by LJ Katch, Contributor
Exiting the Apollo after watching You Can See Everything, I had a lot of questions. Who is the real Elizabeth Holmes? What is the nature of truth? But my biggest question was, Did they intentionally release this movie right before Halloween?
Like Curtis Sliwa last year, Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder became the go-to pretentious costume of Oberlin Halloween. Every duo I saw was the same. Elizabeth Holmes in her black turtleneck, wicked eyeliner, and the pill-thingy. Nathan Fielder with silvering hair and headphones. It’s perfectly low-effort, clever, and culturally relevant.
It makes sense why people are drawn to Elizabeth Holmes, she’s a transfixing subject. She’s so open as to let a camera crew live with her for the last month before her incarceration, yet totally opaque. In the first half of the film, while Fielder lives with her, his goal is to break into her mind. In the second half, once she’s in prison, he has to find ways to recreate her. Fielder and the audience have to push past billboards, Twitter posts and AI renditions all controlled by the men around her in the grand quest to find Elizabeth Holmes. But in his attempt to find her true voice, he starts creating his own renditions of her.
But what about Fielder, our disconcerting protagonist? Who, according to my Instagram feed, is the internet’s new odd man sex symbol. Theoretically, the audience’s attention is on Holmes, but in reality our perception of her is guided by the way she makes Nathan feel. He’s such a strange audience surrogate, and that’s what makes this film so unique. Throughout his career, Fielder’s whole schtick has been dialling up his own awkwardness to prompt interesting reactions. Maybe that’s what people are so attracted to: he is the misunderstood, socially inept, brilliant artist every Oberlin student dreams to be. He’s a little freak like us, only he makes money.
Not to mention the sparsely implied romance between Fielder and Holmes, which is deranged enough to drive any situationship-lover wild. Honestly, I had mixed feelings about its inclusion in the film. I doubt how authentic any romance between the two of them was, and its presence feels like a distortion of the story. It turns Holmes into a sort of demented manic pixie dream girl, who opens Fielder’s eyes to the wildness of unreality. And he, like the audience, has been pulled into her crazy world. It’s a plot device, an easily digestible ending. And it’s kinda romantic, too. No wonder we have all these costumes.
On the other hand, this is a film that intentionally grapples with the promise of its title, You Can See Everything. It’s all about the things you can’t see, the interactions and intentions that play out behind closed doors. So the filmmakers resort to reenactments. They employ Amanda Seyfried, who famously starred as Holmes in the humiliating TV series The Dropout, and give Seyfried the impossible task of portraying Holmes authentically. Similarly, the film constructs narratives around Holmes, whether it be that she is a victim of the men around her, a mass manipulator, or romantic interest.
I think about the billboard Holmes (ostensibly) hates, the one Fielder makes a big deal about to her partner, Billy Evans. The turtleneck, the eyeliner, the pill. Sound familiar?
It’s both tragically ironic and deeply fitting that a documentary hellbent on authentically representing Holmes would result in its viewers literally representing her in costume. And not the cardigan-wearing, “woe is me” Elizabeth Holmes that appears in the movie. We’re dressing up as old-school, evil scientist Elizabeth Holmes, the very image she’s trying to replace. It’s proof of the movie’s well-executed failure. I don’t imagine Nathan Fielder, master of blurring acting and authenticity, thought he would end this project with the real Elizabeth Holmes. So he let us watch him try and fail instead. Now we’re speculating about her and analyzing her and dressing up as her. All inspired by another voice that isn’t her own.
I feel a little bad for Holmes at the thought of her knowing that, on Halloween, hundreds of people walked the streets replicating an image of herself that she hated. Then I remember that the person I’m feeling bad for is also a representation, the character created by Nathan Fielder. And of course, he created that character because the real Elizabeth Holmes was too elusive to capture, even while recording her 24/7. So we’re all just falling for Holmes’ shadow, and the quest to find her continues.
