Murphy Shimamoto

You Can See Everything: The Impenetrability of the Subject

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary masterwork investigating Elizabeth Holmes sets out with the goal of answering one crucial question: did Elizabeth Holmes intentionally defraud those who invested in Theranos. The film, however, does not embark from a neutral perspective. In fact, Fielder directly tells Holmes in their first conversation that he believes she defrauded investors and deceived regulators. Perversely, Holmes and her partner, Billy, participate in the film hoping that this project will communicate the opposite. This is stated explicitly in the opening sequence wherein Billy is recorded telling an unnamed person on the phone that Holmes has been turned into a monster because no one knows who she is and that the documentary will remedy this through its radical transparency. It is this stark either-or as to Holmes’s intentions which propel the entire film and is the antagonism through which we should seek to understand the events which occur.

Right from the beginning, however, Fielder is confronted with increasingly strange answers to his questions, slowly unsettling his conviction regarding her motivations. This is most obvious in Holmes’s incredible remark that she cannot remember a single instance in her life in which she lied followed, in a separate scene, by Billy’s concurrence with this claim. In the latter interaction Fielder becomes visibly frustrated, in response to Billy’s ungrounded suggestion that the “smear” against Holmes was instigated by a journalist put on by her competition, saying “why are you being weird and cryptic with your words, say what there is.” Here we see Fielder struggling to prove his assumption and grasp the reality of who Holmes is despite the unprecedented amount of access granted to him and his crew.

What begins as mere frustration morphs into bafflement and self-skepticism. Fielder’s doubt is awoken by a semantic uncertainty regarding what Holmes meant by the statement that her Theranos devices can perform any test. The controversy results from whether it was sufficiently clear that her devices were capable of developing blood tests given the chemistry which confirms such tests had already been performed. Fielder elaborates on the difference between the claim that her device can currently develop any test, which she denies in the film, and that the device would theoretically be capable of developing blood tests, to which she subscribes. Fielder begins to see this as a possible misunderstanding even if it is extremely implausible given the general, public, everyday understanding of her words. In order to gauge this plausibility Fielder develops an ingenious scenario which throws his initial conviction into a crisis.

Fielder decides to assess Holmes’s sincerity by showing her Abbott and Costello’s Who’s on First comedy routine. What is revealing about this scene is Fielder seems to unearth that Holmes is incapable of grasping the crux of the joke, which is one of semantic confusion due to the fact that the baseball player occupying first base is named Who. What this test does is open up the possibility that Holmes’s understanding and use of language, especially socially, is so abnormal that she may have seriously not comprehended the everyday implications of her statements in the same way that she seemingly could not understand the joke. Fielder says explicitly, “I’m wondering if your mind cannot grasp how a certain statement can be confusing.” Billy is quick to latch onto this exonerating interpretation of events saying that Holmes just thinks differently and unlike normal people. This crisis haunts Fielder throughout the remainder of the film.

In his final one-on-one conversation with Holmes before her imprisonment, Fielder voices his perplexity to her. He says, “The thing throwing me the most is how inviting you are and how much access you are giving me…everything here points to someone with nothing to hide,” in response to which she quickly retorts, “I don’t have anything to hide.” Fielder states that if the core of her guilt or innocence rests solely on what she meant by her words then the only thing he has to go off is her. Holmes replies that she is hoping that through her actions he will be able to discern that what she says is the truth, something which she has consistently maintained. The second section of the film wrestles with the task of trying to uncover Holmes the person despite her incarceration.

Having stated that the answer to the film’s guiding question could only be answered through Holmes herself, Fielder is faced with a seemingly prohibitive obstacle saying “the trouble I’m having is she went away and was taken in, now it’s just Billy saying he can speak for her.” Billy presents himself as an odd remedy to this difficulty, claiming to speak infallibly in Holmes’s name due to a profound communion which exists between his and his partner’s souls thanks to their extraordinary love. Fielder is quite right to not take such claims too seriously but does espy an avenue through which he may be able to reveal Holmes’s person. Fielder recounts to and then re-enacts with Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed Holmes in the Hulu series The Dropout, an interaction in which Billy, unconventionally, asked the documentarian to supply him with a portion of the profits of the film. Fielder seems to believe that if he can substantiate the idea that Holmes knew about and encouraged Billy’s request that she could thereby be unmasked as a manipulator since it would contradict her assertion, on tape to Fielder, that her authenticity can be verified because she has no economic interests in the film and her repeated claims that she, in general, has no interest in money. Fielder stakes his ability to answer the guiding question on his ability to answer this subordinate question saying, “Either this is fully sincere and she actually has no clue about the deal Billy made or she honestly might be the most manipulative person that ever lived.” This leads Fielder to question Billy about whether Holmes knew about his request, something he denies unequivocally. However, when pressed about what details Holmes was aware of, Billy remains ambiguous. The film climaxes with a scene, reconstructed from Fielder’s notes and memory, where Seyfried plays Holmes in the final interaction Holmes had with Fielder. Here, Holmes is directly asked about her knowledge of the deal interspliced with a conversation between Seyfried and Fielder about this prison meeting.

What occurs in the film’s climax is a series of increasingly strange answers which, rather than arriving at a definitive conclusion, demonstrate the impenetrability of the documentary’s subject. This impenetrability arises due to the limitation involved in the very act of interpretation itself. The faultline which cracks the security of the documentarians ability to accurately interpret Holmes comes when Holmes is supposed to have said to Fielder that she knew that Billy was talking about “it”. Seyfried interprets this as Holmes attempting to keep her hands clean of the deal. Upon hearing Seyfried’s interpretation, Fielder himself rewords what Holmes is supposed to have said for her. Fielder rephrases his initial retelling of events changing the word “it” into “something”, rendering a less incriminating statement in which it appears that Holmes was innocent of mercenary motivations. The reason Fielder gives for doing this is that he did not interpret her statements the way Seyfried did, and that therefore the problem is with the statement itself, not his interpretation. This dilemma as to the interpretation of the words Holmes used mirrors the initial crisis-provoking confusion Fielder felt about whether the machines can or had the capability to develop blood tests. Rather than illuminating Holmes’s character, the secondary question ensnares Fielder into yet another semantic puzzle.

Seyfried then asks Fielder a killer question as to whether Fielder might be withholding moments which would support interpreting Holmes as a manipulative, deceitful person in order to protect her. Fielder, defensive, asks why she would think that was the case, to which she responds that he may care about her and not want to hurt her. Fielder insists that he is not putting his feelings into the project and that he is trying to be accurate. However, and this is the great stroke of brilliance of the film, the documentary then cuts to a scene shot around the time of the film’s first section where Fielder and Holmes swim happily in the sea together, something which Holmes had previously said meant a great deal to her. Fielder, with this cut, undermines his own claim to interpret Holmes accurately as this betrays that he does in fact care about her. This is supported by an earlier scene in which he took Seyfried to the house in which Holmes was filmed. There is an odd moment where Fielder stares out of the window at the sea and it cuts to him and Holmes swimming together, as if he were wistfully reminiscing on happy times spent together. This idea is furthered by the fact that Seyfried asks him in the final scene about whether he misses Holmes: a question which he responds to evidently caught off guard and defensive, only able to say how weird he thought the question was.

This is the core insight with which the film attempts to disclose. Rather than providing a definitive answer to the project’s guiding question, the film renounces its own ability to arrive at such a conclusion. Furthermore, this was not the position that the documentary began with but one arrived at by the artists due to their inability to conclusively interpret Holmes and close mutually exclusive, possible interpretations. Fielder, who brings the audience with him, moves from entering the project with certainty as to her intentions into increasing doubt and a final unresolvable, confusing skepticism. The documentarians’ care for Holmes is further evidenced by the fact that Fielder always refers to her as Liz not Elizabeth or Ms. Holmes and various sympathetic scenes where he buys her food in prison, asks if she is ok, and so on. In caring for a subject one’s interpretation of them and the selection of evidence through which they are portrayed is always already colored by their own developing interpretation. At no time do they pierce into a neutral ‘accurate’ reality as to who Holmes is, but rather resign themselves to the realization that their interpretation of her is limited by their intuitions.

In retrospect, we can understand the film as dealing with the problem of interpretation throughout. For example, when Fielder visits Seyfried at a farm they both agree that Holmes could be hiding illuminating information over the phone because her calls are monitored and recorded. Fielder bemoans this state of affairs especially since he is prohibited from bringing filming equipment into the prison. Seyfried immediately offers her services to Fielder saying that she will re-enact whatever is said between him and Holmes. In response, Fielder expresses his concerns saying that while Seyfried is a fantastic actor, she is nevertheless not actually Holmes. Seyfried concedes this but asks a rhetorical question: do you know how many people were convinced that I was actually Holmes. Yet, for Fielder, the point is not to convince people about who Holmes is but to reveal the reality of who she is. Here, Fielder concedes that interpretation, no matter how skillful, lacks the ability to penetrate into reality. Interestingly, Seyfried distances herself from her prior interpretative optimism when Fielder’s scripted re-enactment of the prison conversation begins to criticize The Dropout’s portrayal of Holmes. Holmes lambasts Seyfried’s interpretation and the showrunners for packing their program “full of lies” which she blames for her being bullied while incarcerated. Reading this, and self-admittedly defensive, Seyfried exonerates herself of any responsibility for Holmes’s treatment saying that the fault belongs to Holmes alone and that this is how TV works. Fielder presses Seyfried on a particular scene in which the Holmes character denies test results, establishing her as intentionally deceitful. In response, Seyfried says that Holmes acted as if the scene could have happened and thus that the show’s interpretation of Holmes is a valid possibility. Whereas Seyfried previously held onto the position that performance could accurately interpret Holmes, she retreats to a position in which performance can merely convey a possible interpretation. The documentary thus, retrospectively, throws into question the reliability of its own staged re-enactments. The film can then be pictured as a limited interpretative work containing a collection of increasingly limited interpretations.

What remains for the audience at the film’s end is not a definitive reading as to Holmes’s the person, but a profound skepticism at even the attempt to acquire such a conclusion. This raises profound questions about interpretation and the medium of documentary filmmaking itself. Moreover, the film does not appear to simply let this question stand but takes an express decision against the capability of documentary filmmaking to reach the truth. This is evident in the film’s idiosyncratic and innovative, yet jarring and uncanny camera techniques, in the many awkward remarks made by Fielder, and unusual editing choices. One such example is when Billy is comforting Holmes who, having seen a clip from The Dropout depicting her and her former business partner and boyfriend Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, breaks into tears. Fielder then leaves the room but the camera holds on the door as we listen to Billy saying that he loves her and that she is so good and true. This intimate scene is broken by an abrupt cut to Fielder seemingly listening in on their conversation surrounded by filmmaking equipment. This throws the audience out of the spell of being in an unmediated experience alongside Holmes by reminding them that they are watching a documentary. The film is aware of itself as a documentary and thus the aforementioned restraints that go along with interpreting a subject. The promise of unrestrained access and radical transparency being able to reveal the true Elizabeth Holmes is caught in a labyrinth of unending possible interpretations inherent to the medium.

It is worth noting that the film does not become philosophical. It does not question whether there really is a reality which we can comprehend, whether there is a definitive interpretation as to who Elizabeth Holmes actually is and what her motivations are. Instead, the film, humbly and ingeniously aware of its own limitations, reveals a skepticism of its ability to interpret her accurately. The abstract questions the documentary thereby raises run along the lines of the capacities of documentary filmmaking and interpretation itself.

Works Cited

The Dropout. Created by Elizabeth Meriwether, Hulu, 2022.

You Can See Everything. Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, A24, 2026.