Seeing Is Not Believing: A Review of You Can See Everything

In light of the new feminist hysteria over Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, the Cornell 7 allegations, and Shane Gillis’s joke about women’s gym outfits, along with the weird doomsday predictions of suspicious Big Tech geniuses like Dario Amodei, it makes sense that the new documentary You Can See Everything has generated so much attention and acclaim since it combines both strands in the news cycle, feminism and Big Tech.

The film centers on Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos who was sentenced to more than a decade in prison for defrauding investors of half a billion dollars. At one point, Holmes was considered a kind of feminist messiah primed to overtake even the most accomplished men in Big Tech. When it came out that her new device, which was supposed to do a vast array of lab tests from one drop of blood, didn’t actually work as advertised, she then became the poster child of Silicon Valley deception and was roundly shamed and denounced.

So was Holmes really this diabolical puppet master who conned so many powerful old elites out of their money and manipulated everyone around her, or was she duped by men who exploited her feminine naivety? To find out, comedian Nathan Fielder and a camera crew follow Holmes and her family starting in the final weeks before her prison sentence begins. Despite the many interviews he has with her and her fiancé Billy Evans along with her parents and the actress Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the TV series The Dropout, the answer to whether Holmes was a victim or victimizer remains unclear.

What is clear is the moral messiness of post-Christian modern culture, which lacks a shared moral code. While all the characters know what it means to lie, it is unclear what moral weight one should assign to their lies and what value there is in being honest. Most of the time, Holmes seems to genuinely believe her own innocence. At most, she might have used misleading language, but this might have happened because her mind works differently than most people—indeed, she may be autistic.

Yet, even if one wants to absolve Holmes of culpability, it is also evident that she makes no effort to correct the “misunderstandings” that followed from her claims. She insists that she simply trusted everyone to understand her and never suspected that she was being taken the wrong way. Whether it’s investors, her fiancé, or Fielder, she demonstrates that she is able to gain their trust by showing them how much she trusts them first.

Obviously, it helps that Holmes is a woman. Modern feminism has conditioned everyone to believe her, even after her conviction. And even if she did lie, the thinking goes, she was entitled to do so because men do it all the time and the industry is sexist. Surely, it must be the men around her who are at fault.

As writer Sasha Stone explains in her review of the film, this implicit assumption ends up being the major weak point of the film. The more Fielder gives Holmes the benefit of the doubt, the more he casts suspicion on Billy, who takes care of Holmes as he tries to launch his own Theranos-like blood-testing startup. Understandably, Billy does not show the same openness as his partner and increasingly comes off as overprotective and occasionally exploitative, trying to profit from Holmes’s name and original idea.

Billy comes under increased suspicion when he confronts Amanda Seyfried about her vile comments about Charlie Kirk after his assassination. In typical leftist fashion, Seyfried immediately assumes the worst of Billy and says as much to Fielder. To his credit, Fielder does not judge Billy for his politics, but mainly expresses annoyance at his interference with the documentary.

Although it would be easy to condemn Billy for taking advantage of Holmes, the facts tell a different story. Despite her notoriety and long prison sentence, Billy remains faithful to Holmes, agrees to take care of the kids, and even moves to Texas so that he and the kids can visit her regularly. For good reason, he remains guarded with Fielder, seeing the kind of prejudice shown by Hollywood types like Seyfried. There is also the key detail that he met her only after the Theranos scandal had broken and had nothing to do with her crimes.

Nevertheless, at a certain point, determining any person’s innocence in this story becomes exhausting, which becomes the second major weakness of the film. It is way too long (close to three hours) and consists of way too many close-up shots of people’s faces. A large portion of the movie consists of drawn-out scenes of Fielder awkwardly holding eye contact with his interlocutors, waiting in vain for them to flinch. In the absence of a rational moral code, this apparently becomes the best means of determining whether a person is speaking the truth or not.

It also renders the argument of anyone’s duplicity more or less moot. Holmes and her fiancé may be pathological liars using Fielder to make them look good, or they may actually be good but unlucky people who hope to convince Fielder that they have been wrongly condemned. Even if trying to figure this out makes for an interesting film, the impossibility of arriving at a definite answer prevents the audience from apprehending greater truths or insights about the importance of honesty for a meaningful and happy life.

For better and for worse, You Can See Everything offers more questions than answers and touches on many popular issues without taking a clear position on any of them. Aside from its length and feminist leanings, it is an otherwise great film that will both provoke and entertain the audience. While it mostly remains open and inconclusive in its overall message, it does make one important point: a person can be allowed to see everything and still come away learning nothing.