Comment by antasvara
5 hours ago
Nathan Fielder is pretty well-known for his work in The Rehearsal and Nathan for You. Nathan for You resides in the docu-comedy genre, where you take advantage of real people's reactions to absurd situations for comedic effect. Other examples are things like Kitchen Nightmares (where Gordon Ramsey goes into real restaurants and "fixes" them). It's a well-done version of the idea, but not revolutionary IMO.
The Rehearsal, however, extends the idea further. In that show, he helps real people "rehearse" for hard conversations. It involves Fielder building extravagant sets and having absurdly detailed set-ups with multiple actors, then running the conversation multiple times. What makes this "different" is that now the real person is partially in on it? Like, they know that they're on a set. They know that this is a simulation. So the show is more "meta" than previous entries in the genre, opening up other avenues for humour.
I say this because You Can See Everything is best understood as a further extension of those projects. Even the name indicates this, because by nature of a documentary, you can't see everything. You have a real person in Elizabeth Holmes, being interviewed by a person in Fielder that's known for his stunts taking advantage of "real people," where he watches fictionalized versions of Holmes with Holmes herself? Viewed in light of his previous projects, this feels like an extension of them.
But even with that, I think the setup does allow you to see something real in Holmes. She also knows how people "want" to see her! So there's also a sort of meta-narrative there too, where you know Holmes is on her best behavior to try and dispel the narrative from those fictionalized TV characterizations. The fact that she comes off poorly in the documentary says something, even accounting for the fact that Fielder is trying to sell a narrative.
It's a real mind game, but I think it's representative of Holmes because of that. She is going to jail for a fraud that amounts to a similar sort of mind game, she agrees to a documentary to show herself differently, but that documentary is also a mind game. Wild stuff.
> Wild stuff.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I fail to see anything that seems particularly "wild" in a film featuring a bunch of insipid mind games. Mind games are not exactly new or fascinating, you find them almost everywhere you go these days.
There is no longer any mystery about Holmes. As everyone already knows, she was a fraudster convicted of criminal fraud. The whole story of Theranos has been covered at length in the press, including an award-winning book that was published several years ago [0].
This so-called documentary seems like another reality show featuring a former celebrity with little self-awareness, who is incapable of seeing how absurd and ridiculous she appears now that she is no longer powerful.
[0] John Carreyrou (2018) Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Knopf
I cannot imagine being so hostile towards curiosity. You approach this as "I already know everything there is to know, and therefore this documentary (that I haven't seen) has no value".
I was merely citing the known facts in this case. The facts have been well-established in the criminal trial and in the press coverage about Holmes. The facts are voluminous, and of all this mountain of evidence, very little of it is featured in this so-called documentary.
1 reply →
>she was a fraudster convicted of criminal fraud...
>a former celebrity with little self-awareness, who is incapable of seeing how absurd and ridiculous she appears now that she is no longer powerful...
As someone who has seen it, there's simply no way both of these descriptions of her are true. If you believe that she's guilty of everything she's accused of doing, she's incredibly self-aware and her entire participation in this movie is a desperate Hail Mary attempt to save face in the court of public opinion. At one point in the movie Fielder is having a conversation with another person and says something along the lines of "She's either innocent or maybe the most manipulative person in human history". The movie isn't as concerned with a true journalistic investigation of her guilt or innocence, there are better accounts of that elsewhere and plenty of people who can tell that story better than Fielder. What he seems to be most interested in is the absurd commitment to she has to her claimed innocence and how effective that is or isn't.
> If you believe that she's guilty of everything she's accused of doing, she's incredibly self-aware
There was a mountain of evidence against Holmes, and she was convicted in a criminal trial. So it seems like a safe assumption that she was guilty.
Does it follow then that, because she is almost certainly guilty, that she must be "incredibly self-aware"? Of course not. It's just as likely that she is totally lacking in self-awareness, and that she simply does not know when to shut her mouth because she has no idea how stupid she sounds.
11 replies →