A Character I Created: An Analysis of You Can See Everything
“I think she’s really good at telling you what you need to hear to keep you going.”
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR You Can See Everything AND MENTION OF S/A
The latest unsettling blockbuster, You Can See Everything, has resonated with audiences in a way that few documentaries ever could on such a scale. The postmodern dive into the Theranos CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, co-directed by fellow star Nathan Fielder and Primetime director Lance Oppenheim, is a dizzying narrative that descends into a chasm of uncertainty and misdirection. As such, it’s easy to get lost in the excessive detail and disorienting narrative that plays out in the near three hour run time. All this hinges on its focus on Holmes, whose business venture with partner Sunny Balwani lead to being found guilty of defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars – claiming they created a machine that could run multitudinous health tests from a small amount of blood. The central struggle of You Can See Everything can then be viewed as the following: how do you get reliable information from a party most famously known for trading in deceit?
Truth be told, Elizabeth Holmes is in far less of this film than I expected. The first main portion of the movie includes her and her husband, Billy Evans, inviting Nathan Fielder into their home to document the lead up to Holmes’ eleven and a half year long sentence in federal prison. As such, the movie’s last third and entire climax then almost entirely lacks Elizabeth in the flesh. While also being a result of the conditions of the situation, this also plays strongly into much of the ideas that You Can See Everything flirts with. While Fielder documents this the lead up to prison, the three seem to put a particularly fine point on one quote from a New York Times interview where Holmes allegedly says that “They aren’t playing me, they are playing a character I created” on the HBO biographic miniseries The Dropout. While the couple denies this quote ever being stated by Holmes, the movie centers it as indicative of one of its most important ideas: everyone involved in the situation seems to have constructed their own version of who Elizabeth Holmes really is.
The initial version of Holmes comes from herself. She’s personable towards Fielder, albeit spacey and vague in her speech and demeanor. She insists that the version of her that the public perceived was false – groomed by publicists and photographers. The images of her from those contexts seem to cause distress and represent a loss of agency. Similarly, we interpret at the surface level that Holmes’ life has been robbed of agency; it can be seem from the sexual assault that her father tells Fielder about to the imbalanced power dynamic between her and Balwani in their messy relationship. She clearly wants us as viewers to see her in this rental property, balancing childcare and her continued work on Theranos, as her supposed “true self” – (supposedly) divorced from people speaking for her.
It’s in this environment that we observe a pivotal part of the run time – the Abbot and Costello scene. Fielder and Holmes are talking about an infamous quote in which she said to an interviewer that the company’s tech “can” run any test. She attests that she meant any test would be possible provided that the correct samples and conditions were collected and processed, whereas investors (and the public) interpreted the statement as an indication of current capabilities. In an effort to illustrate this miscommunication, Fielder shows the couple the iconic “Who’s On First” comedy routine. Upon observing Holmes’ inability to get the humor in the comedic duo’s routine, we can then read that she perhaps doesn’t have the communication capabilities as most neurotypical people. This feeds into the read of Holmes that she never intended on doing anything but helping people, but, if that’s the case, why can’t she or Billy point to any main reason that the company failed? Is it possible that this innocent, naive persona is a front to vindicate herself and/or her public image?
As for Billy, a construction of his own Holmes is far more literal. Before she goes off to prison, the couple create a full body scan of Holmes – a process that reminds her of the trauma she had around getting photographs taken of her during the Theranos bubble, clearly triggering her. We are told that this is to create an AI version of herself that can stay behind and allow their children to still have their mother in their life. Later on, once Holmes is brought to federal prison in Texas, we see Evans then use this scan to create a simulacrum of Holmes that’s available to anyone. At the same time, he’s posting as her on Twitter and clearly courting a right wing audience (I will remind you that “Holmes” had pushed for a Trump pardon late in 2025). All the while, Evans claims to speak for her while she’s in prison and claimed to have a mental connection with her that surpassed the physical. It’s in that dinner scene where we discover that the ever-controlling Evans has complete power of attorney over Holmes and intends on using it to the fullest extent of his ability. This level of influence he seems to have over her flies directly in the face of the liberated persona that she carried before going to prison.
Throughout the whole runtime, Billy is excessively controlling when it comes to the flow of information and access to Holmes. In the effort of manipulating the perception of his partner, he regularly interrupts interviews conducted by Fielder whenever he seems to be getting too close to details he wants to keep hidden or obscured. Before the filming even started, he attempts to get a portion of the movie’s profits – a weird attempt at a power move that mirrors other choices the couple makes like leaving Fielder an empty bed frame after inviting him to stay or blaming the film crew for internet issues within the rental property. These all add up to create a portrait of a man desperate for control and a desire to influence the supposed truth. We watch him regularly make moves and decisions that we expect to shake Holmes’ faith in him (misrepresenting her in depictions, using supposedly traumatic photos that were mentioned earlier in promotional material, utilizing their work together on his own company, attempting to take money for their appearance (potentially creating a vast conflict of interest), etc.), but it’s revealed that none of this shakes her conviction in her partner, claiming by the end of the movie that her idea of God himself is the love the two of them share. She seems to have bought into these constructions of her that he crafts throughout the runtime.
That said, it’s clear to Fielder, and therefore the audience, that the way Evans constructs these pseudo-Elizabeths are not true to form for her personality as we saw it previously. We follow Nathan Fielder much further than we would follow a documentary’s director, making this film a lot closer in framing to the works of Michael Moore (lol) or a documentary like Tickled. As such, we begin to see a construction of who Elizabeth Holmes is from his perspective. Despite evidence that Elizabeth was lying about Theranos in the form of an interview with a business partner of Billy’s, we see Fielder’s sympathy for Holmes and her place in what seems like a overly-controlling relationship begin to cloud his ability to be objective. We can see this in the contrast between him telling The Dropout star Amanda Seyfried (who gets wrapped up in the situation by Fielder after Holmes goes to prison, initially just to re-enact Holmes for the film) before the dinner confrontation with Evans to not get sucked into Holmes’ narrative compared to her reminding Fielder of the same idea they are running through the transcript of his final visit with Holmes in prison (we are told regularly that Holmes can not be filmed or recorded while serving her time). It’s clear that, somewhere in the last third of You Can See Everything, Fielder has crafted an overly-sympathetic read of Holmes’ character, losing his objectivity in the process. As a surrogate for the audience, this allows us to fall into the same trap before the film asks us in the end to analyze these assumptions.
Seyfried’s involvement in the project then presents another literal construct of Holmes, in that many scenes where Nathan Fielder could not record Holmes had to be re-enacted by her and other actors. However close to detail these scenes end up, doubt looms over these recreations, as Fielder in the climax of the movie begins to doubt what Holmes said to him versus what he put in his script – where even the smallest of details imply differences in what Holmes knew about the behind the scenes payment agreement and other details. This then casts uncertainty onto any scene where we are asked to view Seyfried as Holmes and any scene where we do not hear or see Liz herself saying anything. Seyfried’s constructed analog is evocative of the one she played on The Dropout, a depiction that Holmes attests to being inaccurate and one that she blames on her poor treatment in prison from guards and inmates alike. This attitude from Holmes is clearly off-putting to a now defensive Seyfried, who goes from empathizing with Elizabeth’s plight as a woman in a controlling relationship to doubtful of Holmes’ narratives while in a self-protective posture. Just like Fielder, her read on Holmes is incomplete do to her own feelings clouding her judgement in the opposite direction.
So, somewhere between all of these simulacrums, can we find a clear image of who Elizabeth Holmes, the face of Theranos, really is? Honestly, I feel that I know even less about who Holmes is and what her intents were than I did going in. If anything, the movie enlightens us more to the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of just about everyone else. We see Fielder’s empathy for Liz bloom. We see the extent of hunger for power and supposed retribution within Billy Evans, a seemingly-dishonest entrepreneur in his own right (with an affluent Mormon upbringing he’s not eager to discuss). We see the emotional baggage and subconscious guilt that Amanda Seyfried carries around her fictionalized depiction of Holmes. Hell, I’d argue we learn a bit about A24’s dedication to the project by their willingness to pay out Evans (as well as insight into the true power dynamic between Evans and Holmes, as the movie’s final moments arguably imply she talked Evans out of that deal). All that aside though, we walk away after supposedly seeing everything without a clear image of Holmes after the dust settles.
I would argue that, in a way, it doesn’t matter what Holmes intended or why she did what she did – she still defrauded investors and sold the public on a mistruth. Her case can be framed as a microcosm of a fractured reality we’ve been living in since 2016 (or earlier). Holmes (whose father was involved in similarly failed startup Enron) and Evans belong to and are in communication with the same class of wealthy power brokers like Elon Musk, a figure who’s existence seems to haunt this movie in a few crucial scenes. Figures like Billy Evans use their capital and resources to build tools to take any sense of reality and convert it into subjective, personalized half-truths and siloed off worlds devoid of objectivity. Look how the AI construct of Holmes being offloaded on to the internet and how that mirrors the upper class’ investments into AI technology as a form of polarization and customized reality. By segmenting truth, those with corporate and political powers are able to use the same means of gaslighting and narrative control regularly utilized by Evans throughout the runtime of the documentary. That uneasy ending of Fielder observing Holmes playing with her family is stark, leaving him lost in what parts of the canon these Silicon Valley snakes craft are bullshit or not. The audience is left to ponder what the truth could ever look like in a modern environment of obfuscation and anti-materialism – viewed through the lens of someone we are told can “…[tell] you what you need to hear to keep you going,” and we see that Fielder is kept going and then some. We are left to ponder who is who they claim to be and who is just playing a character they created.
And that’s probably scarier than anything you can put in a slasher flick.
