You Can See Everything is a captivating and brilliant documentary from comedian Nathan Fielder and filmmaker Lance Oppenheim that turns the lens on Elizabeth Holmes and her family for 34 days before she goes to prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and lying to investors and consumers about the capabilities of her blood analyzers. The A24 documentary You Can See Everything has been one of the strongest openings in 20 years. This film has everyone talking and wondering who the real Elizabeth Holmes is, yet many of us are still left feeling as if we saw everything but the truth.
Elizabeth Holmes is still Elizabeth Holmes. She’s just swapped one persona for another. Because Holmes believes her own version of the truth, she is so convincing that even the filmmakers and the audiences can’t seem to figure out what is real and what is not.
The word persona comes from the Latin word for masks worn by actors in ancient theater. The mask, or persona, resembles the person, but is partly created by society. For instance, when you come home from work, you might leave your work persona at the door and become a more intimate or real version of yourself behind closed doors. In Carl Jung’s Collected Works Vol. 7, the persona is described as “a complicated system of relations between the individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.”
In the documentary, the black turtleneck-wearing, deep, masculinized-voiced CEO persona of Elizabeth Holmes that we all know so well from TED Talks, magazine covers, and the Hulu series “The Dropout” is replaced by a tan, crewneck-sweater-wearing, softer, higher-pitched-voiced mother and wife. This new persona serves to authenticate what Elizabeth Holmes wants us to know: that she did not do anything wrong. Theranos “could” work, and she has nothing to hide. What she wants us to see is authenticity, but we may be looking at narcissistic distortion.
As psychotherapist Erin Leonard writes, “Narcissists live and die by their own version of the truth. Is it the truth if reality has been distorted? A narcissist believes it is.” Holmes is rewriting reality to protect her fragile ego, which is why we never really see remorse for her wrongdoing. The persona of Holmes isn’t dropped; we aren’t seeing the real her, but we are seeing another reality, and the primary reality is absent.
Nathan Fielder challenges the way we see documentaries and the cinéma vérité genre, in which the filmmaker remains just a “fly on the wall.” Instead, Fielder inserts himself as a main character, challenging and questioning Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, at every step. However, he does not do this from a journalistic perspective or even as someone who understands engineering, but as someone like us—someone who just wants Holmes to say, “I messed up. I lied because I did not want to fail.”
But the confession, the remorse, or “the magic trick revealed” never happens. Instead, you get a portrait of a woman who has reconstructed her image to appeal to us, once again, as someone we should trust. In this version, her husband helps. He tells us she “thinks differently” from other people and that we should believe what we see.
In some ways, he is right, just not in the way he is insinuating. Neurodivergents think differently than someone who is non-neurodivergent, and individuals who are narcissistic think differently from those who are not. Fielder is quick to want to teach Holmes how magic tricks work, but as smart as Holmes is, she never quite seems to get his metaphors or his jokes as they apply to her.
The ultimate magic of the film is that we think we are going behind closed doors to see an unmasked version of Holmes, but what we find is someone whose mask does not (or cannot) come off. She is, and believes herself to be, exactly the persona she is projecting to us. That is why we feel so uneasy when we hear her say, “I have nothing to hide.” If Fielder even gets close to something—a glimmer of remorse or authentic vulnerability—her husband conveniently interrupts or shuts down the cameras—not to protect the person, but the persona. Holmes is not hiding some truth we need to discover; she is living a version of her truth, and that’s what makes it impossible for us to ever really see everything.
