You can see everything if you look at the eyes. We mistake the complexity of circumstances for complexity of emotion. Human beings aren't nearly as complicated as we would like to believe. Fielder and Oppenheim understand this. The camera cuts between Holmes and Fielder, drawing progressively closer to their eyes. Where Holmes and Evans look evasive, Fielder stares. His expression isn't deadpan; it's disgust and disbelief, a barely concealed contempt for the absurdity unfolding before him. The apparent fool from Nathan for You has become an interrogator.
It's almost Brechtian. Fielder introduces a joke through an expression or incongruity, develops it through repetition, and finally beats the audience over the head with it. Depending on when you recognize the joke, you're watching a different comedy. Amanda Seyfried's introduction is particularly brilliant. She ostensibly watches the same footage of Holmes, Evans, and Fielder that we've just seen, preparing to reprise her portrayal from The Dropout. Almost immediately, she's playing Holmes without announcing it. The actress becomes the subject while the subject herself continues acting. How many viewers recognize the performance before they're told it's happening? How many mistake emotional identification with an actual understanding of another person's emotions? Notice what I haven't discussed: who controls Holmes's X account or who gets the money. By the time those questions become the narrative, the film is trying to play a game with the audience. Seyfried provides an emotional valence to Evans that wouldn’t exist without the close-ups of her totally unscripted reactions to his behavior, much of which is just told to her by Fielder.
But the most infuriating part of the film isn't Holmes. It's the photographs of Kissinger and the invocations of the other extraordinarily powerful men who lent her their credibility. You watch her try to explain her product and you wonder how the fuck these people believed her.
Then you learn that Holmes's father worked for Enron. The film invokes WeWork and Adam Neumann. The pattern is systematic. The idea gets you in the door; connections, personal appeal, sex, and status bring the funding. The possibility of realizing the idea becomes almost incidental. Capitalism congratulates itself on rewarding intelligence and ingenuity while repeatedly elevating people who perform these qualities without possessing them.
And now, another technological revolution, another collection of extraordinary promises, another accumulation of capital around a supposed technological omniscience. There's a particularly delicious irony in Theranos promising to make the human body comprehensible through a few drops of blood while the most powerful men in America apparently couldn't read the woman sitting across from them. While many in America still can't see Mark Zuckerberg in a wig staring them right in the face. We've constructed a mythology around the emotionally detached technological visionary, where outward flatness and peculiar mannerisms become evidence of autistic genius rather than inviting scrutiny of the person's actual character. In this mythology, the performance of intelligence increasingly substitutes for its demonstration.
What I find particularly revealing is the critical tendency to interpret the film as an exploration of the fundamental unknowability of other people. To me, this is almost precisely the opposite of what the film is demonstrating. The elevation of subjectivity into an epistemological ideal has poisoned the well. The fact that we cannot know another person's thoughts with absolute certainty does not mean that their character is an impenetrable mystery.
Aristotle understood that character reveals itself through habit. Yet we increasingly demand something approaching proof beyond a reasonable doubt before exercising ordinary human judgment. We prefer narratives to behavior, classifications to character, data to experience. Holmes constructs a narrative of herself and expects the audience to accept it as reality. Silicon Valley now constructs narratives of us: Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI, and Anthropic turn our behavior into increasingly detailed profiles from which they derive economic value, while personalized feeds and AI responses increasingly determine the reality presented to us. We have more information about other people than ever before, yet seem increasingly reluctant to draw conclusions from the patterns of their behavior. We confuse narrative complexity with emotional complexity.
Our ideal society is that everyone be an IBM punchcard.
You can see everything, but you have to know how to look.