YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING. Although celebrity and notoriety have, in this age of commingled and corrupted meaning where interpretation is truth, become functionally one and the same, they remain distinct, even antithetical. Elizabeth Holmes, the perceived wunderkind founder of Theranos now serving a lengthy term in federal prison for defrauding investors and the primary subject of Lance Oppenheim (Primetime, 2026) and Nathan Fielder’s (The Rehearsal, 2022-2025) expansive, confounding documentary, is a case study in both the permeability andseparateness of those ideas.
As a Stanford dropout, Holmes purportedly invented a medical technology that would change the world. She quickly became a literal poster child for Silicon Valley ingenuity and entrepreneurship, the youngest self-made female billionaire in history; by any standard, a celebrity. The fall was perhaps even more precipitous than the ascent, though, as Holmes was, by her account, vilified and railroaded (the federal government would frame it as investigated and adjudged guilty) by the corruption of public opinion and made to pay restitution for having done nothing wrong. Having become notorious and probably ostracized by her once-innumerable supporters, Holmes disappeared from public view. And then (this is where it gets really interesting), mere weeks before she would surrender to federal custody, Holmes and Billy Evans, with whom she began a relationship and had two children during her fraud trial, decided to invite filmmakers into their rented San Diego-area home to document every aspect of their lives.
That invitation, presumably an attempt to humanize the disgraced CEO, somehow made its way to Oppenheim and Fielder, a team both ideally suited to the interrogation of the subject at hand and, by most lights, the absolute wrong guys to make a promotional reel.
I’ve only recently become acquainted with Oppenheim’s work, and not as deeply as I’d like, but I’ve been fascinated by Fielder going back to Nathan for You (2012-2017), which he refers to in conversation with Holmes and Evans as a comedy show about business scams. In that context, Fielder presents a character based on himself, a graduate of a prominent business school who remakes struggling businesses using objectively bad ideas and films the results. Fielder is, of course, a comedian whose neurodivergent-coded deadpan both underscores andbelies his singular perception of things: His work begins in the mundane and, inevitably, spins out into the fantastical and philosophical. But it is also, always, grounded in his dry Canadian humility, his insistence that he’s no better at understanding or communicating things than anyone else; he just has the imagination and means to build (often literal) structures to explore them.
Oppenheim, drawing solely on my recent experience with Primetime, appears to be fascinated by many of the same semiotic and epistemological notions as Fielder: appearance versus reality, the construction of mythology and all of that. And he shares his co-director’s droll, sometimes morbid ability to mine comedy from the ordinary and the distressing.
These two are thinkers: creators in a new(ish) media landscape fascinated by the permeable barrier between truth and fiction, acolytes of irony driven by the pursuit of their own curiosity. Holmes and Evans allegedly had no idea who they were when they invited them in.
As Fielder, perhaps reluctantly having been cast as a main character in his own project, becomes more deeply embroiled in the lives of its subjects (though still often looming eerily and to great comic effect in shadows or darkened windows), he becomes ever more obviously fascinated by the couple’s twinned psychology and their solipsistic take on reality. (They speak often of their life’s work being the construction of monuments of their love, which is either romantic or deeply disturbing or both.) By turns, Fielder is charmed by Holmes, convinced she is lying to him, frightened of Evans and righteously indignant that he not allow himself to be conned (if there’s actually a con).
Inadvertently, the documentary that would become You Can See Everything fell into exactly the right hands: Fielder and Oppenheim do not relitigate the rise and fall of Theranos, at least not in a conventional way. Instead, they apply themselves ardently to the documentation and analysis of the information being presented to them, even as they are implicit in the creation of much of it. And so the movie doesn’t purport to unearth any truths, except the truth that their process, which is as transparent as it is artful, will guide them. Granted full access by people who purport to have nothing to hide, the film crew becomes enmeshed in a reality of denial, half-truth, self-righteousness and insistence on a version of events that appears to be impossible to demonstrate.
For ostensible scientists, Holmes and Evans seem distinctly impious about the scientific method, while Fielder, Oppenheim, et al apply it scrupulously in the creation of their art. And that essential conflict fuels a movie unlike anything I’ve ever seen. R. 174M. BROADWAY, MINOR.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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For showtimes, visit catheaters.com and minortheatre.com.
This article appears in ‘Crash Course’ A Halloween Comic by Liz Valasco and Collin Yeo.