Well, I saw Nathan Fielder’s documentary You Can See Everything last night, and it’s really a pretty stunning movie. One that’s particularly timely for some of my own personal ponderings.
First, let me give you the premise. Nathan Fielder is a deadpan comic who likes to set up these absurd situations and has had a couple of popular television shows. A couple of years ago, he was contacted by a guy named Billy, who, if I have this straight, is actually married to Elizabeth Holmes.
Elizabeth Holmes, or Liz as they call her in the film, was one of the founders of Theranos, a company that claimed to have developed a device that could run all these health tests with just one drop of blood. The company grew to be worth billions of dollars. Holmes became a superstar because she was a young woman with a strangely deep voice who modeled herself on Steve Jobs.
Problem was, the device couldn’t do what they said it could do. Eventually, she and her business partner and lover, Sunny, were brought up on fraud charges, among other things. After a lengthy court battle, both were found guilty. Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
Billy popped into Holmes’ life just as this news was breaking, roughly seven years before the start of the film. They quickly fell in love. They have two kids. And they are working on some new business venture together.
The film picks up 34 days before she goes to prison. Billy’s offer to Nathan Fielder and the film company A24 is that he can, with his crew, actually stay with them and film the last 34 days of Elizabeth’s freedom. The goal, so they claim, is to show Elizabeth for who she really is, help humanize her, and basically rehabilitate her public image.
Believe it or not, it’s hard to say too much about this film without spoiling several wild twists and turns. But I do think I can say it’s basically a game of cat and mouse.
The question being asked is: Is Elizabeth Holmes a full-on liar? For example, she repeatedly claims that she’s not motivated by money and that her device did what she claimed it did. Fielder repeatedly confronts her on this claim, which then makes you ask the question: Is there something innocent or naively broken about Holmes, and has she just been used as a pawn by her lovers, perhaps again? Is there something broken in her form of communication and her ability to understand how she comes across?
That leads to a fascinating scene where Fielder has her watch Abbott and Costello’s famous Who’s on First? bit and asks her, “Why is it funny?” To which she gives a pretty mystifying answer.
And as the story unfolds, the question isn’t just whether it’s a cat-and-mouse game, or who’s the cat and who’s the mouse, but whether these are two cats, and the mouse being played with is Fielder himself.
The reason this film really hit me, besides just being filmed beautifully and having a wild premise, is that it touches on the issue of people being deluded and perhaps lacking self-awareness.
My career, both ministerially and vocationally, has ended up being about dealing with situations that aren’t what they seem to be on the surface. My background includes my early years working in collections and fraud, and dealing with complicated HR issues. As a pastor, I’ve found myself involved in some pretty horrendous abuse cases, three of which eventually involved me working with the police to varying degrees.
In many of these situations, I was dealing with people who had been accused of something that they swore up and down wasn’t true. And my job was, to the best of my ability, to get to the bottom of it and make a decision on how to move forward.
These cases could be disorienting. The number of sweet, innocent-looking people who lie about crazy things in convincing ways and make you feel crazy for questioning the inconsistencies in their stories is legion.
I’ve dealt with people pretending to be dead loved ones for years to take out loans and credit cards in their names. People who falsely accuse others of abuse only to later admit that they did so.
A lot of the people I’ve worked with, I’ve seen grow cynical. And the best way to avoid that, if you work in these fields, is to always remind yourself that you’re kind of like an emergency room doctor dealing with the most intense cases. It’s usually not like this.
However, that brings me to why I’ve been thinking about deluded, lying people. Maybe I’m just getting older and more experienced, but it seems like the number of people who believe crazy things about themselves, things that are at odds with reality in almost every way, is increasing.
And I’ve been pondering: Is this a matter of mental health, where there’s just something wrong with people’s brains? Or is this willful deception?
It’s had me thinking about things like where Paul warns about impostors deceiving and being deceived, and God giving people over to delusions.
And one of my big takeaways is pretty simple: If you engage in lies for long enough, or are allowed to believe lies for long enough, you start to think of them as if they are true, as if they are reality.
Which is why one of the greatest ministries of a parent, a pastor, or someone in some form of leadership is doing the hard work of confronting someone and helping them see the truth about themselves.
Parents who aren’t willing to call out their children are sentencing them to a life of unreality, which will eventually bring them heartache. This actually comes up later in the movie.
There is a fairly understated scene with Elizabeth Holmes’ parents where you can tell that they love their daughter but believe some claims she’s made that they shouldn’t. And now she’s ended up with a man who is a deluded, crazy person, perhaps for the second time.
Anyhow, it’s a really good movie.
I will say that there is a totally unnecessary three- to four-second scene where one of the characters is showering naked and you see everything. It’s not the woman, and it’s not sexual.
And if I had to guess, I would say that scene is left in there to show you the sort of hypocrisy or contradiction of what’s happening in the documentary. In one way, they will let you see everything, even themselves fully nude. But in reality, they’re trying to hide the truth from you, and nothing is as it seems. It’s not a bad metaphor for our age.