You’d think we’d be weary of flimflam artists, tech vampires and alternative realities by now. But no.
It’s like Gertrude’s lust for Claudius in “Hamlet”: “As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on.”
In a time of deceit — political, algorithmic and every other way — a meditation on deceit has taken the culture by storm.
Meditation is not the right word, actually. It’s more like a film noir thriller, with a manipulative femme fatale, a destructive romance, a man who’s meant to play the fall guy, and an atmospheric cottage by the sea.
The three-hour documentary about Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, “You Can See Everything,” is paradoxically titled, because you can’t see much of anything. (Except her naked narcissistic fiancé preening in the shower.) Holmes is busy obscuring the truth and building an illusory world where her dangerous fraud about comprehensive medical testing with a pinprick of blood was just an innocent hiccup.
“I know I didn’t commit any crime,” she assures the filmmaker Nathan Fielder, training her big, blue Furby eyes on him. She doesn’t think she has ever lied in her life, she says. It was all just a misunderstanding. Never mind the threatening lawyers like David Boies she sicced on anyone who questioned her phantom technology.
Holmes abandoned her Steve Jobs black turtleneck in favor of J. Crew-looking soccer mom sweaters. But she remains the perfect avatar for our age: She promised tech that would help humanity and then unleashed a deception that could have hurt humanity.
Holmes and her partner, who had two children before her 11-year sentence for fraud began in Texas in 2023, wanted a sympathetic documentary charting her last weeks with her family before she got locked up. They stumbled upon Fielder, who directed the movie along with Lance Oppenheim, and ended up starring in it.
Fielder originally did not intend to appear onscreen, but Holmes irresistibly drew him into her web, and the resulting game of cat-and-mouse between the two magicians is astonishing.
The deadpan Fielder is a Canadian-born satirist who worked with Sacha Baron Cohen on the 2018 mockumentary “Who Is America?” and on his own shows, “Nathan for You” on Comedy Central and “The Rehearsal” on HBO, where he has built elaborate ruses. He is a master at spinning his own absurd reality, and so is Holmes.
The sparring of these two raises the question: ls there any point searching for the truth or is it better to settle into our own fractured, subjective realities?
At 30, Holmes became the first self-made female billionaire, after she dropped out of Stanford at 20 and started Theranos. But she’s no role model for women. When she got in trouble she embraced victimhood, turning from a confident Silicon Valley founder who dominated every room into a damsel in distress. In court, she blamed her lover/partner, Sunny Balwani, who got an almost 13-year sentence for helping Holmes defraud investors of more than $700 million. She said he abused her psychologically and sexually and controlled everything, from her clothes to her diet. The jury was unconvinced.
Holmes tries to turn Fielder into a film noir sap, someone who will believe her lies about her lies, be drawn to her emotionally and come to her rescue. And the documentary projects, then calls into question, a scenario where her current lover/partner, Billy Evans, is manipulating her, asking for a cut of the documentary’s profits supposedly behind her back, taking over her X account and putting up foul-mouthed posts pretending to be her, releasing a hologram of Holmes that he nonchalantly acknowledges might be used by some men online for porn.
The woman famous for her guile — suckering George Shultz, Jim Mattis, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch and other brainy older men — plays guileless, acting as if she can’t even scramble eggs without her controlling fiancé’s help, or understand the simplistic joke in the classic Abbott and Costello “Who’s on first?” comedy routine. Fielder jokes that if Holmes had “just said that Theranos was a comedy bit, maybe you could get off scot-free.” The couple talk about building “monuments of love” to each other, but it’s more like monuments of manipulation.
Tyler Shultz, George Shultz’s grandson, who was an intern and researcher at Theranos and then left and blew the whistle on Holmes, said on “CBS Mornings” that Holmes took in Fielder enough to allow doubt to creep in about Holmes’s guilt.
“She knows that she was lying,” Shultz said, “because she created this whole web of lies that you would not have needed to create if you actually believed the lies.”
Shultz said the harm to real patients was horrible and Fielder never laid out the dimensions of her crimes.
“We told people that they had H.I.V. when they did not,” he said. “We told people that they had cancer when they did not. We told expecting mothers that they had lost their unborn child when they had not.”
Amanda Seyfried, who won an Emmy for playing Holmes in Hulu’s “The Dropout,” also wonders if Fielder is too “protective of her.” The actress reprises her role in some scenes in the documentary and visits Holmes’s family after she goes to prison, getting chided by Evans for her Hulu portrayal.
Evans is a handsome, buff man, the scion of a wealthy hotel family who is now determined to work with Liz, as she is known now, to straighten out the problems with her blood-testing method. But as the film goes on, there’s a Dorian Gray effect, where his face grows scarier, twisted into a mask of rage and subterfuge. Is Evans, not Fielder, the sap? As in film noir, the boyfriend carries a rod and is vowing vengeance.
Whether or not you think Fielder isn’t tough enough on Holmes, it is impossible to look away from her. Her unblinking gaze is like the disembodied blue eyes in the haunting billboard in “The Great Gatsby,” and both represent the same thing: moral decay.
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