Comment by jdorfman
20 hours ago
No one including my wife was interested in seeing it so I went by myself. It was long, but interesting. The author hits the nail on the head:
“You sit there believing you’re watching a documentary about a woman who deceived the world, only to discover that you’re also watching a demonstration of how easy it is to deceive you.”
I couldn’t agree more.
I haven't seen the documentary, but I have a background in media and art. There are a couple of ways I could understand this.
The first is the general public's lack of understanding of documentaries as an art form. Documentaries are essentially narratives presented as unfiltered reality ("facts"). Most folks don't truly understand this, or they lose sight of it through suspension of disbelief. That is, they don't know or forget about the film crew, editing, framing, and other artistic choices that form what they see. The illusion becomes invisible; they see only "facts" rather than a constructed narrative designed to guide their interpretation.
Second, filmmakers often use deception as an artistic device in documentaries. Mockumentaries are a pretty clear example of subverting the conventions of documentary filmmaking. It's a bit meta for most folks, so I could see how someone without much media literacy might totally miss this. But it's definitely a very interesting artistic choice given the subject matter.
The achiles heel of the documentaries as a form of propaganda & psyops (aka "narratives presented as reality") is that they have a profound dependence on aural cues for manipulating the audiance. It is difficult to be subtle regarding that intent when sound is involved.
So pay attention to the sound track and adjust your "suspension of disbelief" accordingly.
Yeah, the documentary was going hard on the dissonant horror movie strings right from the opening.
And near the end, that bubbly euphoric/revelatory ascending arpeggio was a common motif.
I am lucky that I am very sensitive to emotionally manipulative music in contexts where I don't want to be emotionally manipulated by music.
In general, it would help anyone to know more about the craft of how filmmakers get people to feel emotions.
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Fielder has said that setting the tone with music in documentaries is among the most important things he does. I also find that unsettling.
My favorute example of a "documentary" whose sound stage reveals it as a psyop very obviously is the 2007 "Zeitgeist: The Movie".
To be fair though it is A24 and I don't know if they're capable of making music that isn't extremely tense and eerie, it's all they do. So keeping in mind that the movie, clocking in at nearly 3 hours, would have been too dry and possibly still fairly unsettling without music, I thought the score was actually quite fun.
Nathan spent a good deal of time openly trying to decide if he was being deceived or not and while the music drove the tension, by the end of the movie it was clear that he had an open internal conflict about whether to trust her or not, and ultimately left that choice up to the viewer.
This isn't confined to "documentaries" - everything we accept as unfiltered 'facts' must be from 'a certain point of view'. Consider the Canon illustration from the article. Those present a man from different lighting, angles and perspectives. No matter how much a photographer might want to convey objective truth, a picture will always be from some perspective and lighting.
The same can be said for the news we watch. Or the history we read. Or the stories we tell each other. In 2026, we have swung too far toward the fanciful end of the spectrum of storytelling. We're now beset on all sides by BS generators (both human and artificial) and it's more important than ever to carefully handle truth in our stories.
But make no mistake - the teller of a story is absolutely crafting a reality for you. It's on you to decide whether you trust the narrator, or not.
> No matter how much a photographer might want to convey objective truth, a picture will always be from some perspective and lighting.
A workaround is to always shoot everyone the same. If a journalist or interviewer grows a reputation, they can show everyone "on level ground" by keeping the pose, lighting, etc... constant.
It's one reason that long-form YouTube interviewers like Lex Friedman are so popular with a more discerning crowd.
"But he's so bland, monotonous, and boring!" cry the haters.
"Yes! That's the point!"
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Where would Ancient Aliens fall into this lack of understanding?
One of the most stunning things to me is that most people do not recognize film cuts as breaks in time. The classic example of a guy shooting a basketball and then a cut to the ball going in, and 90% of the population says "Yeah, I saw the video, he made the shot".
Most modern people would laugh at those who scuttled away from the Lumiere's approaching train back in 1896, but in fact they are really not that superior mentally.
This is like saying it's stunning that fish don't know they're wet, imo
Growing up in a very high-functioning and very dysfunctional family, I felt that a lot of people were missing the basic truth. Even the film seemed to circle it without really understanding it.
Elizabeth Holmes doesn't know her own center. She responds to the people around her; everything she does is to please her partners and/or the internalized expectations of her family. In the psychological parlance, she is an extreme fawner with narcissistic traits.
Such people are, in a sense, masters of deceit, but once you understand that they lack a real center outside of how others perceive them (and that they also have real feelings, even if their notions of love are profoundly confused), there's no longer an enigma. You know exactly what you'd looking at.
I met and spent a lot of time messaging and hanging out irl with a person this.
Its so weird because at one point they really had me and I remarked to them that what I liked about them eas they were always up for it and openminded.
Turns out they were just telling you what you wanted to hear and reflecting your desires back at you while trying to capitalize on new business ideas and have you contribute food/supplies for their gatherings.
Well said. I agree with you.
I had no interest in seeing it until I read this article. This sold me.
I didn't knew it existed before reading. Still, I have no interest in watching it.
What was deceitful about it?
They show Holmes reluctantly watching the movie "The Dropout" which is a dramatized version of "the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes" starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes.
Later in "You Can See Everything" Amanda Seyfried literally becomes an important character in the documentary including voicing her opinions and impressions, arguing with and challenging Holmes' husband Billy (they have just met for the first time) and talking at length with Fielder about his opinions and impressions.
This inclusion of Seyfried in this manner ruined for me any chance of this film feeling like a "documentary." This is the point for me where the film went "off-the-rails" and begins to feel like a very confusing experiment in audience manipulation.
It suddenly feels contrived because of this.
But the question was how is this deceitful? Like, when someone says a documentary is deceitful, I assume there’s some important information the documentary didn’t include, or provided outright false information. I get that the documentary went in a direction you didn’t like. I just saw it this afternoon, and didn’t feel the same way, but I’m still processing it and I do find your opinion interesting. But unless you are saying this is, like, false advertising, I don’t see how that qualifies as deceitful.
Isn't that typical of Nathan's work? To mess with the viewer.
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I had the same question for the author of the article, but it's understandable that people are going to be cagey answering this question because they may not want to give away spoilers.
To a documentary?
If anything that's the part that convinces me it's more than just a documentary, the fact that people apparently don't want to spoil what happens.
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Spoiler she goes to prison
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I'm guessing it's because she's still trying to control the narrative even though she's literally just waiting until her prison date.
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In my experience with Fielder material, the only truth is what you said. I never know if what I see and hear is real or some flavor (if not entirely) acting.
It's not a particularly strong value proposition.
If I buy a security product, and the seller sends me nothing, therefore showing how easy it is to scam me. Are they somehow less of a scammer, did I actually buy anything of value? Are they raising awareness of the problem? Or are they just the problem?
People pay magicians to be deceived for entertainment.
And whores for cheap trix
Neither you nor the author are saying how you were deceived. I think neither of you are being genuine
Both just apologists for obvious scumbags