted in a recent You Can See Everything post: "Nathan Fielder making a movie about Elizabeth Holmes being a delusional sociopath is just like Dexter taking down a worse serial killer."

Even starting from the simplest premise, Fielder enters strange territory. In an episode of Nathan for You in which he advises a real estate agent to use a psychic medium to make sure the houses he is selling are not haunted, he drops a bombshell that was once choked by a ghost.Switzerland. In another, Fielder forces a gas station owner to advertise impossibly cheap prices that can only be achieved through a laughably awkward rebate process. However, the most memorable part of the segment is when the business owner reveals that he drinks his grandson's urine when he feels scared.

Fielder often follows strange discoveries, letting the strangeness of people and the unintended consequences of his own intervention determine where he goes. As such, there's an investigative element to his process that's certainly appropriate when dealing with an enigma like Holmes, a convicted felon who continues to proclaim his innocence with a gleeful warmth that comes off as utter self-delusion.

In 2023, Fielder and Oppenheim, co-directors of You Can See Everything, moved into the Del Mar, California home shared by Holmes and his partner, Billy Evans. The group lived together in the house for over a month, right up until the day Holmes reported to prison for his 11-year sentence. They weren't sure if what they were filming could be made into a movie, but as Fielder said at the New York Film Festival last month, a deep sense of mystery compelled them to move forward.

"Lance and I were talking about what we thought happened there and we had a complete disagreement on ... what we thought was going on," he explained. And we were like, "Oh, this is really interesting, if we can't agree on what's going on, there's something here."

Fielder has a "remarkable talent," Darrenbom says, for using these frictions to twist and expand his narrative. He points to the second season of The Rehearsal, which was inspired by Fielder's theory of how communication breakdowns between airline pilots and co-pilots can lead to fatal accidents. To make his cockpit collaboration model work, he spends two years getting his commercial license and eventually flies a Boeing 737 full of actors (all of whom have written roles to play on board) from San Bernardino, California, to the Nevada border and back.

When it comes to Fielder pursuing a subject as far as he can, Rehnbohm says, "I expect this document of his time will be no different than Holmes."

What has emerged in Fielder's latest output can be described as anxiety about the nature of truth.

The Rehearsal (2022–present) is, on the surface, a series to examine how we behave in destabilizing circumstances. In the first season, Fielder concocts a scene where a man can practice admitting to his bar trivia team that he lied about having a master's degree. For the rest of the season, Fielder engages in a complex, multi-part experiment in which a woman, aided by child actors (and Fielder acting as her platonic parent), evaluates life as a mother.

However, there are countless moments where Fielder is more concerned with the authenticity of these staged interactions – and their complete mismatch with reality – than their potential. The results, we learn, are his fanatical mode of observation.

Fielder is often shown walking with a laptop strapped to his torso so he can take notes on the go. He catches the smallest inaccuracies and omissions and revises the next version accordingly. He understands the psychological dissonance of pretending to do something rather than actually doing it, and has candid interviews with his actors and advisors in hopes of closing these gaps.

According to Rehnbohm, the exercise gives the fictional Nathan the opportunity to substitute fabricated and seemingly controllable realities for his real-life reality, though often even these fictional scenarios end up resisting Nathan's totalitarian impulses.

Bricker points out that the fundamental "paradox" of Fielder's "hypothetical revelations of truth" is that he reaches his conclusions only through his own constructed persona and detailed simulations. "Even if these genuine moments of self-disclosure are genuine, given the artificial framing of their disclosure, how can we know?" he asks.

But this also makes the fact that you can see everything an attractive proposition. Bricker notes that Fielder and Oppenheim are in a position to play with the "hard boundaries between fact and fiction" through dramatic reconstruction, stylization, and careful editing.

Rennebohm says that Holmes is also emblematic of a technology industry with over-ambitions that ignores human reality itself. All you can do is prepare to be impressed.