You can see everything?

[7 min read] Nathan Fielder’s documentary on Elizabeth Holmes’ last month before going to prison blew up over the last few weeks, a whirlwind few saw coming. Not having grown up in North America, Theranos and Elizabeth’s name didn’t ring a bell until 2022, when the miniseries The Dropout entered the public discourse at my college.

It seems that quirky leaders of technology companies in the US have been rising in popularity over the past decade or two, with worshippers and haters alike. Social media feeds into the public narratives surrounding these personas, digging into their lifestyles, psychology, and principles. The influence of individuals on mass psychology is reaching unprecedented levels of speed and impact, which, in my mind, is dangerous given the follower’s dilemma in social psychology.

I’m hoping to write this piece mainly as a personal reaction to the documentary (questionable??) instead of a fully fact-backed analysis of the actual events. There are plenty of those circulating around the internet.

Beware of spoilers.

The experience

You Can See Everything is… both long and short. It feels to me like it’s divided into two halves, with the first half focusing on Nathan’s time with the Holmes household 24/7 leading up to her going to prison. As the camera follows her going into prison, I thought the documentary was about to end, except it didn’t! The second half follows the crew essentially trying to figure out to what extent Elizabeth knows about the deal Billy and the A24 production team made regarding the profit units of the documentary. This is the part that gets a little wild, with Amanda Seyfried joining the production to reenact some of Elizabeth’s final moments before going to jail, as well as her meeting with Nathan in prison. The runtime of the documentary was close to 3 hours, but I always felt like I could use a little bit more context, and that if I could just get a little more information about the whole event, everything would make sense. Except things didn’t totally make sense, and I felt like I left the theater with this cognitive dissonance. I’ll elaborate on the psychological aspect later.

The cinematography, colors, composition, and music were on point in creating dramatic tension. It felt a little like The Odyssey (I could hear the experimental-contemporary, haunting, texture-focused, distorted-synth, eerie-ambient postmodern musical composition, at the very least). The close-ups of everyone’s faces, combined with the traditional TV aspect ratio choice, reminded me of Christopher Nolan pointing his IMAX camera directly at Cillian Murphy’s face in Oppenheimer. This seems to be a popular aesthetic these days, featuring your protagonist’s beautiful deep blue eyes staring unblinkingly into the screen. Chris Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, Lance Oppenheim, y’all could be good friends.

The Moral

My feelings toward Elizabeth Holmes changed while I watched the documentary. I went into the theater relatively spoiler-free, so my reaction to our central character went through a few notable shifts over the course of the experience. I’ll go through some of them and explain my earlier mention of cognitive dissonance.

The setup: a family at a San Diego beachfront. Elizabeth is holding her baby, Billy cuddles her gently and plays with the other child.

Me: Ohh they look like a nice chill family together. That’s neat! Do they own the beachfront property? Oceanfront real estate in San Diego is quite expensive given that they’re going through the process of incarceration, though.

Nathan and Elizabeth talk about the goal of the documentary, to which Elizabeth responds that she hopes this is a human story.

Me: OK! She literally stated her intentions. Her goal is to use the documentary to show that she’s just a human who’s relatable and is going through a hard time, instead of the media’s portrayal of her as the villain. It is quite a literal statement.

Nathan and Elizabeth discuss her belief that the Theranos machine “would be able to”/“can” run any test. Nathan shows her the comedy sketch about the baseball player whose name is “Who.” Elizabeth says she truly cannot see that she has ever lied in her life. Nathan mentions to her that the magician David Blaine performed a magic trick where he drove an ice pick through his hand.

Me: This is very interesting, and I think it touches on some core concepts I like about this documentary. There was a moment when I was thinking, “oh, is she autistic? I can understand that people see the world very differently.” Then I thought, can she be both autistic, clearly very smart, and also manipulative? Can someone repeat their own version of the truth for their own purposes so much that it becomes their reality? Can the deliberate use of ambiguous language help someone stay in their moral gray area and bend reality to fit scenarios that best serve them as the moment sees fit?

In my experience, people are very complicated, and all of these things can be true at once. Our inner narrative is what we construct as our experienced reality. There are facts and then the appropriation of facts for narrative’s sake. Elizabeth does this. Billy does this. Nathan does this. We do too. We all love a good story. Memories are really unreliable sources of information (I get embarrassed thinking about how much I rely on my photo album or Google Calendar to recount events, though some events I can remember with photographic precision). A simple “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” can literally silence someone looking for an explanation or truth, leaving them questioning themselves and feeling frustrated over an incomplete narrative. Cognitive dissonance happens when my lived experience mismatches the version the other person is trying to convince me of. It could be intentional or unintentional.

The ambiguity of human language can create and reinforce such gray areas. Different cultures and different languages have words with different levels of precision to describe events and emotions. I personally feel English can be a lossy language in conveying information compared to some other languages (with their grammatical inflections, for example) that carry more context by default.

Popular psychology profits from moral complexity, using social media to sell narratives, frameworks, whatever we want to listen to or believe in. Elizabeth and Billy are good at telling people what they want to hear; charming leaders are good at that too. The difference is that when the outcome harms people, there are legal repercussions for the wrongdoing, but when the outcome benefits some number of people in a tangible way, we idolize the individual’s charisma and leadership.

In the second half of the documentary, following the aftermath, the narrative creates the impression that Nathan forms an “emotional attachment” to Elizabeth, with Amanda Seyfried doing a lot of the reenactments while Nathan tries to establish a direct line of communication with Elizabeth.

Me: Here I kinda want to talk about our unreliable narrator for a bit. Nathan is known in some of his other work to act like he’s developed a crush on the protagonist of the show. You Can See Everything gives us a taste of that as well. I think the key to critical thinking is to evaluate our sources of information with a debiasing filter. It’s easier to take sides because we get partial information from someone we trust. Incomplete information forms a narrative that serves our own filtered vision of reality. We can sell that partial reality to others until it becomes their whole reality. Social media algorithms or AI chatbots can amplify and entrap us in our accepted version of reality, our comfort zone, without questioning the legitimacy of our trust. Empathy is developed through understanding that our world is not the only valid world, even when we don’t agree with the other person. Seeing the other perspective doesn’t mean one has to change their own view of reality, and it’s OK to let the disagreement remain unresolved while focusing on the human connection we share.

“Monuments of love” or whatever that means

When I first heard about Billy and Elizabeth’s first encounter and the subsequent rapid development of their romance after Billy learned about Elizabeth’s downfall, I became skeptical. Normally, if you hear that this person you had a good time connecting with is a federal criminal, you would want to reevaluate your situation and maybe back away. But Billy was like, yes, she’s the one I want to spend the rest of my life with, and I want to build “monuments of love” with her every day, even when she’s in prison and I get to take control of all her social presence and basically speak for her as her, and that’s love because we don’t even need to communicate to know what each other thinks and make decisions for them.

The egg scene, in which Billy takes Elizabeth’s bowl and starts stirring the egg the way he likes to, and explains for her in front of the camera that he likes it the way he stirs it so that Elizabeth can focus on talking to the camera, got me laughing a bit. It felt like one of the first few moments when I started to feel off about the couple’s dynamic. When they are on screen together, she speaks about 30% of the time while he speaks for her, explaining their intentions as a unit for about 70% of the time (roughly, at least that’s my impression).

The “monuments of love” Billy refers to between him and Elizabeth seem to be built on a foundation of trust, but a trust in which each person plays their role perfectly, which is also where aspects of toxicity come from. Billy is controlling, narcissistic (he calls it “protective”), defensive, all the while having a fundamentally fragile ego, which is what determines his role in their relationship.

Elizabeth’s role in romantic relationships is quite interesting, on the other hand. From her track record of dating and running a business with her ex-partner Sunny Balwani for more than a decade, starting when she was 19, it appears to me that Elizabeth’s view of romance falls on the more practical, if not utilitarian, end of the spectrum. It seems less like she “feels” love and more like she can play the role of a partner, a mother, and attach herself to the person who can fulfill the role of a partner, or a father, as long as the relationship itself is symbiotic. To each their own; she might genuinely not want to take responsibility for certain aspects of decision-making in her life, and leave them to her “partner” (insert role needed) to take care of them for her. This helps me understand the part about the deal with A24. It almost follows this narrative of “if I did not proactively make a decision, if I just neglected certain decisions, and they’re in others’ hands, my negligence does not make me accountable for whatever happens. Thereby I did nothing wrong. I am not guilty.”

To sum up

There’s a saying that’s been popular on the Chinese internet these past 2 years, “尊重每只青蛙和它的井”, translating to “respect every frog and its well”, which comes from the idiom “井底之蛙”, describing someone with a very limited perspective or horizon. I like the saying, especially because we are all little frogs in our own wells, and we can only see the part of the sky limited by the circumference of our own well. It’s easy to point to another froggy and say “look at how limited your vision is!” without accounting for the fact that the sky is so vast and we can only see so much ourselves.

The frog and its well metaphor applies to the title You Can See Everything. Yes, we can, but in our own well.

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