This article contains spoilers for “You Can See Everything.”
Among the many twists and turns of “You Can See Everything,” the documentary about the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, there is one scene that has become the focus of theories — and theories about those theories.
Early on in the movie, Holmes and her fiancé, Billy Evans, are seen chatting with Fielder in the kitchen of their temporary home, weeks before Holmes is expected to report to prison in 2023 for defrauding investors. Holmes is whisking eggs in a yellow bowl or, to be more precise, is lightly dipping a fork in and out of a bowl of eggs, while she tells Fielder about her schedule for the next few days.
For a few seconds, Evans stares intently at what she’s doing before walking over, grabbing the bowl from her and whisking the eggs himself. It’s a seemingly tiny act, but one that bemuses Fielder.
“Why’d you take the eggs over?” Fielder asks. “What was she doing wrong with mixing the eggs?”
Evans explains that she wasn’t whisking the eggs vigorously enough.
“She, like, does it very lightly,” he says, as he continues to mix. “Really wanna make sure that they’re well stirred.”
He hands the bowl of stirred eggs back to Holmes, who takes over again. Then he adds, “She’s got it, she’s got it.”
In another setting, that small moment might have been looked over, perhaps chalked up to differing preferences, but, through the lens of Fielder and Oppenheim, it seems to crystallize one of the film’s central conundrums about its subject: Is Holmes being manipulated, or is she in control of her image?
Online, some speculated that Holmes deliberately stirred the eggs gently, knowing that Evans would take over and, in turn, make her appear like a pushover or a victim. Others said they saw Evans as a controlling partner who stripped her of autonomy in that moment and in other ways.
Those are all pertinent interpretations of an otherwise insignificant kitchen moment in large part because Holmes has a track record of painting herself as a victim. During her trial in 2021, Holmes and her legal team tried to shift blame onto Ramesh Balwani, her ex boyfriend and second-in-command at Theranos, the blood diagnostics tech company she had founded, saying he had called the shots and manipulated her. (She was ultimately found guilty of defrauding investors, and Balwani is serving his own prison sentence.)
At the same time, as the documentary unfolds over almost three hours, the audience comes to learn that Evans is, in fact, exerting control over Holmes’s image in a number of ways, including by having power of attorney over her and posting online on her behalf, which Holmes says in the film she trusts him to do.
The egg scene was a “bone-chilling” moment for Chloe Fineman, the comedian and former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, because it “perfectly encapsulated how spooky Evans is,” she said in an interview. But, she added, “I keep thinking about it, and I’m like, Is she conning all of us and pretending she doesn’t know how to whisk an egg? That’s not how you whisk an egg, Elizabeth.”
Fineman watched the documentary with other “S.N.L.” cast members. After the screening, she said they all came away obsessed with two moments: when Holmes appears perplexed by a classic comedy routine that Fielder shows her, and “the egg,” as Fineman called it.
In the documentary, the audience learns that even the actress Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the Hulu series “The Dropout” and reprised the role for the film, is seemingly taken aback as she watches that egg scene on Fielder’s laptop.
On Tuesday, Fineman posted a parody video on Instagram, including a scene of herself, as an unblinking, wide-eyed Holmes, poorly stirring eggs. Like Fineman, others on social media have turned “the egg” into internet gold. Some suggest re-creating that moment as a Halloween costume, complete with a yellow bowl of eggs. Even Instacart has joined in, posting a video of someone stirring an egg in a yellow bowl. The caption reads, “Never let anyone tell you how to mix your eggs.”
The egg scene also resonates because it echoes what many domestic partners might bicker about. Fineman, for example, said she did intervene when her boyfriend didn’t chop carrots the right way.
The comedian Rachel Scanlon watched the movie with her wife within the first few days of its release in a packed theater. The egg scene, she said, received loud, shocked laughter from the audience.
“My wife, who’s never heard of Nathan, or doesn’t really know his style, turned to me and was like, ‘Is this a comedy?’” Scanlon said in an interview. “We woke up the next day, we were going to go hiking and we were scrambling eggs, so I start joking with her. I was like, ‘Am I whisking this too slow for you, babe? Like, are you even gonna say anything?’”
Scanlon posted a video of her and her wife vigorously whisking eggs on Instagram, with the caption, “Does your partner pass the scramble egg test?”
For Colette Fehr, a couples therapist and a co-host of the podcast “Insights From the Couch,” it’s the way that Evans grabbed the bowl that felt like a red flag. “Even though it’s only whisking eggs,” she said over the phone, “if you feel free to transgress someone’s boundaries and grab something away from them and take over, because they’re not doing it right? That’s a template of behavior.”
But, she went on, “to me, there’s something symbiotic in this, too,” because Holmes “doesn’t seem perturbed by it at all — it does not bother her.”
When it came to Holmes’s prior relationship with Balwani, the evidence has not shown that he was running the show, said John Carreyrou, the reporter who first exposed the falsehoods at the core of Theranos for The Wall Street Journal (Carreyrou now works at The New York Times) and the author of “Bad Blood,” which tracked the downfall of the company.
In reality, the couple “ran the company together,” Carreyrou said, and their personal correspondence showed “that they consulted about everything, and whenever there needed to be a final decision, she was the one who took it.”
The post Is There a Correct Way to Mix Eggs? appeared first on New York Times.
