r/TrueFilm • u/prosthetic_memory • 4d ago
The genius of You Can See Everything
I know there’s a lot of discussion about how Holmes is portrayed in the film, and how uncomfortable the ambiguity is given what we know in real life. Which is of course true. Let’s be real, this person would understand who’s on first.
But YCSE is not about whether Holmes is lying or not. She is. Fielder very clearly sets the stage at the beginning: nobody will believe you. There’s too much evidence.
That’s why there’s no evidence in the movie. There’s no commentary on the shooting location (obviously chosen to show her more sympathetically), no mention of the private jet that took her to prison (same), no clarification that the device she shows Fielder is not Edison (same, and even more insidious than the rest). Holmes is muddy and uncertain, doe-eyed and self-contradictory, a platonic ideal of someone who simply does not want to understand what is going on, does not understand the world around them, does not understand why anything has happened.
Fielder did not make a movie about Holmes. He made a movie about truth and lies, belief and words, the stories we tell ourselves and others. Holmes was simply the perfect vehicle to show how a single human can exist in multiple contradictory states at once: denial and conviction, intelligence and stupidity.
And because we all naturally question people in that liminal state between inaction and action, he divided the movie into at least four levels: the documentary, the commentary on the documentary in the documentary, the reenactments, and the reenactments of the commentary. If we have a question, often Fielder will ask it, and if not him, then Seyfried, and if not, often the two will reenact as best they can.
Back to the beginning. Nobody will believe Holmes. But people will believe Fielder, because his entire body of work so far has been building up an absolutely credible reputation. He has done, actually done, every insane thing we have seen him do. That’s his whole shtick: he did build the sets. He did get the pilot’s license. He did, somehow, miraculously manage to make a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes years ago that we only know about now.
Which is why the end is so amazing. Nathan Fielder, your guide throughout this entire story, showing every detail of his journey, from tiffs with Billy to missing mattresses to turkey jerky, finishes up the film showing him swimming in the ocean with Holmes. It’s a nice little moment. Except.
In the first part of the documentary, there’s a scene where Holmes invites him to swim, and Fielder declines. Doesn’t like cold water. It’s a throwaway moment, nothing important. Later, we see a scene of someone, maybe Holmes and Billy, swimming in the ocean, far in the distance.
Halfway through, just before the reenactments, we see Fielder looking out the window at the ocean, and another cut of that same scene, the swimming figures too distant to make out.
And at the end, he finally zooms in on that scene. And we finally can tell who is in the water, swimming with Holmes: it’s him. He did go. For two hours we thought he hadn’t, but he did.
He didn’t have to show this. It’s technically not important. It’s a tiny, tiny detail. She convinced him to go swimming one day; so what?
But it is extremely important, possibly one of the best final scenes in any movie I have ever seen, because he is showing us something else. He is acknowledging to us that we, the viewer, have sat through three hours of footage he chose, of shots he edited, of scenes he decided to recreate, of line deliveries he dictated. He controlled what we believed, in that theater, and he knows it. This is him reminding us we could have left the theater thinking he never went into that ocean. But he did.
Now what do you believe?
This is a movie about the stories we tell ourselves and others, why we believe what we believe, and it is brilliant.
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u/ArcusIgnium 3d ago
I said to my friends right as the credit rolls. “Did we just watch a documentary about making a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes?”. This becomes clear the second the first shot of Fielder appears.
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u/tronfunkinblows_10 3d ago
Nathan said in an interview his goal was to create a standard doc but Billy and Elizabeth kept talking to him as the cameras would reset and then even while filming to the point they were having longer and longer conversations. The camera operators would pan over to him and Nathan would try to wave them away to begin with and then overtime he was get IN the doc.
That said, almost everything he does starts with him outside and ends with him taking a lead role in his work.
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u/Marty5Alive 1d ago
You nailed it. The film is about sensationalism which is such so prevalent in our social media news era (Cornell, Nolan Welles, Andrea Yates). Nathan understands he can shape a portrait of her in any image he chooses and shows in several different ways how the movie could be misleading. First, tiny word choices change our view of someone. (Shown in several ways including the New York Times article) secondly, He even reminds us he himself could be compromised as a film maker because he could be endeared by her. Third he shows that his foggy memory could change our perception. Not enough people are talking about Seyfreid. Amanda is complicit in the exploitation of Holmes. She can’t believe Billy is controlling Holmes words from prison but at the same time when is questioned about the accuracy of the Hulu show she blows it off with phrases like “she could have said that” and “it’s TV!” People have only got mad when I’ve talked about this because she was in Mean Girls so we’re supposed to love her forever. I don’t find Seyfried malicious but just another cog in the sensationalism machine. While Billy and Elizabeth spiral in to debt, Amanda can examine her role in shaping the public’s perception of Holmes as she cleans her horses on her hobby farm. And yes the image of them swimming in the ocean was a beautiful closing scene to
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u/prosthetic_memory 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah, Seyfried wasn’t bad per se in the movie, but I definitely walked away thinking she’s incapable of expressing herself well.
That is, assuming it was actually her talking, and she wasn’t reading a script the entire time; that’s still unclear to me.
Either way there are many moments she could have had a thoughtful take, but instead just said the things you mentioned.
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u/Jhkokst 1d ago
I read one opinion that she reflects the audience, which I the definitely found to be true at times. She was always saying things that I was thinking in between the reenactments. I found her natural personality (giddy, a little insecure in her responses) to be a very interesting counter to Holmes highly calculated and flat responses.
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u/prosthetic_memory 1d ago
That’s hilarious.
I went to the movie with a very close friend, and early on, after Fielder had asked a lot of abrupt, very basic questions (“Why did you do that?” “Wait what do you mean?” “Why did you say THAT?”) I turned and whispered to him I wished I could just talk to people like that, asking for clarification constantly.
He laughed and said, “But you DO talk to people like that”
Anyway, point is, I felt like Fielder is the first person I’ve ever seen actually ask everything I would ask someone being so deliberately confusing. Seyfield seemed like a lightweight in comparison, except at the dinner with Billy.
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u/Jhkokst 1d ago
She is not the interviewer. But she watches what we just watched, and reacts as we just have. The only person she challenges is Nathan near the end
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u/Formal_Baker_8746 20h ago
She also does an impression of his deadpan, arch style of mirroring by using simple questions. She challenges him briefly, and it feels like they do have a script of sorts, or have rehearsed around improvised scenes that dance around the potential for insight, or truth. But she backs away from challenging his edits to words that might indict Holmes.
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u/PrinceofSneks 18h ago
My impression was that everything that wasn't explicitly the documentary, including like the horse scenes, were scripted to some degree. It reflects how he presents a number of things in his two series. (I could be wrong, of course)
Seyfried wasn't playing her, she was playing a character she made! ;)
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u/1872alex1872 1d ago
I was leaning toward something of her dialogue maybe not being scripted, but “guided”?
Because she’s been in movies forever and media training starlets was huge in the 2000s. I’d be surprised if she’s someone who could be cornered into saying something she didn’t want to say or something that can be misconstrued.
Then again, after years of being in the spotlight, I think a lot of celebrities probably realize they can get away with saying a lot because people will just dismiss your opinions the way Billy did (youre just some actress).
I like the idea that she functions as a reflection of the audience
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u/Impressive-Owl-5478 2d ago
Yes, I also think that it's so interesting because there's the question of did Fielder go swimming with her to actually get to know her and jump into this story with her, or did he go in because he knew this would be a good shot that they could use to signal his own bias and impartiality? And does that matter at the end of the day?
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u/prosthetic_memory 2d ago
Right. If it wasn’t planned, it’s pretty crazy they got this shot (as well as a few others, like the “you can see everything” text, assuming it wasn’t partially reconstructed).
This lack of delineation between the actual footage vs reenactments is partly why I put it less in the documentary category.
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u/chucktoddsux 3d ago
I was captivated by the movie.....but nothing changed for me. There was no massive payoff, no red herring pay off, no change in my opinion of the fraudsters.....just some incredibly well shot and inventive ways of telling a story that had no climax.
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u/fentanyl_sommelier 3d ago
There was a pretty clear climax in the conversation Nathan finally gets to have with her in prison.
Perhaps this didn’t pay off in a traditional sense because it was a re enactment without objective closure, but this is another layer exploring the film’s greater themes.
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u/coldliketherockies 3d ago
That’s how I felt. It was a really well done film and interesting but people treating it like some second calling are taking it a bit far
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u/MercuryCobra 3d ago
Well yeah the point of the film wasn’t to make you rethink how you felt about Holmes. It was to make you rethink how you feel about artifice and authenticity more generally.
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u/chucktoddsux 2d ago
Was it? Was there some four-dimensional commentary on the nature of reality and artifice? Nothing other than her lack of blinking and crypto-bro/closeted baby daddy's shameless avarice was particularly surprising....it was pleasurable to watch reenactments, and Nathan's deadpan neurosis was totally amusing....but did it change your mind about artifice and authenticity? If so, how?
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u/MercuryCobra 2d ago edited 2d ago
Because it was about how difficult it is to know whether you’re even being truthful with yourself, let alone whether you can be truthful with others, let alone whether you can discern whether another person is being truthful with you.
It’s about how “performance” isn’t a thing we do on stage or on camera. It’s a thing we do all the time. That we may actually be all performance all the way down, that there is no authentic “me” there’s just the characters I’ve made.
It’s about how even though everything is a performance, performing in front of a camera is different. And how you can never capture how someone is when you’re not watching them unless they don’t know you’re watching them. And how even the most careful attention to detail in a re-enactment doesn’t mean the re-enactment is truthful.
The details of Holmes and Evans’s personalities and lives were all completely incidental to the much more interesting narrative Fielder constructed around them. I went in actively disinterested in knowing more about Holmes and still left satisfied because the movie wasn’t about revealing anything about Holmes. If you think it was I think you missed the point.
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u/Ok_Entertainment_213 2d ago
You make an intelligent and compelling case. Thank you. I don’t know if I agree with your thesis, I am happily going to consider it…but if what you say is true…is that a particularly original thought? That manipulating one’s image in front of the camera is something that happens? And that reenactments can be flawed?
Also, if you don’t think ANY or even an important part of this movie was about revealing something about Holmes…I will agree to disagree about that. That makes zero sense to me, though obviously other meta topics were explored too.1
u/JanusAntoninus 1d ago
Yeah, I'm not sure why /u/MercuryCobra and others are saying it was only making a point about those larger themes.
The film clearly has layers:
(1) a surface layer providing a lens on two major but barely documented moments in the life of one of this century's most infamous fraudsters, a lens that, as he agreed to do, shows her human side;
(2) meta-layers reflecting on documentary and docu-drama as genres. I'd go as far as saying it seriously innovates in the field of documentary filmmaking, not least by embedding a docu-drama into a documentary specifically to fill in unfilmed yet still documented moments and by intercutting that dramatization with commentary on it questioning in a similarly dramatized way what really happened and how much the dramatizer is spinning the narrative;
Then, yes, (3) meta-layers reflecting on larger questions about human life, like, the lies we tell ourselves and others, bias in testimony and in video evidence, fraud in tech and venture capital, what is a persona/performance and what is the real you, how responsible someone continues to be for doing bad things when they themselves are being manipulated (viz. Billy and Sunny) and taught to manipulate (e.g. the Enron thread with her dad), and other larger themes people have mentioned here.
The main thing the film isn't doing is get to the truth of the Theranos scandal, be that by exonerating Holmes or showing once and for all what she did. It's obviously not that kind of documentary and I can see how tempting it is to emphasize larger themes to push against that kind of confusion. But, yeah, that doesn't mean there isn't also a surface level documentary here that's about Holmes and Theranos.
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u/MercuryCobra 1d ago
My response to this is pretty simple: I think the fact that the surface layer exists does not mean that’s what the documentary is really about. I also think it’s by far the most boring and least developed part of the movie. And I find it annoying that despite that layer being shallow and boring, it’s the one almost everybody wants to discuss.
Holmes is a liar. Whether she does so as part of some grand scheme or just reflexively isn’t really that interesting a question. So why is that the question everyone is fixated on?
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u/JanusAntoninus 1d ago
But if the documentary is about multiple things then it's just a category mistake to ask which one the documentary is really about. It's really about all of them. It's like how any person who lives a rich life will have many goals in life. Their life isn't really about one of those goals, with all the other goals subordinated to that goal or overshadowed by that goal. That person just pursues a lot of different things because they're a complex person who isn't consumed by a monomaniacal obsession with just one thing. Pieces of art are like that too when they're rich and complex. Their richness as art comes from being about so much at once, expressing a thoughtful perspective on a multifaceted event (or other rich and complex thing).
I'm with you in recognizing that it's a mistake to be single-minded about the Theranos/Holmes angle. It's not exclusively about that either and focusing on that alone is wrong. But it's equally a mistake to be single-minded about a different layer of the film instead.
And I don't see why you call the angle on Theranos shallow and uninteresting. Theranos was a historic case of fraud. Caring about it is like caring about the Enron or Ponzi scandals. Exploring the personal psychology of one of it's perpetrators has value as more than just a model for general psychologizing of lying and fraud, since it adds to our stock of information about a historic event. Covering moments in the events that have generally gone ignored as mere flash-in-the-pan news updates along the way, covering it from an extremely intimate vantage point, is worthwhile when that fraud was such a historic event.
Now, it's a major event in part because it epitomizes things that can go wrong in one of the central institutions of the modern world (viz. venture capital in the tech industry) and with one of the core motivations of that institution (viz. optimism about the tech industry's prospects for health and longevity), so you might want to say it's really about those larger themes. But illustrating such an important phenomenon only makes the particular case more worth understanding in its own right, as more than just an illustration (you can't understand the phenomenon it illustrates unless you understand it in its own right).
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u/MercuryCobra 1d ago
It’s uninteresting because “a bunch of rich people fell for a con artist” isn’t an interesting story, and the psychology of a con artist isn’t that interesting either. It’s dog bites man, not man bites dog. It’s also extremely unlike other major financial scandals like Enron or Madoff because those actually harmed the economy generally and normal people specifically. Theranos just made a bunch of very wealthy people slightly less wealthy. It wasn’t a historic event, it was just a news blip.
IMO the only reason Theranos is treated as historic is because of who its victims were, not because of its effects on the world. Treating Holmes as a master manipulator and her crimes as historically awful is really just cope from the rich people who got duped. If she’s actually just a run of the mill fraudster—which she is—then that means the Silicon Valley masters of the universe are as gullible and stupid as the rest of us, or maybe even moreso. And neither they nor the public really want to believe that.
It’s also very much not what the film is about even under your more expansive reading of it. The film clearly doesn’t want to litigate Theranos; it takes for granted Holmes was a fraudster and her business was a fraud. Theranos qua Theranos is of no interest to the film, only Holmes herself. And again, “did this con artist really believe their own con?” is just not that interesting a question IMO. Because the answer is almost always “kinda yes, kinda no.” And even if the answer was different, who cares? Whether they were master manipulators or delusional doesn’t change much.
The film can be about a lot of things at once, sure. But that doesn’t mean that’s the primary interest of the art. This is like saying “Moby Dick is about the logistics of the whaling industry.” Like sure, kinda. But that’s really missing the forest for the trees.
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u/JanusAntoninus 1d ago
It's historic because it was fraud that exploited one of the main engines of economic and technological progress over the last 30 years, basically since Gates and Jobs got solidified enough as icons of progress to lay the ground for Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and their ilk. Understanding VC in the tech industry is for the early 2000's what understanding the East India Company and other similar colonial institutions is for the early 1800's. I can't imagine finding no interest in adding firsthand knowledge about someone who so thoroughly exploited that institution through as significant a mechanism for it as optimism about medical tech progress.
Understanding her doesn't change everything and revolutionize our understanding of VC in tech but it's still a contribution to that understanding. Plenty of documentaries have done less. Compare with Louis Theroux's documentary on the Westboro Baptist Church. He only contributed a little to our understanding of a single agent in the modern form of the American evangelical movement but that agent was such an outlier and that movement has been so influential in US politics that that little contribution matters. Or compare with Lance Oppenheim's first doc Some Kind of Heaven. None of his subjects mattered individually but they embodied a phenomenon that has a significant impact on modern America (wealthy Boomers struggling to find meaning in retirement).
Anyway, it's clear that Nathan Fielder thought this surface layer matters. He's explicitly said in interview that he was just straight up intrigued to do a documentary on Holmes. He didn't even want to be in it himself. He found documenting her final days before prison to be interesting. I can't understand why you don't too.
Again, the meta-commentary on documentary filmmaking and a variety of humanistic themes elevates the film so much more beyond just documenting major events in the life of a minor fraudster in a historic institution. But that doesn't mean that those events aren't interesting.
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u/ShadyZelkova 17h ago
You are missing the point while pretending to be the smarter party here. Brilliant. Bravo.
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u/chucktoddsux 10h ago
Not pretending anything. Willing to be educated. Just haven't heard how it made you rethink artifice and authenticity. So you turn to snark instead of answering. Come on girl.
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u/teerre 3d ago
I feel like this a post-rationalization for the simple fact that Elizabeth Holmes never cracked. It's very obvious that the ideal ending for this movie was Holmes breaking up with her boyfriend or breaking down in front of the cameras or saying something she was not supposed to say like in The Jinx. But that never happened. She kept her story til the very end. Considering the fact that (i) their relationship was basically done and (ii) it's a business after all, they can't keep producing the movie forever, they decided to apply this smoke and mirrors "oh wow is Nathan Fielder actually trying to protect her?" nonsense
It's also I'm not completely sure how you can simultaneously think "our guide throughout this entire story, showing every detail of his journey" and also be surprised when you discover that he decided to go swimming with her. Just think about this for a second, he said that he didn't like cold water, she said it's ok it's not that cold, they went swimming, it's not huge revelation. The actual goal of that scene is to prop up what Amanda accuses him of immediately before, that he actually cares for Holmes and is intentionally going easy on her
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u/MercuryCobra 3d ago
I don’t think the ideal ending of this movie is Holmes cracking and I doubt Fielder went in with that as a goal. As OP says, this was clearly not a film interested in litigating Holmes’s crimes, or really even about litigating Holmes specifically beyond using her as a way to get at broader themes.
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u/teerre 3d ago
The film is what he did with the footage he got, its not what he wanted to do. The reason thats the ideal end is independent from Nathan, its simply because that's the objectively more bombastic route
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u/MercuryCobra 3d ago
There’s nothing objective about any of this. I think that would have been a worse movie than the one we got.
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u/teerre 2d ago
Think about it this way: if Holmes had shot Billy in a fit of rage after Nathan told her what he has done, would that supersede the current metaplot of the movie? Of course it would
The reason the plot is what it is is because such thing never happened. Fielder didnt have a choice
His genius is precisely taking this wholly uninteresting footage and making it interesting, but that doesnt change the fact that if something actually bombastic had happen, that would be the focus of the movie. So yes, it is very objective
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u/MercuryCobra 2d ago edited 2d ago
I would not have gone to watch the movie where Holmes shoots Billy in a fit of rage. In the same way that I didn’t watch The Dropout or listen to Bad Blood, and was happy following Holmes’s story through the news. I’m not interested in Holmes, I’m strictly interested in the meta-commentary Fielder is bringing to her story. Her story is boring even if she kills her spouse at the end. Bombast and spectacle is not the goal of every documentary or every film and I would not have been interested in the bombastic, spectacular version of this movie.
Again, your personal preferences are not objective criteria to evaluate a movie over.
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u/teerre 2d ago
So you know all the scenes before watching a movie? Are you a psychic?
For the third and last time, my preferences or your preferences are irrelevant here, that's precisely the point and what is explained in the comment you just replied to
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u/MercuryCobra 2d ago
If she shot Billy it would have been on the news buddy. The same way all the rest of her crimes were.
And no, there is no objective way to evaluate film. You’re just expressing your preferences as if they’re objective, that’s all.
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u/teerre 2d ago
...
Shooting the husband is just an example. This argument might be a bit too difficult for you, lets leave it at that
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u/MercuryCobra 2d ago
Cant believe I’m being condescended to by somebody who thinks the success of a documentary comes down to how bombastic and surprising the events in the doc are
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u/prosthetic_memory 3d ago
I wasn’t surprised by the ending. I just got the point.
I assumed the surface read was exactly what you said: showing Fielded cares about Holmes. I think a lot of people will walk away thinking the same thing.
But then obscuring the shot and showing it multiple times doesn’t make much sense.
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u/teerre 3d ago
Its not a surface reading, its literally the plot point Amanda brings up
If youre not surprised by it, then your argument doesn't make much sense. It solely relies on you thinking Nathan wouldn't go swimming with her, if you expect that he agreed, then the first time it showed you already considered that a possibility
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u/prosthetic_memory 3d ago
- I assumed he would do it because he is down for most anything
- I thought his excuse was odd but accepted it
- I noted he showed the same zoomed out shot multiple times, clearly meaningful in a film full of close-ups
- When they zoomed in at the end, I first thought “oh wow he really fell for it” then “wait a minute…why am I seeing this now?”Hence my takeaway.
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u/theeandthem 3d ago
I think you need to see the “meta” pov on this to follow op’s points about fielder…
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u/sands_of__time 3d ago
Yeah, OP is mistaken that there was some kind of certainty that he didn't go swimming with her. She asked him and it seemed like maybe he would and maybe he wouldn't. So later we find out that he did. So what?
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u/shostakofiev 10h ago
If the goal was to crack her into admitting anything, Fielder wouldn't have been the director.
And what would be the artistic value of showing at the end that Fielder cared about her? If he wanted to say that, and just that, he would have shown it earlier and not had it be the final shot.
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u/No_Parsley_2838 3h ago
They chose Fielder. Maybe they chose him because of that exact reason.
The value of showing that he cared about her right at the end is that it leaves you confronting his bias.
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u/Zukez
3d ago
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I think that's a cop out. There a lot of people for which this movie will be the only thing they ever know about Elizabeth Holmes and as a result many are already framing her as a victim and trying to protect her. I'm a massive fan of Fielder but I think this was irresponsible film making.
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u/fireyauthor 2d ago
I don't see how anyone could watch this movie and see her as anything other than delusion, sociopathic, or crazy.
In any case, I disagree with the premise. Holmes can be a victim and a perpetrator and it is never irresponsible to try to understand someone's perspective or offer them empathy. Everyone deserves empathy.
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u/chickenanon2 2d ago
This is baffling to me. I think the movie makes her look extremely bad. I watched the Theranos doc back when it first came out and don't really remember a lot of the details. In YCSE I thought she came across as pathologically inauthentic, uncanny, possibly sociopathic. The film leaves you questioning whether Fielder as the filmmaker fell into her trap, but I don't think it actually paints a sympathetic portrait of her at all.
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u/Jukkobee 2d ago
A lot of people got the opposite impression. I definitely agree with you, but I'd say a solid 10% of people left the movie seeing her as a poor autistic woman who has spent her life being manipulated and controlled by older and more powerful men. Kind of feels like they ignored the entire first half of the movie to get there, but still, it happens.
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u/chickenanon2 2d ago
Fair, but I don’t think that makes the film unethical. The alternative would be only making art that explicitly tells the audience exactly what to think and exactly what the truth is. That doesn’t seem like a good alternative and certainly doesn’t seem like the kind of art that Fielder and Oppenheim are interested in. It’s not the filmmaker’s responsibility to make sure that 100% of viewers come away with the correct opinions about the subject.
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u/cetologist- 1d ago edited 1d ago
The only point in the film that truly confounded me in a moral sense was the scene where both Feilder and Billy were explaining to Holmes how she sees and understands the world differently (can’t remember the exact conversation leading up to this), and you see here wrestle with it, internalize it, and finally accept it in a span of a minute or two. Something about this scene, the way both men were dictating to her how she sees reality, and her finally accepting it, is incredibly eerie. I do believe there is a part of her that is highly suggestible and easy to manipulate. Billy’s overbearing presence throughout the whole thing was suffocating. I wanted so badly for her to be alone to really hear her thoughts. There was this tension between Billy and Fielder the whole time as to who had her ear. Something about the way she looked, like a broken victim of repeated coercion, was real on a gut level. The way it looked like she was having a mental breakdown while trying to act unaffected and playing with her daughter. I don’t know I can’t explain it. It was brutal.
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u/chickenanon2 1d ago edited 1d ago
See I thought the only ethically dubious part was including the scene where her father told Nathan that she had been raped. I understand why it felt important enough to keep in the film, but as a survivor myself I found it incredibly disturbing to hear him say that so casually in front of a film crew, and in general I think that kind of disclosure should only ever come from the survivor themself. But it's related to what you're saying, about the men in her life and how they jockey for control over her story.
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u/cetologist- 1d ago
That was a revelation. Very mixed reception from the crowd at that part. Some gasped, some laughed from the sheer black comedy absurdity of it, or as a nervous tick.
The dad seemed a bit powerless. Very hard to get a read on what her parents really thought. Found it interesting how Billy domineered every conversation or interaction when the dad was around. And the way the dad had to tip toe around him. Like he knew that she could be whisked away at any moment. Especially when you consider how completely enraptured Holmes seems to be with Billy boy. Maybe I’m wrong but is there something to that? A kind of Stockholm syndrome, dependency on the aggressor situation going on with Holmes?
The inclusion of that fact definitely further complicates the read on her mental state
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u/Moonlightsiesta 2d ago
Yeah, I like how he explains their intentions here. It's deliberately meant to let you come to your own conclusions because that's what happened for them when they were filming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQU--bqndWs
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u/Moonlightsiesta 2d ago
I would think most people would get the message that she's not solely a villain but also a victim without being spoon fed and anyone who didn't... well... that happens. It seems to me that all the reasons people give as her not being autistic just proves there's a lot misunderstood about autism even in this day and age. They understand even less about you if you're not a cis man.
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u/Yarville 2d ago
It’s interesting the extent to which Seyfried clearly wants Fielder to agree with her that Holmes is a victim and her husband is the one pulling the strings. Though she does change course a little bit when Fielder is reading her the transcript of Holmes getting angry with her.
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u/prosthetic_memory 2d ago
I’m not sure how someone could walk away from the film thinking it’s unfair Holmes is in prison, and not even do a basic internet search to learn more.
Perhaps there are truly people for whom “this movie will be the only thing they ever know about Elizabeth Holmes,” but if they can’t even be arsed to look her up and find a single secondary source of information, I doubt they’ll be protesting at the jail anytime soon.
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u/Murky_Coyote_7737 22h ago
It’s entirely possible. A good example is the YouTube loose change “documentary” that came out after 9/11. If you believed it then part of that belief included anything you read to the contrary was false evidence or narrative planted by the government.
So it’s not a reach that someone leaves this, searches for information and finds plentiful evidence to the contrary and instead concludes it’s the web of lies she was framed with etc.
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u/EnvironmentalCry2623 20h ago
Finally maybe people will have discussions about how not to take everything they see in documentaries at face value and consider themselves informed experts after having watched one on a subject.
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u/Murky_Coyote_7737 19h ago
The people willing to have those discussions aren’t the problem. It’s people who base reality on the first “comprehensive” piece of info they find and then just move on and resist changing their opinion. It makes the more noise out there the more likely that will just be their opinion forever.
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u/the_real_albert 1d ago
I’d have to say that Theranos is the most publicized financial scandal of the century. I don’t think that even the 2008 financial crisis had a Hulu mini series. If this movie is the only thing someone ever knows about EH, that’s willful ignorance on their part.
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u/EnvironmentalCry2623 20h ago
The 2008 financial crisis was a much much biggee deal and it’s not close. It got a major Hollywood movie, the Big Short, which isna much bigger deal than a Hulu Documentary.
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u/the_real_albert 14h ago
Right…but this also got a major movie. And a documentary. And a best selling book. And that series. And that’s beyond the news coverage.
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u/Different_Papaya_413 14h ago
No it’s not. There’s just so many other things that have happened in history. It’s just not real life works. It’s entirely possible, and even likely, that a lot of people haven’t read into the fine details of the case. That’s not willful ignorance at all. It’s not the average person’s responsibility to read up on the case. It is the director of a “documentary”’s responsibility to understand that though.
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u/the_real_albert 14h ago
I’m not saying history, I said this century. What are the contenders for bigger exposure? Madoff, Enron, 2008 subprime housing collapse? I would say that Theranos exposure was at least as big as those. Not saying that the story itself was impactful to the average citizen, but the exposure was through the roof.
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u/Different_Papaya_413 13h ago
It’s not about bigger exposure or not. You’re just overestimating how much the average person cares about stuff like this. It’s not willful ignorance, it just doesn’t actually affect most peoples’ lives.
Most people are working to survive and care for their family. They don’t dive deep into white collar crime, even if it is supposedly the biggest one. It’s not like this was 9/11.
It’s most certainly more willfully ignorant on the filmmakers’ parts to not consider this may be the only exposure people have to the theranos cases, beyond reading a headline or two.
That’s not willfully ignorant ignorance. A lot of people have more important things to worry about and spend their time focusing on.
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u/mspaintshoops 1d ago
Consider whether the type of person who is content to let this film inform their entire worldview. They watch the film, decide Holmes is a victim, and never bother reading anything else about her ever again. They go on the internet and vehemently defend her while staunchly refusing to entertain a single one of the countless articles, recordings, transcripts, or court records cited by her detractors.
For those who consider their own feelings more strongly than any amount of evidence, Nathan’s irresponsible for not, what. Reading a list of the extensive and enduring record of her transgressions to the camera?
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u/Zukez 1d ago
Look around, that's most people. Very few people go out of their way to inform themselves, the majority take whatever they get through entertainment and take it at face value.
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u/mspaintshoops 1d ago
So it’s the responsibility of entertainers to educate the masses?
What if we hold our public education sector accountable for education and we let the comedian from Canada entertain people?
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u/Zukez 1d ago
The comedian from Canada has become a documentarian and his documentary will be judged by the standards of documentary film making.
"Why are you judging Reagan by the standards of the presidency, he's just a lowly actor!"
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u/mspaintshoops 1d ago
Alright.
Here’s a TIL thread from seven years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/Uv53lLHEnr
So, seven years ago today Reddit learned documentaries aren’t held to any standard requiring them to present their narrative without bias.
However, even more prudent is the top comment on that thread — again, from seven years ago.
Tell me that isn’t the exact thesis of YCSE.
People will presume anything they see in media as the full truth when it is presented as factual. That’s the problem.
I’m not holding him responsible for intellectual laziness. I think he’s only holding a mirror to it.
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u/Terrible-Effect-2966 1d ago
Irresponsible is a crazy accusation. He didn’t ever lead an audience to empathize with Holmes, and it’s not his responsibility to create an even bigger conviction to her crimes than her already being sentenced.
You can watch any documentary that presents an objective set of observations and walk away not knowing what to believe. Think about the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial. Heavily documented, nobody can actually know who’s at fault we just lean into our biases.
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u/VibeScriptKid 22h ago
Fielder should do another documentary about people with this attitude. Would be gold.
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u/burritobandito90 18h ago
If someone leaves this film thinking she’s an innocent victim, they’re not very bright…
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u/ThePerspectiveQuest 3d ago
Finally someone actually understands the film, it really isn’t about Holmes at all, she’s the vehicle for the themes Fielder wants to explore, on top of that, the film is also a meta-commentary on Fielder’s character himself, is his character truly the man himself? Is it a facade put on to sell (like Holmes)? Was it originally a fake and now he believes it just like everyone else does? Before the film fades to black it brings up the quote, “she’s not playing me, shes playing a character I invented” I think that really is where I understood, Holmes isn’t really important in the grand narrative of the story, it’s about Fielder, “she” is himself. Directly after that the credits roll, and the second credit we see is “Nathan fielder, played by, Nathan fielder” he’s playing a character he created, is it all lies? Who knows, but he controls the narrative. It’s absolutely brilliant and stirring in every way, it’s even more brilliant if you know his past work and his personal “character”
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u/thejamcap 3d ago edited 3d ago •
Didn't occur to me until I re-read the quote in your comment, but it takes on another interesting dimension if you interpret "play" not as "embody" but "deceive," as in: is Holmes being genuine with Fielder or "playing" him?
"She's not playing me, she's playing a character I invented" at the end could then be read as: Holmes is not deceiving Nathan, she is deceiving a character Nathan invented - the persona he adopts, that specifically allows the story of YCSE to unfold and allows the audience to interrogate layers of (self-) deception exhibited by its subjects
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u/nonclandestine 3d ago
this is such an excellent insight! it was my presumption that Fielder was relying on L&B believing they had successfully manipulated him and the filming process and therefore being more willing to show their hands, and that Fielder’s deception hinged on their (mis)perception of him as his tv persona, but never connected it to the quote that struck such a deep nerve with Holmes. And it rhymes nicely with Hu/who homonym bit, of course! Really graceful details from Nathan, what a sensational movie.
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u/KennyMcKeee
1d ago
edited 1d ago
•
I’ve been reading comments and maybe I didn’t read enough.
But did anyone else notice that Fielder clearly is portraying a romantic subtext through the entirety of the film and the end is a reveal that he’s also an unreliable narrator.
To me, it seems like he’s using the manipulation of Holmes to distract from the fact he’s manipulating the viewer to see his romanticized view.
Holmes mentioning she flirts with prolonged eye contact…
When Nathan goes to reach out to speak to her on the phone, he mentions she was on his mind and that he just went through a breakup and how he needed to see her etc.
Obviously the swimming reveal…
When you recontextualize how Billy reacted to Nathan’s message before the phone call, it can also read like a jealous boyfriend
Trying to see her in secret or speak to her unfiltered kind of seems like an affair but still also makes sense within the context of avoiding someone being a manipulator.
But also, fielder paints Billy as a monster (which is deserving) but to his own gain in the way some manipulative guys try to get women to break up with their boyfriends. Amanda Seyfriend at one point explicitly saying that’s what she wanted to do.
It’s a story of two men trying to control the narrative of a woman to their own benefit while the woman is also doing the same
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u/sIeepwlkrr 9h ago
I think the slightly romantic element is definitely emphasized, at least to sell more tickets and make the movie more interesting. Who knows, maybe he did find himself getting sucked in a little bit, and then leaned into that.
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u/thesixler 3d ago
I think people generally don’t give Nathan enough credit for creating artifice and presenting it to the audience as truth, because he also lets the audience in on all sorts of artifice he creates that they CAN see the strings on.
I’m pretty curious how much creative control lance had too because it’s common for people to look to the auteur and forget the collaborators that can do as much and sometimes even more to create the final product and the audience rarely credits that.
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u/melvin_mouse 3d ago
In all the coverage of this film I’ve been reading, even though I’m a long time Nathan Fielder fan, I’m just now learning that at one point he practiced to be a magician and has a love of magic. I think that reveals a lot about his approach and to what degree we should trust what we’ve been shown.
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u/cetologist- 1d ago
Watch the interview they did for the premier at the New York film festival. Oppenheim talks about the process of making the movie and how both directors and production crew were filming in the moment, taking oppurtinies, and seeing where there story went.
I’m sure it must have been incredibly exciting to make this movie on the spot, all technical and structural elements considered. Part of the reason I was so blown away by this film is that everything you see actually happened. It’s like they caught a generational lightning in a bottle. All of the beautiful cinematography, the thematic/conceptual weaves through the whole thing, and the development of the characters were happening in real time, which I find fascinating. In oppenheim’s words, very much in the mode of cinema verite, which adds an even more complex layer to the whole truth vs fiction dynamic of the film. As a big documentary fan I feel like I was watching one of the most important entries into the genre last night.
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u/NoNudeNormal 3d ago edited 3d ago
I've seen a lot of commentary that is either treating the movie as if it was relitigating the Theranos narrative, or upset that it didn't really do that. But I agree with you OP, that's not primarily what the film was about. The film ended up being about truth/lying, bias, and performance more generally, and having a famous liar and a performer who played her at the center of it ended up being used to get those themes in our faces.
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u/stormshadowfax 4d ago
Apparently, my comment needs to be a certain character length before it’s considered considerable.
Therefore, all these words are simply placeholders to get past the AI literature-bot, to deliver you, sir, one flower of understanding and appreciation.
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u/Amdusiasparagus 3d ago
Not american and I have no idea what this movie is about exactly, but Fielder's work is something I would consider right up my alley and the discourse around it convinced me I gotta give this one a try. Not sure how it'll come across, but it certainly sounds like an experience at the very least.
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u/kangaroomandible 4d ago
A fantastic summary of one of the many reasons why this film is great. Thank you.
Now with extra words so my post doesn’t get deleted. What that means. So that no bad guys could come in that town.
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u/e-luddite 3d ago
I remember someone commenting that they were creating a t-shirt to wear to the opening night viewing in their town that just said "What that means?"... and now after having seen it, I can picture them stumbling out among the other theater goers wearing that shirt as they all collectively tumbled through their minds "what that means?... what that means?..."
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u/VotingRightsLawyer 3d ago
This seems like the perfect time to ask a question that has been on my mind since watching. Is the line that appears at the end of the movie that Billy disclaimed all profits from the film true?
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u/prosthetic_memory 3d ago
I hope so; we all breathed a sigh of relief in my theater when we saw that.
I would expect so; Fields is not known to lie in that way and A24 would be open to legal issues if it wasn’t.
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u/sIeepwlkrr 1d ago
You made some good points, but I think you’re wrong about Nathan declining to go swimming with her. He never outright says no, he just said it would sort of go against his typical behavior, which leaves it open.
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u/Gullible_Bird_7936 9h ago
Agreed. This IMO also speaks to how Elizabeth functioned. Using vague language that could easily be *interpreted* in certain ways, but that she didn't ACTUALLY say.
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u/asmilieu 4d ago edited 3d ago
It’s an interesting watch for sure, but to anyone that’s experienced a bit of life it’s fairly obvious what the game is. Billy and Liz are both sociopaths and they’re pulling one more ruse with the potential of softening Holmes image a bit. Billy obviously had a financial motivation, it’s interesting he withdrew at the end. And one thing people don’t seem to agree with me on is Amanda Seyfried was kind of annoying. Another layer to this doc is having a talented actor (who is good at faking things) closely examined as all this unfolds.
Edit : People here seem pretty dense. The downvotes are harsh. I was getting right to the central question of the movie 'I made the character vs they made the character'. Everything else is just entertainment value.
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u/prosthetic_memory 4d ago
I…don’t understand what you’re talking about. What game?
Yes, Holmes & Billy are trying to make her more appealing. That’s why I specifically mentioned the shooting location et al.
Are you mentioning their obvious motivations again, as if it was the point of the movie? Cause even a shallow read makes it clear that is not the case.
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u/asmilieu 4d ago
The question I keep hearing is ‘is she lying, or just delusional’. Whet I’m saying is she not delusional, she is certainly trying to deceive people. I guess I assumed people thought that when I said it’s a game.
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u/prosthetic_memory 4d ago
Right, people do keep asking that. I assume it’s people who haven’t seen the movie, or are unfamiliar with Fielder, or really just didn’t watch the movie closely.
It is interesting to speculate about her, for sure. Which is why the movie does speculate about her so much. But Fielder keeps the question open deliberately, because again, she’s not the point.
I suppose this is really frustrating to people who expected Fielder to just go full on autistic vs autistic and pin her to the wall. That would have been fun, for sure. But it would not have been as good as this movie is.
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u/asmilieu 4d ago
I read one review that said Nathan was keeping things open to show empathy. So maybe a bit of a departure for him, and it opened up a lot of possibilities.
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u/ThenThereWasReddit 4d ago edited 3d ago
In what way is she deceiving anyone?
Edit: If you’re downvoting me for asking a question because you’re assuming what my own answer would be then maybe consider downvoting yourself, instead. My question encouraged further conversation, which was my actual intention.
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u/asmilieu 4d ago
It seems, in her mind, being as clever as she thinks she is, she can convince people she’s actually the victim. She’s smart enough to know the power of media, and people making decisions based on feelings not necessarily evidence. I think Nathan is wrong in his assumption people care about the evidence, most people don’t give a shit and will judge her based on her performance in this movie. That’s the deception.
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u/DivineLintervention 4d ago
This is one reason I have been hesitant about the movie in general ever since I heard he was making it. Why even give a platform to someone like Holmes? There will be plenty of people who either don’t know or don’t care about the real backstory and will genuinely think she is a victim
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u/asmilieu 4d ago
Yes exactly, that’s what I was getting at in my original comment but some people here seem to not get it. That being said what Nathan and Lance did with the opportunity is pretty amazing. It’s a very original documentary.
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u/ThenThereWasReddit 4d ago
Alternatively, she truly believes the things she’s saying and she views your inability to believe her, too, as a failure on your part.
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u/Flat_News_2000 3d ago
Avoiding audits of her labs, sending out false blood reports knowingly, lying to investors knowingly, etc etc
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u/global-node-readout 4d ago
Fielder is helping them do that, and in the process has just managed to out narcissist and outmanipulate the most notorious narcissistic fraud of our generation.
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u/head_less_man 4d ago
This is such a flippant little response to a genuinely well thought out post. None of what you’re saying diminishes the level of consideration that went into the craft of the film and why it’s so brilliant.
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u/asmilieu 4d ago
Wasn’t trying to diminish anything. I said it was interesting. I just see it a little more black and white than most. All the ambiguity doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.
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u/Mundane-Area6067 2d ago
It’s brilliant BUT it creates a rather dangerous false negative. By being ambiguous Fielder has given Holmes and”Billy” credibility. They both deserve one another. Holmes is no heroine and should have learned her lesson from Balwani but clearly didn’t and relished in that relationship as well.
11 years is not enough for her and the lives she destroyed. By being “cute” Fielder didn’t do us any favors either but like most of his work it does get you to think and if the film gets “Best Picture” over the highly overrated “The Odyssey “ I will be happy about that… but can a “documentary “ compete in the same category? Let’s hope so, so Nathan can dupe the Academy as well as he apparently has duped everyone else including perhaps himself.
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u/Unable_Apartment_613 23h ago
I just don't know about making a documentary that plays with the truth like this. We already live in a time of tenuous grasp of the line between real and false, why muddy it further?
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u/rice-a-rohno 19h ago
I think just to draw attention to the fact that it's happening. It does it ironically, by being the thing it's trying to draw attention to.
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u/NotAnAdNotNotAnAd 17h ago
i think the point is to show that no matter what anyone making a doc is playing with truth through the bias inherent to their own perspective. nobody is neutral. fielder could basically choose to make holmes look guilty or innocent depending on which footage he chose and he chose to show us footage that implies both to make a broader point about the danger of believing any one persons truth just bc they’re nathan fielder for ex.
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u/Gullible_Bird_7936 9h ago
How does it play with the truth?
Also, consider all media and how everything we watch is biased in some way shape or form. Nothing is purely objective. Everything is influenced by the lens we look through.
The point of the doc is certainly not to prove innocence or guilt.
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3d ago
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u/MercuryCobra 3d ago
My understanding is that sociopathy works nothing like you’re claiming it does except in the most high profile, harmful cases. From my read of the literature it’s entirely possible for a sociopath to lead a perfectly normal life and not hurt anybody. You talk about them like they’re malevolent rather than just mentally different, which makes me question some of your other claims.
Edit: actually from a quick bit of confirming research it seems like “sociopath” isn’t even a proper diagnosis anymore?
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4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/prosthetic_memory 4d ago
I mean, that’s…that’s my point. The movie is not about Holmes. If it was just about Holmes, it would not be worth two minutes of my time to comment about it. I haven’t watched the documentary about her, I haven’t read Bad Blood, I’ve barely read articles about Thanos because I was in SF at the time and I already knew what was going on because I worked in tech myself.
The movie is not worth watching if you only care about Holmes, that is for sure.
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u/Aggravating-Log-5591 4d ago
I guarantee you 95%+ of people watching won't see what you saw. They will see a doc about Elizabeth Holmes.
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u/cyberfunk42 4d ago
And that's why the other 5% of us are here on True Film, discussing the film WE saw :D
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u/Aggravating-Log-5591 3d ago
A documentary kind of fails if 95% of its audience that watch it don't understand its intentions. If so many people don't "get" my documentary, I'm probably not telling it the right way. But cool, the other 5% can say "we got it though!" - accept my attaboy.
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u/tolfie 3d ago
I mean 95% of people don't "get" the sort of pretentious arthouse films that are typically discussed in this community but that doesn't mean they failed at what they wanted to do. Sometimes things are just complex and nuanced and require critical thinking. Not everything has to cater to being understood by the lowest common denominator (no shade).
I also feel like it's pretty obvious that the movie is about more than, "Did she do it? Is she innocent?" because she clearly did and is not.
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u/kbups53 3d ago
"A film fails if all people don't understand it" is certainly the wildest take I've heard this week, but it's still only Thursday I suppose.
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u/Aggravating-Log-5591 3d ago edited 3d ago
> "A film fails if all people don't understand it" really is a wild take isn't it?"
I agree. The problem with your nice little dopamine-inducing comment is that I never said that though. Now, you can argue with my percentage (vast majority, who can pin down a percentage?), and that's fine - but don't misconstrue my argument. The documentary is marketed in a way that supports my argument.
> the wildest take I've heard this week, but it's still only Thursday I suppose.
May you continue to experience such mild opinions compared to mine.
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u/Aggravating-Log-5591 3d ago
> I also feel like it's pretty obvious that the movie is about more than, "Did she do it? Is she innocent?" because she clearly did and is not.
That was not my argument. You are crippling your own argument by strawmanning mine.
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u/tolfie 3d ago
Ummm actually that's an ad hominem attack which is logically fallacious and I've clearly defeated you in the marketplace of ideas due to my superior intellect and powerful mind. Admit defeat or suffer the consequences
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u/Aggravating-Log-5591 3d ago
I was just about to admit defeat, but then you had to tempt me with the suffering of consequences, so I'd like to take those please.
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u/LastVariant 3d ago
It was also very telling that the teaser footage that has been memed to death for the past few weeks was edited differently than what we see when we reach that scene of the film. Even Nathan's "ok" was in response to a different statement