By now, the story of Elizabeth Holmes feels like a modern parable we have all heard far too many times. She was the Stanford dropout in the black turtleneck who promised to reinvent blood testing with a single pinprick, who raised hundreds of millions from savvy investors, who was crowned the youngest self-made female billionaire, and who then watched it all crumble when journalists and regulators discovered that the technology did not work. Theranos reached a peak valuation of $9 billion in 2014 before it was exposed as a house of cards, and the public reckoning that followed has been relentless: books, magazine features, podcasts, at least two documentaries, and a prestige HBO miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried. So when another documentary about Holmes arrives, a three-hour one no less, it is fair to ask why anyone should care. What could possibly be left to say? The answer, in this case, is not Holmes herself but the man behind the camera. The forthcoming film, You Can See Everything, is codirected by Nathan Fielder, the cult-favorite television auteur whose entire career has been built on making audiences feel deliciously uncomfortable. Fielder’s fans have been buzzing about this project ever since rumors surfaced last year that he had visited Holmes in prison, and the prospect of Fielder turning his singular, unnerving gaze on the most famous fraudster of her generation has turned what could have been just another true-crime retread into one of the most anticipated documentaries in years. This will not be a typical documentary, in other words. It will be a Nathan Fielder experience, which means that the real subject is likely to be something far stranger than greed, lies, and the Silicon Valley hype machine.
To understand why Fielder is the right person to interrogate Holmes, you have to appreciate his own peculiar relationship with business, performance, and deception. Before he became a cult icon, Fielder studied business at one of Canada’s top schools, and he has never let anyone forget it—at least in parody form. On his breakout series Nathan for You, which ran from 2013 to 2017, he played a wildly overconfident, deeply awkward business consultant who offered absurd marketing ideas to struggling small businesses. He once helped a frozen yogurt shop sell its product by creating a poop-themed flavor; he convinced a gas station to offer a “dumb” version of its store; he staged elaborate stunts that often cost far more than they returned. The show was a brilliant, cringe-comedy demolition of corporate self-help culture, but it was also something more: Fielder was not simply mocking his guests. He genuinely implemented his bizarre schemes, and the results were often touching, melancholy, and ethically complicated. He was playing a character, but the character was so close to his real self that no one could tell where the mask ended. Fielder has admitted that he “graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades,” and unlike Holmes, he actually completed his degree. That odd biographical detail matters because Fielder understands the language and allure of business success from the inside—even as he uses that understanding to expose its absurdities. Holmes, by contrast, dropped out of Stanford to build Theranos, and her entire persona was an invention, a carefully curated performance of visionary genius. Fielder’s entire career has been an exploration of how ordinary people construct and defend their own identities through performance. He is not merely a storyteller or interviewer; he is someone who lives in the uncomfortable space between sincerity and irony, and that makes him a uniquely dangerous person to bring into a story about a woman who convinced the world she was something she was not.
Andrew Bricker, an associate professor of English at the University of Ghent and an academic coordinator for the research project Democratic Literacy and Humour, has spent time thinking about exactly what Fielder does and why it works. In Bricker’s view, Fielder is not just a comedian or prankster. He is a philosopher of ambiguity, someone who has deliberately blurred the line between his public persona and his private self. Fielder “has made the borderlands of persona and person so ambiguous, so indeterminable, so indefinable, that none of us is entirely in on the joke,” Bricker says. That quality is central to Fielder’s appeal and also to his potential as a filmmaker. When you watch Nathan for You, you are never quite sure whether Fielder is being cruel or kind, whether his deadpan expressions conceal genuine empathy or ruthless manipulation, whether the people around him are in on the joke or unwitting pawns. That uncertainty is the engine of his comedy, but it is also a serious artistic method. It forces viewers to constantly question what they are seeing, to pay attention to the small signs of discomfort, embarrassment, and desire that flicker across people’s faces. That skill is exactly what a story like Holmes’s demands. Holmes herself was a master of performance, and her downfall came in part because too many people chose to believe her performance rather than question the technology behind it. Fielder’s entire career has been a training regimen in not believing what is placed in front of you, in noticing the gap between what people claim and what they actually do, and in sitting with the unease that comes from not knowing where reality ends and illusion begins. He is not interested in simple moralizing; he is interested in the complicated, often uncomfortable ways that people become complicit in their own deception. That makes him the perfect guide through the labyrinth of Theranos.
Fielder’s previous work, particularly his HBO series The Rehearsal, offers even more clues about how he might approach Holmes. In Nathan for You, Fielder was what Bricker calls “a kind of outlandish problem-solver, someone possessed of what I sometimes call the engineer’s brain, which sees the world strictly through the radically simplified framework of problems and solutions, even if the solutions themselves, ouroboros-style, always lead to new problems.” That description fits Fielder’s onscreen persona perfectly. He treats human interaction as if it were a spreadsheet, breaking down social situations into variables and then trying to optimize them—usually with disastrous, hilarious, and strangely profound results. In The Rehearsal, he took that approach to an extreme, building elaborate simulations to help real people rehearse difficult conversations and life choices. He hired child actors to play hypothetical family members, constructed painstakingly detailed sets, and spent months preparing participants for moments that could never be fully controlled. The show was a meditation on the impossibility of certainty, on the hubris of trying to predict and engineer human emotion. That is also the story of Theranos. Holmes and her colleagues approached blood testing with an engineer’s arrogance, believing that they could simplify a complex biological process into a sleek black box that would change the world. They treated problems as if they were purely technical, and they used the language of innovation to cover up the fact that the technology did not work. Fielder understands that kind of mindset deeply, because he has spent his career both embodying and lampooning it. His films and shows are filled with people who are convinced that they have found the perfect system, only to discover that the system creates new chaos at every turn. You Can See Everything seems likely to apply that lens to Holmes, not by simply condemning her as a liar, but by exploring the strange, almost theatrical logic that allowed her to believe her own hype—and persuaded so many brilliant people to believe it with her.
What makes You Can See Everything especially intriguing is the possibility that Fielder will not be content to simply analyze Holmes from a safe distance. The rumors of his prison visit suggest that he has actually met her, and that the documentary may include direct, unscripted interactions with her. If that is true, the film could become something far more destabilizing than a conventional true-crime exposé. Fielder is not an investigative journalist; he is not interested in uncovering new documents or proving that Holmes is guilty. The facts of her crimes are already well established, and she is serving her sentence. What Fielder does is create situations in which people’s defenses break down, where they are forced to reveal more than they intended, and where the line between confession and performance becomes impossible to draw. He does this with his subjects in Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, but he has never done it with someone like Holmes, a woman who has spent years carefully controlling her own image, who is now behind bars, and who may have nothing left to lose. The prospect of Fielder sitting across from Holmes, asking polite but bizarre questions, and letting the silence stretch until it becomes unbearable, is almost too good to believe. It could be a masterpiece of uncomfortable truth-telling, or it could be a trainwreck that reveals nothing at all. Either way, it will be fascinating to watch, because Fielder’s style is not about extracting clean answers. It is about showing how messy, contradictory, and self-serving all human narratives are, especially the ones we tell about ourselves. Holmes claimed to be a revolutionary who was trying to help the world; she was also a woman who knowingly put patients at risk and lied to everyone around her. Both things are true, and a conventional documentary would try to reconcile them, to find a clear moral. Fielder would be more inclined to leave the contradictions hanging in the air, to let the audience feel the same vertigo that Theranos employees and investors must have felt as the illusion began to crack.
In the end, You Can See Everything promises to be less about Elizabeth Holmes than about the way we tell stories about ambition and failure, about the seductive power of confidence, and about the uncomfortable fact that fraud is often indistinguishable from genuine belief. Fielder’s presence ensures that the film will be strange, funny, and deeply unsettling, because that is what he does: he takes familiar stories and makes them feel newly unhinged. His fans have waited a long time for him to step out of the niche world of cult television and into the cinematic mainstream, and it is only fitting that his bridge to the multiplex is the story of a woman whose entire life was a piece of performance art. The title You Can See Everything is ambiguous in the best Fielderesque way: it could mean that the documentary reveals all the hidden truths, or it could mean that we are all too blind to see what is right in front of us, or it could be a quiet joke about the impossibility of seeing anything at all. That ambiguity, more than any new revelation about Theranos, is the reason to be excited. Nathan Fielder has finally met his match in Elizabeth Holmes, and no matter what happens on screen, the collision of those two strange, obsessive, self-mythologizing minds is bound to be unforgettable. Whether it is a masterpiece or a disaster, it will be the rare documentary that actually makes you question what you were watching while you were watching it—and that is exactly the point.
