In the 1910s, filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty ventured in the Canadian Arctic and shot hours of footage of Inuit families and their daily lives. When he came back home and started going through the footage, he accidentally dropped a cigarette and burned a huge chunk of the original negative. To salvage his film, he went back to the Arctic, decided to set up shop with one particular indigenous family, and explained that he had to film them doing all of their regular daily routines all over again.
That film became Nanook of the North, one of the foundational texts of documentary moviemaking. Back in 1922, when it was released, the very idea of a "documentary film" was both new and nebulous, which meant that it didn't matter that portions of it were staged at Flaherty's direction. Now, it's a reminder that objective truth in documentary cinema is not only a moving target, but also an impossible one.
Which brings me to You Can See Everything, a documentary film that's now fielding accusations that it's not really a "documentary," in part because portions of it are clear re-enactments. But the more I see the discourse around Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder's film flaring up with backlash, the more I see a troubling trend. People don't just want to argue the merits of the film or what is and isn't "real." They want to brand the whole enterprise a failure as a documentary simply because it doesn't offer the answers that they like. It can't be a documentary because it makes Holmes look less guilty, they say, or It can't be a documentary because we all know she's lying.
We need to talk about this, because while Holmes' behavior throughout the film is worthy of scrutiny and study, the idea that the film is not a documentary because it doesn't always depict the Objective Whole Truth is more than silly. It's a trend that points to an alarming lack of comprehension of a film like this at a time when we need films like this more than ever.
SPOILERS AHEAD for You Can See Everything
One of the very first things we hear in You Can See Everything is Elizabeth Holmes' husband, Billy Evans, on the phone. He explains that the Holmes/Evans family is basically in seclusion in a San Diego beach house, and that they've brought in a crew to "document everything," which leads us into meeting Fielder. In the film's early scenes, Fielder wonders aloud, more than once, why he's the person they've chosen to embed in their home. Holmes answers that they see their story as a "human story." They do not want to be interrogated or persecuted. They want someone who can see them for who they really are.
Tension emerges in this narrative immediately, because in Fielder's eyes, to understand who these people are, he first has to understand how they feel about their circumstance. Holmes never expresses anything — anything — but bafflement at the understanding that she's a month away from serving time in Federal prison. Fielder asks her multiple times not to explain her innocence, but to explain how she thinks she ended up here despite supposedly being innocent. He brings up Holmes' ex-boyfriend and fellow Theranos executive Sunny Balwani in an effort to get her to unpack their dynamic, even perhaps to throw him under the bus. She pushes that thought away every time, and insists over and over that she has no idea why she's about to go to Federal prison for something she didn't do. When she hesitates in giving this answer, even for a second, Evans is reliably there to shift the narrative or simply call her away to do something that's not a documentary interview.
The film takes its title from one of these moments, when Fielder's trying to express to "Liz" that he doesn't feel like he has the whole picture. He has this nagging feeling that he's not seeing everything, and just as he voices that feeling, here comes Evans to pull Holmes out to walk on the beach. When she leaves, Fielder gets a text: It's Liz, writing "fyi you really can see everything."
I feel silly even saying this, but apparently it bears explaining for some people: The film's title is ironic.
Fielder, and by extension the audience, never feels like Holmes makes good on her promise. For three hours, we watch Fielder and Oppenheim circle this family, trying every tactic they can muster to zero in on some kernel of absolute truth, even if it's just a truth about Holmes and how she sees the world. Asking her "are you guilty?" is fruitless, and so is asking her "If you're not guilty then why are you here?" so instead they try questions like (paraphrasing, of course) "Do you think it's possible that this is all just a misunderstanding?" or "Do you see how someone would interpret this as though you were hiding something?"
At every turn, Holmes and Evans deflect, rebuff, flat-out refuse to answer questions. Fielder changes tactics again and tries to understand Holmes the human, not Holmes the convicted felon and entrepreneur. What would drive a person to not simply deny their guilt, but keep trying to build a new business even as they're facing prison time for fraud? How can Holmes be so bright, so seemingly open, so intelligent, and yet not understand the basic circumstances of her life and the consequences of her actions? Is she really as naive as her wide eyes might suggest, is she so tunnel-visioned that she literally can't see the issue, or is she the world's greatest manipulator?
This culminates, for me at least, in the "Who's On First?" scene, because it feels like Fielder at his most human and relatable. Having exhausted direct questioning, he turns to what he understands best — comedy — and tries to apply another kind of universal language to the experience. He plays Holmes and Evans this legendary piece of comedy history, a joke virtually everyone gets, and then watches as they react with somewhat bemused puzzlement. Holmes doesn't get the joke. Evans maybe gets the joke but wants to be on her side, or perhaps he's so wrapped up in his own tech edgelord persona that he wants to be contrarian and simply pretend he's beyond the simple joys of vaudeville humor. Their reactions slap Fielder — a guy who's, it should be noted, not known for his warmth and vulnerability — right in the face. It's stunning, and when it happens, the "human story" angle goes right out the window. These people do not want to open up to Fielder, or if they do, they want to do it in the most strategic way possible.
It's an inflection point, and from this moment forward the documentary instead becomes about Fielder trying to trap, in all manner of ways, Holmes and Evans into admitting something they'd rather not admit. He wants not only to get answers, but to see how far they're willing to push their image of two brilliant people who've done nothing wrong. The re-enactments, the arguments with Amanda Seyfried, the weird cloak-and-dagger phone calls, are all part of this journey. Fielder meets their perceived artifice with artifice of his own, and while it pays some dividends (Billy forfeits his financial stake in the movie by the end, etc.), he never gets the whole truth. He's not a law enforcement agency or a special investigator appointed by the government, and he's not going to waterboard the woman, so he uses what he has, what he knows.
Which brings us back to documentaries, and what they're for.
Robert J. Flaherty went back and reshot huge chunks of Nanook of the North not just because he wanted basic nuts and bolts moments of Inuit living, but because he wanted a human core, a narrative on which he could hang a film. It's about forming an emotional connection, hence putting Nanook's name in the title. The film is a window into a way of life that most people had no exposure to in 1922, and it has value even if there are some trappings of artifice in among the facts. And, it's always worth nothing, once you introduce a camera crew into any situation, you are inviting some level of artifice at every turn. People behave differently when they know they're being watched.
You Can See Everything is a film that uses basically every trick in the documentary book, from re-enactments to old-fashioned pavement pounding, to offer a window into a different way of life. Holmes and Evans, particularly Evans, might as well be on another planet. One of them is facing prison time and they claim to have no money, and yet they're in a beach house in San Diego, they're talking to investors, they're making moves. When Elizabeth enters prison in Texas, Billy sets up shop in Austin, overlooking downtown skyscrapers and getting vanity plates on his Tesla while claiming that people are following him and persecuting him for his beliefs. Neither can successfully answer any challenge that Fielder offers them, to the point that Billy, on multiple occasions, even tries to seize control of the movie. I don't think it's an accident that Evans is surrounded by tech albatrosses like Tesla and WeWork as he tries to set himself up as Mr. Business in the film's final third. I think that's Fielder and Oppenheim showing us the connections to the wider tech world, to the world Holmes and Evans would like to usher in with their work. It's not that these people have never done anything wrong. It's that they simply cannot see wrongdoing when it's coming out of their hands and mouths, because that notion doesn't apply to them. They're smart, they're nice, they're trying to change the world. They're the human story, damn it, and yet they can't muster enough humanity to even admit when they're demonstrably wrong. "You Can See Everything" means that you can see what they want you to see.
Every documentary you've ever seen, no matter how clear-cut, no matter how comprehensive, is about this very thing, the tension between perceived reality and "the truth." Documentary filmmakers make choices, and so do their subjects. What shot looks best here? Which bits of this 20-minute conversation do we leave in to capture its essence? What is its essence? If that person's lying, how do we get them to tell the truth? How do we know it's the truth? Sometimes we just don't.
The film illustrates this overarching search for what's real with a recurring motif that echoes from the opening scenes all the way through the closing credits. Billy and Elizabeth insist that The New York Times misquoted Holmes when they wrote her saying "a character I created" in response to dramatized versions of her life. They're sure that she would never say that, that she must have said "A character they created," meaning the writers and directors and actors making money from her life story. They also insist that they recorded the interview, so a "review" of that recording will prove the Times wrong.
Only we never hear that recording. The Times stands by their reporter, Billy and Liz stand by their narrative, and while Fielder asks multiple times for proof that they're telling the truth, they never provide it, and they never provide a good answer as to why. For them, it's all part of the larger narrative of Holmes as a persecuted figure taken out of context. For Fielder, it is the context, the understanding that these people do not believe that they have to prove anything to anyone in order to be correct. If you want me to draw a broader thematic line here, well, think about Trump and his tax returns, or the Epstein Files, or any number of shady financial deals and investor communications coming from AI companies. We don't have to prove anything to you, you should be grateful you're in our orbit at all.
This is a film about arrogance, how it's wielded and the role it plays in our culture. Holmes and Evans arrogantly try to control the narrative, and when Fielder tries to take back that control, the film itself (with Seyfried's help) points out his own arrogance in daring to be the arbiter of truth when he's gotten dangerously close to Holmes. He swims with her in the ocean, he seems to respond with genuine thoughtfulness to her prison visitation hug, and he even wants to see her marriage as a genuine once-in-a-lifetime love story, if only because it helps him sleep at night. Absolutely everyone in this movie is making their own choices about what we see and don't see, and the result is a dazzling maze of dead-ends, red herrings, and shattered assumptions.
The goal is not to portray objective truth, because in a film like this, that's impossible. The goal is not to make Holmes look more or less guilty; the prison time takes care of that on its own. The goal is not to platform or sanctify or justify the subjects of this documentary. The goal is to show us that no amount of access, or hobnobbing, or openness, or emotional appeal can ever wring out the whole truth. That is inconvenient for a great many viewers, and while I understand the frustration it causes, I'm invigorated by that frustration, not annoyed. This is not just a film about people who seem to live in a parallel universe (something Holmes literally says at one point). It's a film about how vast and unstructured and slippery "the truth" actually is. You can't see everything. Ever. The point is to try, because the people who want you to stop trying have a vested interest in showing you as little as possible.
In that way, Holmes got her wish: It really is a human story.
