There has been no shortage of coverage on Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley fraudster whose biotech startup Theranos reached a peak valuation of $9 billion in 2014 before its supposedly groundbreaking blood test machine was revealed to be vaporware. Books, magazine articles, documentaries, TV dramatizations—the exposés have piled up high.
So, you might ask yourself, why the hype for the forthcoming You Can See Everything, yet another documentary about Holmes, and one that spans three hours?
The excitement is thanks to Nathan Fielder, one of the film’s directors. (Fielder codirected the documentary with Lance Oppenheim). Fielder is a cult-favorite television auteur whose devotees have awaited his showdown with Holmes ever since rumors about him visiting her in prison surfaced last year.
Now that Fielder appears poised to break the containment of an obsessed fan base and conquer the cineplex, it behooves you to get caught up. This will not be a typical documentary: Fielder has made a career of heightened unreality, sowing confusion wherever he goes. To give you some notion of what to expect from his analysis of Holmes, here’s a rundown of his unusual and captivating style.
Business Bona Fides
One reason Fielder makes sense as an interlocutor for big tech’s most notorious con woman is his own history of corporate chicanery. In his breakout TV series Nathan for You (2013–2017), he contrived and implemented bizarre publicity stunts for struggling small businesses. (While he jokes that he “graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades,” the fact remains he did graduate, unlike Holmes, a Stanford University dropout.)
Andrew Bricker, an associate professor of English at the University of Ghent and academic coordinator for the research project Democratic Literacy and Humour, writes in an email that it’s important to recognize that, throughout his career, Fielder has always played the same altered version of himself, leaving us unsure just who he really is.
Fielder “has made the borderlands of persona and person so ambiguous, so indeterminable, so indefinable, that none of us is entirely in on the joke,” Bricker says.
Nathan for You and Fielder’s subsequent HBO series The Rehearsal, Bricker explains, cast him as “a kind of outlandish problem-solver, someone possessed of what I sometimes call the engineer’s brain, which sees the world strictly through the radically simplified framework of problems and solutions, even if the solutions themselves, ouroboros-style, always lead to new problems.”