A few months ago, an email landed in my inbox that made me do something I almost never do: I stopped breathing for a second. The sender was Nathan Fielder’s publicist. The subject line was simple, but the implication was enormous. Would WIRED be interested in putting Nathan Fielder on a fall cover? I didn’t need reasons. I didn’t need context. The answer was yes before I even finished the sentence. But then the reasons came anyway, and they were the kind that make a journalist’s stomach do a slow, strange flip. Fielder was about to release something so top secret that I would need to sign a non-disclosure agreement just to learn what it was, let alone watch it. I signed. I listened. And then I watched. In those first days of September, before the rest of the world knew what was happening, I found myself among a tiny handful of people who had screened You Can See Everything, a film that appeared at the Telluride Film Festival as a secret addition no one had been expecting. I walked out of that screening changed—the kind of changed you don’t fully understand until weeks later, when you realize you’ve been thinking about the same frames, the same silences, the same impossible questions every single day.
What followed Telluride was not a normal movie release. It was an online thermonuclear event, the kind that makes you realize how starved we all are for something genuine, strange, and unpredictable. Reddit forums turned into frenzied archaeology digs. Memes were born overnight, the kind that feel less like jokes and more like collective coping mechanisms. Journalists across the planet—including my own colleagues at WIRED, who had absolutely no idea I had been NDA’d to hell and who seemed genuinely confused when I kept telling them, with a straight face, to please stop contacting Nathan Fielder’s publicist—began pining, begging, and elbowing each other for any scrap of access to the film. Or, even better, to Fielder himself. There was something almost desperate in the air, a sense that people weren’t just curious about a project. They were hungry for a person. They wanted to understand how a man who had spent his entire career turning human awkwardness into high art had somehow done it again, this time in a form so strange and so raw that no one could even find the words to describe it. And so the internet did what the internet does: it tried to explain the unexplainable, failed beautifully, and made the legend bigger in the process.
To understand why this all mattered so much, you have to understand what Nathan Fielder means to a certain kind of viewer. He isn’t just a comedian. He isn’t just a filmmaker. He’s a cult hero, a figure who has built his reputation on taking discomfort and bending it into something that feels almost sacred. He opened a coffee shop called Dumb Starbucks, and in doing so turned a simple absurdist prank into an international news event. He constructed an entire fake bar, with real bartenders and real patrons, just so one nervous man could practice having a difficult conversation with a friend. He trained to become a commercial airline pilot—which, if you think about it, is absolute lunacy—and then flew a 737 full of passengers in what became known as the Miracle over the Mojave. I have watched a lot of television in my life, but I have never seen anything like that moment. It was transcendent. It was terrifying. It was, somehow, deeply moving. For people who love Fielder, he occupies a strange space between prankster and philosopher, a man who uses reality as his medium and human vulnerability as his brush. He makes us laugh at the most uncomfortable things, but he also makes us feel them. He’s a comedic god walking among mere mortals, and the fact that he had made a secret film with Elizabeth Holmes—Elizabeth Holmes!—was the kind of news that felt less like an article and more like a riddle.
Of course, all of this came with a cost. Nathan Fielder, not surprisingly, is particular. The cover was on. Then maybe it was off. A week went by. My features director and I didn’t sleep. Not metaphorically—actually didn’t sleep. We sent emails. We refreshed inboxes. We stared at ceilings. Then, finally, we were a “go.” Great! Relief washed over us, until a few days later when things got dicey again. This kind of back-and-forth is normal in the world of booking celebrities, but this wasn’t normal. This was Nathan Fielder, and the secrecy, the buzz, the sheer Nathan-ness of it all made the stakes feel excruciating. I told people in my life that I hated Nathan Fielder. I told them he was impossible, that he was torturing me, that no cover was worth this anxiety. Then we were on again, and I told the same people that I loved Nathan Fielder. I told them he was a genius, that he understood something about the world that no one else did, that the agony of waiting was a privilege. They nodded politely and reminded me that I had said the exact opposite forty-eight hours earlier. I didn’t care. I was on the ride. The ride was stressful, but it was also exhilarating, and I knew—I knew—that whatever was on the other side of all this uncertainty was going to be worth it.
You might be wondering, at this point, why we didn’t just scrap the whole cover and find someone easier. There are plenty of tech-adjacent celebrities out there. We could have found an Aaron Sorkin type, someone willing to sit for a nice interview, smile for the camera, and not make our lives miserable for a month. But the thing is, You Can See Everything is not a normal film. It is a singularly astonishing piece of work. I would go so far as to say it’s among the best films I have ever seen, and I don’t say that lightly. Codirected by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, it begins as a strange, captivating, occasionally hilarious 34-day psychological dance between Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, and her partner Billy Evans, as they prepare for her incarceration. Then it morphs into something else entirely—something so beguiling, so brilliant, so impossible to categorize that any attempt to describe it feels like a betrayal. It’s not a documentary in any traditional sense. It’s not a comedy. It’s not a drama. It’s something in between, a liminal space where reality and performance blur until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. After I screened the film in early September, I thought about it every single day. I couldn’t shake it. I didn’t want to shake it. When I saw it again a few weeks later, I was afraid it wouldn’t hold up. It did. It was even better. I left the second screening feeling like I had just witnessed something that would define the cultural conversation for years to come.
When a small handful of WIRED staffers screened the film before Fielder’s cover shoot, we spent hours afterward doing what you’re never supposed to do with a piece of art: we tried to explain it. The problem was that no one could agree. We debated facial expressions—the subtle micro-movements that flicker across Fielder’s face, the moments when his carefully constructed persona seems to crack. We debated relationships—the strange, almost tender dynamics between Fielder, Holmes, and Evans, who exist in a space that feels both deeply human and completely manufactured. We debated the meaning of single sentences, parsing them like sacred texts, searching for hidden truths. In the end, we agreed on very little, except for one thing: that Fielder, notorious for his meticulous building of worlds, seemed to have finally stumbled into something much stranger than anything he could have conjured. Reality, it turns out, is his ultimate collaborator. It surprises him. It challenges him. It breaks him open in ways that even his most elaborate sets never could. And in that strange, unnameable film, he captured something that none of us could fully articulate, but all of us felt. It was a moment of pure human weirdness, pure vulnerability, pure truth—and it was worth every sleepless night, every frantic email, every swing between hatred and love. Nathan Fielder didn’t just make a great film. He made something that reminded us why we still need stories, why we still need art, and why we still need to look at each other with wonder, confusion, and grace.
