When a mockumentary becomes class propaganda
Why does You Can See Everything take the Silicon Valley felon Elizabeth Holmes as its subject but not spend an equivalent three hours on Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Elizabeth Warren, or any one of the other wealthy white women liberals who have deranged contemporary society? Directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim choose to distract the public from political threat by focusing instead on half-serious, deliberately vague abstractions about truth, objectivity, and media. Media itself has become the tool of political and moral manipulation.
Fielder-Oppenheim use meta pretense as they openly record the private life of Holmes, who founded the Theranos biotech company at age 19, as she prepares to serve the ten-year jail term she received for her conviction in 2022 for criminal wire fraud. Fielder-Oppenheim exhibit their participation in Holmes’s evasive behavior with her life partner Billy Evans and their two children to play a guilt-or-innocence game that keeps docile viewers perplexed.
The fact that You Can See Everything has been extravagantly praised by the majority of film commentators — including those outside film circles — proves that contemporary media culture itself has been discombobulated, even when dealing with its own kind. Fielder-Oppenheim’s ruse of self-criticism gets misconstrued as confession and self-examination when, in fact, it is neither. Short of corporate journalism and network TV, their film may be the ultimate example of media dishonesty.
This illustration of our current cultural disaster — when filmmakers and film reviewers are incapable of holding or recognizing aesthetic and moral standards — is not simply a matter of naïveté or miseducation. Fielder-Oppenheim themselves practice fraudulent storytelling that goes beyond the “unreliable narrator” trend. They resurrect the folly of reality TV and mockumentary to congratulate the narcissism of criminal/celebrity worship and envy.
Holmes and Evans are no different from miscreants of the various Housewives series. And Fielder-Oppenheim work as competing show-offs — Fielder himself appears as the film’s co-star, sometimes upstaging Holmes (his snark to her smugness), continuing his career as a Comedy Central improv clown and social arbiter. (It doesn’t help that Fielder and Holmes both display some variation of sociopathic imbecility.) This gimmick — which Albert Brooks already mocked in his directorial debut Real Life — may fool Millennials who are unaware of questionable honest behavior in the 1970s PBS series American Family or the ’90s bacchanal The Real World. We’re long past the cinema vérité controversies of the Maysles Brothers (Salesman and Grey Gardens) and Frederick Wiseman (Titicut Follies and High School), and just barely distant from the offenses that were Capturing the Friedmans and The Act of Killing, yet Fielder-Oppenheim combine those genre disasters, then muck ’em up some more.
Consider You Can See Everything a guileful example of “smartness.” Here’s where Fielder-Oppenheim profile Holmes in order to seem above asking moral questions; their glib observation of WASP perfidy places the filmmakers themselves above the concerns of their plebeian audience. Viewers are encouraged to see Holmes in terms of their own admiration, envy, or judgment. It is an extension of the ethical confusion that has resulted in chaotic political partisanship.
Glorifying Holmes as a Millennial enigma explains Fielder-Oppenheim’s refusal to scrutinize the outrageous, even criminal, behavior of more suitable subjects, such as the female politicians mentioned up top. Not even a three-hour running time is enough for filmmakers who never intend to hold the film’s subject accountable — idiosyncrasies such as Holmes’s corporate manners, her briefly mentioned rape, or the pregnancies that coincided with her trial dates go unexplored.
It is extraneous — and deceptive — that Fielder-Oppenheim shift their unreliable tale to include the extra-meta exploits of actress Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed Holmes in the 2022 cable film The Dropout. This tedious digression complicates how film and television and journalism collectively cloud our perceptions; it really perplexes the hipsters who so recently fell for Oppenheim’s noxious Primetime.
Since the Covid lockdowns and the media complicity in promoting government tyranny and social conformity, the public seems more dupe-able than ever. The ad poster’s close-up of Holmes’s perky left eye and a blurry peripheral view of Fielder is practically a koan of today’s white-ethnic class anxiety. The title You Can See Everything isn’t ironic or accurate, just deliberately deceitful.
