> But the thing that often gets lost in the retelling of her story is that Holmes was actually acquitted of all four charges related to defrauding patients. She’s in prison because a jury found that she knowingly misled investors who poured more than $700 million into the startup.
This point is also clearly made in the film. Sounds like the article has nothing to say and just wants to leech off the success and attention of the doc.
The people that invested their money did not make these decisions. The people running the fund did. You're victim blaming. Most people don't get a very wide choice where their money goes outside the couple of options the fund managers present. I'd also venture most people do not even look at what stocks are in the fund. They'll look at the past earnings and check the box.
This is family funds - Murdoch, Walton, Ellison. You think they shouldn't be responsible for doing due diligence? The device didn't work. They could've independently verified that at any point.
If there were users that were given bad tests, that was due to these investors not doing their jobs.
Also, just because the jury didn't think there was enough evidence to convict her of defrauding patients (beyond reasonable doubt), doesn't mean she was innocent.
It actually does. You can judge her, but she is not guilty. The more we as a society decide the justice system is just an arbitrary way of deciding who gets punished and not _the_ way of deciding if a person is or is not a criminal the more we slide towards oblivion.
If a person is found not guilty, they are not guilty. To argue otherwise is to undermine the core institution of western civilization.
Important to note that western civilization is fundamentally ok with the knowledge that the statement issued by a jury or judge does not actually define whether a person is morally, factually or colloquially “innocent”. Disputes may be addressed c/o OJ Simpson and the Central Park 5.
there is no way to argue that without also believing that the millions of people the state has tossed into prison are all guilty, which is really not something that I can do.
Not guilty doesn't mean innocent. It means "guilt could not be proven", it does not mean "innocence was proven".
Seriously, this is why OJ was found liable for the murder of his wife in a civil case, as they're judged on the balance of probabilities.
And it's why people who have served time, then had a retrial ordered and then found not guilty, can be denied compensation, because decisions on compensation are also done on the balance of probabilities.
No. To argue what you argue is to play pretend stupid.
Court of law with its ability imprison people must have higher standard for the "guilty" decision. That makes it possible for rich guilty people to not be judged guilty.
You are allowed and expexted to use own brain. You can consider people guilty.
For context for others, Holmes was acquitted of defrauding patients. A juror stated that she was acquitted because Holmes didn't directly interact with the patients. On the other hand, she did directly interact with investors, so the evidence was much clearer.
Separately, Theranos' COO and Holmes' boyfriend at the time was convicted by a separate jury for defrauding patients. Theranos also settled multiple lawsuits for ~$50M and declared bankruptcy soon after.
What gets lost more is that Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients, so it's not even like Theranos was absolved of those charges. The kicker is that the CEO and co-founder of a company that has been established to willfully defraud patients somehow managed to escape conviction.
I don't think there is any magic sauce to this movie. I saw it yesterday, and do agree (spoilers ahead) there are three acts: deception, sympathetic, puppeteer. I feel though that this article treats the movie as if its some sort of hypnosis; it's not. Its a very well put together movie that makes you question everything thats happening. I and others came out of it largely questioning:
A. Is she truly the most manipulative person we've ever seen
B. Largely oblivious to what's happening around her
and not:
- Is she guilty
This movie I would say does not answer those questions, nor do I think seeks to.
I haven't seen it, but my opinion is she likely was what lawyers call "reckless", as in she should have known but didn't care (blinded by the upside and a "we'll figure it once we scale" tech attitude that works a lot better for db performance than healthcare).
It's worse than reckless. They make not-knowing part of their operating model.
And they make sure nobody else with power and influence does too much knowing either. Silos, stay in your lane, don't ask questions about how your department's KPIs mesh with the next one over, or what conclusions might be inferred.
Yes. So many of her replies to Nathan's questions were "I don't know" or "I don't remember" or "I don't understand" for questions that were very straightforward.
At her level of responsibility she'd better know. Whatever the case, she's either deceitful or incompetent. Neither answer is flattering or acceptable.
In virtually every company there are questions you intuitively know that your managers don't necessarily want to know the answers to (or at least, they only want to know the answers to them if you have a solution), usually it's something relatively trivial like minor infractions of corporate rules.
There are some leaders who are extremely good at convincing you about the importance of belief in a particular thing to the point where you avoid even thinking up those questions - if they are ever cornered (and they rarely allow it to get to that point) they will wriggle endlessly rather than responding to a line of inquiry that bursts the collective bubble.
Do they know? It's hard to argue about their internal motivations.
When a lawyer says "reckless" it's an extremely strong word. It doesn't mean "negligent", IANAL (and it depends on the state etc) but it's more like if you knowingly run over a pedestrian in your way, and you aren't trying to hurt them but don't care if they get hurt. And often criminal law will treat it as just a little less bad than intent.
It very much depends on where the lawyer is. What you’ve described would be more like “depraved heart” or “wicked recklessness” in jurisdictions that have it, where reckless was that you were doing 90 in a residential area. I think the point is more that the legal term “reckless” may have a specific meaning in given places.
It's above reckless, in other legal systems there is a level above gross and reckless negligence where the prosecution argues not only they should have known, in fact they did know and chose to proceed anyway.
I think if you're stuck on that question, her manipulation poked through the silver screen and worked on you.
To me the subtext of the movie was that a sociopath's manipulation is so strong that even against the heavy counterforce of the filmmaker's bias, it makes it through. I agree with TFA's general premise that the film forces you to confront how easy it is to deceive you -- but it's not the filmmaker who's doing the deceiving. Sociopathic manipulation is about sparking doubt. Gaslighters don't need to prove anything, they just need to plant a "but what if" in some corner of your mind. The fact that the author felt compelled to write TFA at all is ironically a product of that manipulative power.
Another way to think of it is: the documentary makes you think whether, if you were in the room with her in the years that Theranos was operating, would you have fallen for it?
I don’t think an accusation of ‘apologia’ is justified here. If some particular cognitive process generates deception genuine to the deceiver, that does not make the deception acceptable.
There’s a story in the movie about a magician performing a trick, but where there is no trick. The magician really does the thing he appears to do. I think that’s more where GP’s question lies, i.e.: Is her unusual processing of the world an elaborate conscious construction, or is it automatic, and to what degree?
That isn’t a direct determination about her merit or culpability.
For a lot of people, they wouldn't say it's a hit piece on her; more on someone near to her. I also wouldn't call it a documentary fully. It really is hard to watch the movie, and come to any solid conclusions. I'd like to say also I'm not questioning her guilt, and specifically called out that that's not what the provocation is about in the movie. So apologia may be the wrong term her? It's more about how can you understand someone and the motives of their actions.
Best take of the movie here. When the whole crew met with them before production, Nathan's idea to say "fuck it, let's just see how they do business" was the right call and might show she actually may not have known as much as you'd think, but it's fully intentional to the point of complete insanity.
The simple concept is some version of the Peter Principal.
You just flat out don’t get into these positions without being a psychopath. Partially that it wouldn’t be attractive to you, and partially that you won’t succeed without those behaviors.
I’m a big fan of conscript political assignments. The people that don’t want to do it I think would make better decisions.
I have no idea what this movie is actually about. I only know Holmes is a classical sociopath. Knowing what that means I cannot imagine any surprises coming from this movie.
Here are key observations of sociopathic personalities:
* They are never wrong, but there are rare times they will admit to being wrong if they have calculated an advantage in doing so.
* They don't care about you, or anybody else. They can't. A sociopath is a damaged personality that cannot empathize. What's interesting is that introspection is the same skill as empathy, so they cannot do that either. As such, they have no faults.
* Sociopaths tend to be charming. They want to appear pleasant. A primary goal of any narcissist is admiration. This is all temporary though, because they lack the empathy necessary to adapt and build trust or extend relationships, which means they are more important than you. It also means they will extend an irrationally great amount of energy to inform you of just how charming they are or how wrong they aren't.
* Sociopaths tend to become hostile when they don't get want they want. They live in a world of "i want" or "i don't want" and there is no further action to execute. This also tends to make for controlling and abusive personalities.
* Sociopaths are not necessarily sadists. The goal is not typically to harm other people, but rather to fulfill themselves irrespective of any harm.
While not criminal like Homes this seems to describe a lot of the most currently vaunted tech CEOs
Musk, Altman and Zuckerberg all are able to somehow ignore the harm they cause and have an amazing ability to justify it in pursuit of some “greater good”.
The Gervais Principle [0] decades ago was arguing that Sociopathy is what companies have optimized themselves for in their upper management. That it is almost the expected "social class" of wealthy people today.
As someone outside US politics and as someone who generally takes the position of an impartial observer it’s always fun to engage people in gentle debate to see if they understand why they feel the way that they vehemently[1] do about a person or topic.
A fun one to ask to rile up Fox News listeners is to ask them which specific law Hillary Clinton is guilty of breaking.
Trump just threatened to jail her, so this is still relevant!
That’s just a random example, there are many such biases people hold where they have a strong belief but no clue where they got that belief.
[1] A study showed that many antivaxers would cheerfully get their kid a shot if offered $50! That’s what their “conviction” is actually worth.
This article falls into the same trap, I dunno what to call them, artsy-upper-class-society-and-film reviewers often do; writing vague yet meaningful-sounding things about the obvious subtext of a movie as if it was a revelation, yet without any specific observations about it.
Yes, this is a documentary about a person. And how the documentary is presented will color your perspective of the person. This should (hopefully) be apparent to anyone who's watched a documentary about a person before.
But how does it do it? What tools does it use to that effect? I appreciate that this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous, but what makes this unique from other documentaries that deal with ambiguous subject matter?
> this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous [...] with ambiguous subject matter?
There's a big difference in ambiguousness and ambivalence, especially in documentaries. "Ambiguousness" represents an uncertain logical conclusion, whereas "ambivalence" stands in for (the strength of) conflicting forces.
I'd wager that an ambiguous documentary would be close to being unwatchable, and I can't remember that I've seen any. Since I've yet to see You Can See Everything, unfortunately I can't comment about it in any way.
Without having watched the film, I'm sure they can make it look like Sunny Balwani was the guy in charge, or something like that. I don't even know the whole story of Theranos and never followed it with much interest - startup scams are a dime-a-dozen. HP's acquisition of Autonomy always struck me as such a tale: CFO takes the fall for CEO and CTO for a $11 b acquisition that a few years later was worth a tenth because of accounting fraud and when he gets out the CEO gives him a sinecure; then the week of CEO and CTO acquittal the latter gets killed in a bicycling accident and the former dies when a tornado sinks his yacht.
Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are interesting characters, true, but there's so much nuts in tech, it's just fertile ground for stories.
The story is so much more than a startup scam. It's about large numbers of supposedly savvy men being duped by a kid. What kind of kid could and would do such a thing?
It seems that everyone interviewed about this story has their own red flag moment -- the point where they knew that something was way off, and that they should stay far away. Silicon Valley VCs being the prime example. It is incorrect to say that Theranos was a VC company, it was more funded by angels who were incapable of objectively judging what was being proposed.
At Stanford a prof (important to say: a woman) who knew that the idea was technically infeasible. (And interesting to contrast with another very senior prof -- a man -- who left his tenured position to join Theranos). I remember reading a New Yorker profile of EH years before Theranos blew up, and the story described how she had all of these extremely powerful old men on her board: George Schultz, Henry Kissinger. That was my red flag moment. Yes, they are brilliant and powerful, but they are also clueless about biotech and medical tech. So why get them involved? Something seemed very off to me. Lots of people knew that something was very off, and yet ...
I’ve watched the film. There are things that happen during the filming of it, involving the people making the project, that I would indeed classify as big spoilers and knowing them beforehand would lessen the experience.
besides the topic that is being explored is deception so its expected the documentary Will use a rethorical or film technique that has some connection to that theme of deception?
> But how does it do it? What tools does it use to that effect? I appreciate that this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous, but what makes this unique from other documentaries that deal with ambiguous subject matter?
If you’re that interested in getting these answers, you probably should watch the film
Unfortunately, it has such a limited release that most people who want to watch it outside North America won't be able to. No one has been able to explain why it has had such a limited release.
Seems like most documentaries from my point of view in Spain. Seems we won't be able to see this in cinemas until February sometime, and before that it'll probably be available via other channels. In the end, most interested will have seen it before February already, so when times come around, not that many people see it. So the cinemas adjust future viewings since not that many end up seeing them, as it takes so long time to arrive here.
Been like this with most mainstream documentaries like this one.
I respectfully disagree. It's post-postmodern performance art. It's like a box of Post cereal with a Post-It note on it nailed to a post in from of the lamppost at the corner of Meta's headquarters in the metaverse. It's a relentless onslaught of origami tesseracts made out of pages from a Baudrillard book that an NYU student used to roll a cigarette of imported European tobacco while they post on Xitter in all lowercase. It was pure never-been-stepped-on A24.
I'm glad I saw this film in theaters as the people laughing and shouting was part of this experience but I'll never watch it again, i.e. it was good but definitely not "fun". I agree with those who say that excising the final third would've made it tighter.
This reads like a high schooler discovering that film can manipulate you, but doesn't go any further than that.
"We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not."
She speaks for herself. The author then doesn't bring up a single fact, piece of evidence, or anything else besides just restating the pedestrian premise a few times. I don't share her inability to study a topic in-depth, come to a conclusion or challenge my previously held beliefs, and then pass judgment while attaching a calibrated degree of certainty to the soundness of my conviction.
> We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not. Here’s how it actually goes: We form an emotional impression first, then we build a belief around it, and then we go looking for facts that support it. This is my theory as to why we’re so divided in this country. Beliefs built on emotion are nearly impossible to reason with.
This idea is explored in depth in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.
And related David Hume quote:
> Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions
Documentaries and video in general are just dramatically, intensely worse mediums for communicating factual learnings compared to books and text in general.
Apologies! I'll add more words next time. I was actually just getting out of the movie when I saw this and should have taken more time to write a proper comment. Thanks for the reminder.
I saw a video on YouTube a while ago about her. I think it was either by Internet historian or someone similar. Not sure if it’s worth going to theaters for this
“I watched an unrelated YouTube video therefore I’m not convinced this movie is good” sure is a paradoxical level of judging a book by its cover.
I assume what you meant is that having heard about the person the movie focuses on, you have no interest in seeing more about her. Having felt entirely apathetic about Holmes since the early days of the Theranos scam, I can’t say I disagree with you.
Ye but I was saying more along the lines of I’ve already been spoiled on the plotline of what happened to Holmes. Idk if seeing the movie will be any different. Might be who knows
I saw the movie Friday night. It is a mind job. You'll walk away with more questions than answers.
Without spoiling the movie, it's possible for people to be multiple things at once. That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of. The movie is a wild ride.
> That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of.
Thanks!
Surely the documentaries are made in a way that's depicts that very accentued, manipulative, borderline psychopathic person. This is likely more than she was in real life. She might even have been motivated by genuine will to improve the diagnostics field. So yeah you might be "deceived" by these docudramas.
I fear that this kind of poetic write-up muddies the water into "oh, maybe things are more nuanced, and played on her weird personality and background to make things look worse, maybe it wasn't so bad".
People got misdiagnosed and suffered directly because of her. She's every bit guilty of that, as deserving of a harsh judgement as any person directly causing that kind of harm.
She was acquitted of several counts of wire fraud to defraud patients, but that does not mean harm was not found to customers. I haven’t been able to find the specific statute, but essentially the jury found that the prosecution didn’t prove all of the elements of that charge beyond a reasonable doubt. We’ll likely never know the details, jury deliberations are secret. But there was absolutely harm to patients. Balwani was also charged with patient fraud and WAS convicted on those counts.
Maybe it's just because I've been around a bunch of people in startup circles, seaking angel and vc, etc and myself raised and had exits and been deposed in highly contentious situations.
Holmes doesn't talk like any innocent person has ever talked. Period. Not even like a naive rube either.
She explicitly initiated this whole thing as a narrative exercise and she just had to stick to the script for what, 45 days? While letting herself feel the genuine self pity all these types of people feel when they are experiencing the consequences for their actions instead of being able to foist them onto someone else?
Her only path forward is to FULLY commit to the bit as a way of deceiving the credulous, even a moment of cynicism and the whole thing falls apart.
Now, did she in fact succeed in that or was it a choice to show no cracks in the facade because it made a more engaging movie?
News flash, I love his media but Nathan Fielder is a monster as well he's my favorite monster but let's not pretend. We can just hold both things to be true instead of engaging in cognitive dissonance.
Other than the children everyone involved in this is a monster, and the only way to hide that fact is to ensure the ending is ambiguous, otherwise it just feels like non-transcendent tabloid pap profiting off of bad behavior.
> Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns - when the article or book appears - his hard lesson.
It really sounds like you would consider most people to be monsters. That is, the vast majority of us participate in exploitation to some degree and rationalize that exploitation as necessary, acceptable, minimal or merely something we cannot change.
That's an arguable position, but the problem with it is that it lacks any kind of gradient. Is the person who stole someone else's lunch from the fridge at work (an unfathomable act, to me) a monster in the same way that any person in federal prison is?
The film is relevant: initially, Amanda felt like a proxy for us, the viewers, someone to point out the abnormality in what we have seen. But then, she shows her unwillingness to even confront the possibility the miniseries was exploitative. She also shows a voyeuristic enthusiasm for more information and involvement. She blends into the film at this point, and we lose the feeling of her being our proxy. But, can we really not think of a time we reacted defensively instead of with considered reason? Can we not think of a time we dove into a lurid topic that was fully irrelevant to our lives?
There are a number of cases where people involved in monstrous gang violence appear to show genuine rehabilitation. They devote significant effort toward encouraging others to avoid the mistakes they made. Do they do that because they are no longer monsters, or do they do it because it's one of the few acceptable choices available to someone in their position? I'm not sure we can reliably know.
The idea that anyone in this film has a lived experience close to those who grew up embedded in gang violence is a laughable comparison. The idea that anyone involved in this project has demonstrated, through proof of work, even .5% of what's involved in a person who has engaged in gang member reform is absurd. This is extreme category error.
Are you going to pretend that anyone in this film can be rightly considered a representation of the average persons lived experience?
I agree that Amanda Seyfried is an audience proxy in this movie initially. Are you going to assert that her lived experience and her role and place in society is representative of the norm? In this case is it reasonable to accept the films implicit presentation of her as a audience proxy? How is that reasonable? We do not have to accept or enter into the frame the film wishes us to, we do not have to allow it to anchor our starting point in how we engage with the piece of media.
Humans are the only monsters that actually exist, it doesn't make them less human and it doesn't mean they can't change their lived behavior.
Talking to someone outside of the situation confronts the possible compromising of Nathan's objectivity, and dialog is a common way to process experiences.
I felt it as a break from the intensity and absurdity of the initial half, a lull in the rollercoaster. Then the film reduced Amanda's distance from the subject matter and we were off again.
(I do think the intensity of the first half is partly manufactured by a soundtrack that almost cartoonishly conveys 'unsettling' and 'eerie.' That's probably my main complaint about the film.)
I did not suggest anyone in the film had done a single shred of work towards redemption. Not one person in the film recognizes or admits doing anything wrong, which is a usual first step. Nathan never second-guesses his personal rationalization for making a documentary that financially benefits a subject against his own values. Successfully emerging with clean hands in the end does not fully resolve that.
I did not equate anyone in the film with the lived experience of a gang member. When talking about the categorization of people as good or bad or monster, examples where the dichotomy is extreme are relevant.
And yes, of course, Amanda not having our lived experience is part of why she blends into the film. That's no accident. We are shown her farm, horses and a picture perfect fireside setting. Nathan doesn't need to narrate that "Amanda is comfortable and rich with a farm in the Catskills and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan at one of those buildings where you regularly peek into the courtyard you aren't allowed to enter while you walk past" for the film to make that point.
Whether or not the average person has a different lived experience is still a different question from whether or not the average person is classified as a monster by your measure. And the lived experience of the average HN poster could be closer in relative terms of privilege to that of Nathan and Amanda than to that of the much less privileged, even in the so-called developed world.
I do not believe that the average person would agree with your classification of Nathan and Amanda as monsters. That doesn't invalidate your argument, but it does suggest very broad boundaries, and it becomes unclear what, if anything, prevents a plurality or majority of people being defined as a monster by your worldview. My question was about the utility of the binary classification if it ends up being that overarching.
Explain what position you think is being taken? Is it a binary position? A spectrum? Discrete? Continuous? How can anyone understand what you are even arguing against?
The attempt to extrapolate a generalized formalism from a single specific analysis is really building a pattern out of a single data point.
The pattern you've chosen to build is one that allows you to take the negative position but no one knows what position you're actually complaining about?!?
Maybe where I went wrong is that, even knowing you weren't using a more common meaning of monster, I still made some assumptions based on it, namely: monsters are (or seem) inhuman, irredeemable, undeserving of sympathy, and best removed from society. I also assumed that what made Nathan and Amanda monsters to you is their respective exploitation of others, aka "profiting off of bad behavior."
But, monster is a superlative: there isn't much worse you can be. If you are calling a plurality or majority of people 'the worst kind of human,' does the term not lose utility? Do you use it as a mere stand-in for 'bad person?'
That is why I asked: Is the person who stole someone else's lunch from the fridge at work (an unfathomable act, to me) a monster in the same way that any person in federal prison is?
This may seem less serious than I intend it to be. I do think stealing a colleague's lunch is a sign of severely compromised morality, but I wouldn't default to calling them a monster.
This ultimately matters to me, because I am concerned about the outcome. If we characterize people who do bad things as monsters or 'bad people,' it may follow that they be denied any sympathy, humane treatment in prisons or a path to rehabilitation. None of this is to diminish the harm to victims, whose concerns are a priority. I would posit this is a significant reason that sexual assault in men's prisons is tolerated or accepted as serving justice. The larger and more absolute the category, the more people are subject to that outcome.
I also tend to be a bit hypervigilant about anticipated objections. This may appear as a lack of clarity of opinion when it is intended to be concession for the sake of discussion.
Reading reviews about almost any movie is like this. But, I expect the comments on HN to be more genuine than I’m witnessing in this thread.
It almost as if the comment section is filled with HN-trained LLM-backed bots intentionally being absurdly vague; just like the trailer last month was.
I am seriously concerned this is all some sort of ingenious marketing ploy to get people to watch the movie instead of just saying, “I genuinely don’t give a shit about Holmes any more now than I did a decade ago.”
>I am seriously concerned this is all some sort of ingenious marketing ploy to get people to watch the movie instead of just saying, “I genuinely don’t give a shit about Holmes any more now than I did a decade ago.”
Yes, these comments look like a serious astroturfing campaign.
It's a movie with at least one surprising twist, which seems to be fairly central to enjoying the experience, and people who've seen it don't want to spoil it for others. Hence they're vague in their descriptions. It's as simple as that.
I haven’t seen a single spoiler, even on the one comment that said there were spoilers ahead.
Again; I expect better on HN and, in this particular case, I’m not getting out of the community what I’ve come to expect with its candor and transparency.
The general twist is that she doesn’t really come off as the villain of this film (though she certainly does not come off in a flattering light) - her current husband it turns out is actually a pretty terrifying sociopath who seems to possibly have a bit of a cocaine habit (inferred from the excessive sniffles and insane demeanor) - and he really becomes sort of the films main antagonist.
All of this is completely subjective so someone else could come away with a different take, but if there was a twist (which I would not say this is a film with an overt twist) - it would be this.
For me it was a window into insane wealth and privilege and the types of lives these people lead and the engines that power their sense of self importance and delusions. I do think it was a phenomenal documentary.
SPOILERs kinda: Notably, it's all in the presentation and form of everything that went on. There were about ten different moments in the packed theater where something was said or happened where the entire audience was... silent. tense. I've never felt that sort of palpable and shared tension anywhere in my life like that.
But the movie also teases that could just be spin to distract from Holmes' villainy. Just as the first half explores how much the villainy of Theranos by some gets pushed off to Sunny. In about the same ways. Or the first half hints that her Dad as a former Enron executive is the exact same sort of person "who never did anything wrong" but "accidentally" happened to be right there when everything went wrong. (Which is related because her Dad is also one of the big voices for "Sunny was the villain and I knew it all along" narrative in the film.)
But yeah, window into insane wealth and privilege.
The big, big "twist" is SPOILER that last second reveal that Nathan did go swim in the ocean with Holmes and might have been compromised (as Seyfried wonders in the last few moments) and the film really is just another case of trying to make it seem like Holmes isn't the villain because Nathan came away liking Holmes.
(But that's also a game Fielder is playing in this film, how much you can trust him to be an "objective" observer, so not necessarily a twist following along from the beginning, but subtext made text in the last few minutes.)
I think it’s incredibly bad faith to knee-jerk respond that people unwilling to reveal the surprises that made the film enjoyable to them are LLMs or shills.
Almost everything you'd want to say about it would spoil something interesting about the film. (This is not hearsay. I've seen it and I can't think about how to say anything meaningful about it without spoiling it.)
So if the movie can be "spoiled" it's at least....entertaining? I'm not sure to think if people are just leaving disturbed and mildly traumatized or what
I felt the movie was entertaining, but also somewhat unsatisfying. You don't really get answers or catharsis from Holmes being further confronted and exposed. To me, the movie was about media narratives and how deceptive lies of omission can be.
No one including my wife was interested in seeing it so I went by myself. It was long, but interesting. The author hits the nail on the head:
“You sit there believing you’re watching a documentary about a woman who deceived the world, only to discover that you’re also watching a demonstration of how easy it is to deceive you.”
I had the same question for the author of the article, but it's understandable that people are going to be cagey answering this question because they may not want to give away spoilers.
Well, it's both. We have all the public facts about Theranos. Nathan Fielder got to live with them for a period of time. That's not public information. It's still a documentary.
Well, she probably watched lots of videos about Holmes and read a lot about her in preparation for her role. IIRC Tina Fey talked a lot about Sarah Palin.
And “the point” is that it is an interesting twist to have an actor who portrayed a public figure actually interact with that figure.
They show Holmes reluctantly watching the movie "The Dropout" which is a dramatized version of "the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes" starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes.
Later in "You Can See Everything" Amanda Seyfried literally becomes an important character in the documentary including voicing her opinions and impressions, arguing with and challenging Holmes' husband Billy (they have just met for the first time) and talking at length with Fielder about his opinions and impressions.
This inclusion of Seyfried in this manner ruined for me any chance of this film feeling like a "documentary." This is the point for me where the film went "off-the-rails" and begins to feel like a very confusing experiment in audience manipulation.
But the question was how is this deceitful? Like, when someone says a documentary is deceitful, I assume there’s some important information the documentary didn’t include, or provided outright false information. I get that the documentary went in a direction you didn’t like. I just saw it this afternoon, and didn’t feel the same way, but I’m still processing it and I do find your opinion interesting. But unless you are saying this is, like, false advertising, I don’t see how that qualifies as deceitful.
I haven't seen the documentary, but I have a background in media and art. There are a couple of ways I could understand this.
The first is the general public's lack of understanding of documentaries as an art form. Documentaries are essentially narratives presented as unfiltered reality ("facts"). Most folks don't truly understand this, or they lose sight of it through suspension of disbelief. That is, they don't know or forget about the film crew, editing, framing, and other artistic choices that form what they see. The illusion becomes invisible; they see only "facts" rather than a constructed narrative designed to guide their interpretation.
Second, filmmakers often use deception as an artistic device in documentaries. Mockumentaries are a pretty clear example of subverting the conventions of documentary filmmaking. It's a bit meta for most folks, so I could see how someone without much media literacy might totally miss this. But it's definitely a very interesting artistic choice given the subject matter.
The achiles heel of the documentaries as a form of propaganda & psyops (aka "narratives presented as reality") is that they have a profound dependence on aural cues for manipulating the audiance. It is difficult to be subtle regarding that intent when sound is involved.
So pay attention to the sound track and adjust your "suspension of disbelief" accordingly.
Tantacrul (software project manager, UX guy, muso and YouTuber)’s “Music on Reality TV is Insanely Manipulative” https://youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I is pretty good.
Heck yeah! Thanks. It's bad-tasting medicine, but Tantacrul makes me laugh, so I don't mind thinking about what this manipulation can do to me. Hopefully, I'll also pick up some resistance.
To be fair though it is A24 and I don't know if they're capable of making music that isn't extremely tense and eerie, it's all they do. So keeping in mind that the movie, clocking in at nearly 3 hours, would have been too dry and possibly still fairly unsettling without music, I thought the score was actually quite fun.
Nathan spent a good deal of time openly trying to decide if he was being deceived or not and while the music drove the tension, by the end of the movie it was clear that he had an open internal conflict about whether to trust her or not, and ultimately left that choice up to the viewer.
A24 and who they hire don't compose all the songs - for movies the music supervisor is either picking songs or hiring composers - it is either scored (custom written for the show $$$$), or famous tracks are licensed ($$), or songs from royalty free stock music libraries are selected and used($).
The bigger the budget the more custom scoring and less stock music.
The music was composed by Ari Balouzian, same guy who did Primetime which is also A24 and currently in theatre. Both were Lance Oppenheim projects, they seem to like to work together.
But literally watch any A24 movie and compare the soundtracks. A24 takes a much larger hand in things like this than other production companies. They have their own in-house music label. They forgo typical big composers and prefer to hire awesome indie folks like Alex G or Nala Sinephro and let them do their thing, with some light production notes (eerie, etc) and a design goal to make the music part of the narrative. It's a formula and they do it well.
This isn't confined to "documentaries" - everything we accept as unfiltered 'facts' must be from 'a certain point of view'. Consider the Canon illustration from the article. Those present a man from different lighting, angles and perspectives. No matter how much a photographer might want to convey objective truth, a picture will always be from some perspective and lighting.
The same can be said for the news we watch. Or the history we read. Or the stories we tell each other. In 2026, we have swung too far toward the fanciful end of the spectrum of storytelling. We're now beset on all sides by BS generators (both human and artificial) and it's more important than ever to carefully handle truth in our stories.
But make no mistake - the teller of a story is absolutely crafting a reality for you. It's on you to decide whether you trust the narrator, or not.
> No matter how much a photographer might want to convey objective truth, a picture will always be from some perspective and lighting.
A workaround is to always shoot everyone the same. If a journalist or interviewer grows a reputation, they can show everyone "on level ground" by keeping the pose, lighting, etc... constant.
It's one reason that long-form YouTube interviewers like Lex Friedman are so popular with a more discerning crowd.
"But he's so bland, monotonous, and boring!" cry the haters.
> A workaround is to always shoot everyone the same. If a journalist or interviewer grows a reputation, they can show everyone "on level ground" by keeping the pose, lighting, etc... constant.
I don't think this works.
And I think it might be actually easier to exploit. The fraudster knows what you're going to do in advance, and can target their own presentation to maximally take advantage.
If the way you show someone conveys X about them, especially when due to outside cultural cues - here's the millionaire framing, here's the convict one... - and you just use the same X for every subject, then you're just suggesting a particular framing over and over. You're avoiding a layer of "my active framing is telling a particular story" but only with a passive—but still deliberate—framing of "my framing is telling a particular story" that you hold constant across every story.
In some ways this is similar to what Holmes exploited originally! Lots of industry media was willing to uncritically frame and present her with their "visionary tech founder" styles, and she leaned even further in to that with the Jobs-isms.
Would not a truer "fair" framing would've been to dig into the claims and let the evidence determine the visual language, to avoid the visual language of "Steve Jobs!!" bias the reader/viewer into giving Holmes' claims more credence?
If I buy a security product, and the seller sends me nothing, therefore showing how easy it is to scam me. Are they somehow less of a scammer, did I actually buy anything of value? Are they raising awareness of the problem? Or are they just the problem?
In my experience with Fielder material, the only truth is what you said. I never know if what I see and hear is real or some flavor (if not entirely) acting.
I really don't like Fielder's previous body of work. It strikes me as unkind and mean-spirited. A body of work that's built around laughing at and looking down on ordinary people. Fundamentally evil in most of the same ways than most reality television is.
You Can see Everything, on the other hand is a masterpiece. The Wunderkind becomes a grownup and makes something serious and meaningful and important. A documentary infused with self-consciousness and introspection. Provocative, innovative and calculatedly brilliant.
Whether that happened entirely accidentally through a confluence of absurdities remains to be seen, I suppose. I am very much looking forward to seeing what Fielder does next.
One of the most stunning things to me is that most people do not recognize film cuts as breaks in time. The classic example of a guy shooting a basketball and then a cut to the ball going in, and 90% of the population says "Yeah, I saw the video, he made the shot".
Most modern people would laugh at those who scuttled away from the Lumiere's approaching train back in 1896, but in fact they are really not that superior mentally.
Growing up in a very high-functioning and very dysfunctional family, I felt that a lot of people were missing the basic truth. Even the film seemed to circle it without really understanding it.
Elizabeth Holmes doesn't know her own center. She responds to the people around her; everything she does is to please her partners and/or the internalized expectations of her family. In the psychological parlance, she is an extreme fawner with narcissistic traits.
Such people are, in a sense, masters of deceit, but once you understand that they lack a real center outside of how others perceive them (and that they also have real feelings, even if their notions of love are profoundly confused), there's no longer an enigma. You know exactly what you'd looking at.
I met and spent a lot of time messaging and hanging out irl with a person this.
Its so weird because at one point they really had me and I remarked to them that what I liked about them eas they were always up for it and openminded.
Turns out they were just telling you what you wanted to hear and reflecting your desires back at you while trying to capitalize on new business ideas and have you contribute food/supplies for their gatherings.
The psychology term for that is "mirroring" and it's a way used to make people like you. It's used consciously by people very high in narcissistic traits (up to psychopaths) and unconsciously by people medium/low on those same traits (people with borderline PD, most fawners (people pleasers) with CPTSD.
Im pretty sure she was BPD, definitely fawner. Her mother was a cold distant person she was estranged from and she wanted to get with any rich douchebag and presumably repeat the cycle
It's not easy. Someone with BPD carries a lot of shame, so seeing faults in themselves is a big no no, it can trigger a spiral shame and lead them to self harm or other destructive behaviors.
I definitely have empathy and sympathy for them despite them being an economic superior to me but the stark absence of any authenticity offends me on a level I could never sustain a friendship or even likely aquaintanceship (whatever that means) with them.
Nearly everybody has a center, though it may be so obscured by repression, their coping mechanisms, etc. that it would take years of deep work to start to find it. And most people in her shoes never do that work, so functionally the question may be moot.
I'm not bragging: but I do not watch any (almost any) video of the news, so I never see Trump speak or see the Israeli military against the Palestinians or watch the footage of the trials, etc. I do read the news. I just sort of drifted into it when I was an early cord-cutter. I think around the yr 2000 there wasn't much video and I got used to it. I do find that I am much less overstimulated than my friends and family who watch a lot of news video.
Lacan described registers of experience: the Imaginary (visual, sexual, emotional, fantasy), Symbolic (language, associations), and Real (the unsymbolizable, "impossible"). Watching video is immersion in the Imaginary, you get roused, riled up, turned-on, activated, thoughts are connected by paranoia, magical thinking, and aggression. It makes HUGE difference to not not follow the news that way! Again, I'm not bragging, not proud of myself, not espousing a Mr Spock outlook. But it is hard to miss the difference.
So many comments about Holmes, I think, are missing the point. This isn't about Holmes, and neither, IMO, is the article. Like all things Nathan Fielder does, this is a movie by Nathan for Nathan. Elizabeth Holmes is just used, in every sense of the word, as a prop.
The article was written by someone who's never seen any of Nathan's other work and is apparently blown away by his skill at and unquenchable fetish for using and deceiving people. Yeah, that's his whole thing. Congrats, you just watched a documentary about psychopaths.
I don't think this is anything like Nathan's normal stuff. He didn't manipulate at all. He just hung around and asked really direct and obvious questions and you watched her and her husband squirm and lie.
I hate these kinds of documentaries. Even after being caught and punished, these wannabe larger than life con artists still get an exit. If school shooters shouldn't be plastered all over the news, then why are these people.
This has a very interesting way of showing it to you, how easy it is to deceive us. What we see is what er believe in, but it can be very much easily used to exploit us.
>An entire theater full of grown adults was falling for it. At one point, people were shouting so loudly at the screen that I couldn’t hear the dialogue. I heard a woman yell, “Criminal!” — and it wasn’t directed at Elizabeth Holmes. I’ve never experienced anything like that in a movie theater. It was emotion, and it was visceral.
Is this a parody lol?
Maybe when I read about "cinemas are a bad experience nowadays" on american sites (reddit, HN) they mean this but I always felt that they are deceiving me.
Maybe I'm just too Asian-European because I never experienced that in any European or Far East Asian cinemas.
> I heard a woman yell, “Criminal!” — and it wasn’t directed at Elizabeth Holmes. I’ve never experienced anything like that in a movie theater. It was emotion, and it was visceral.
No, that's called "obnoxious virtue signalling" and people do it all the time in places like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland. It's gross and unnecessary. Don't glorify it.
Hi! I grew up in Seattle, lived in SF just prior to the pandemic, and have since lived in Portland.
While I understand the stereotype of these places lends itself to that view, I have never, ever seen this type of behavior displayed in a movie theater, from blockbuster showings to small, art-house stuff that touches on controversial issues you think people would be vocal about.
Hi! I lived in Seattle, in SF and I’ve been to Portland many times. And I’ve seen the behavior I’ve described in all of the locations I’ve mentioned. Personally. With my own eyes and ears. More than once in rach place! Strange, that.
So I don’t know…right back at you with the stereotyping thing? Because what you’re doing is taking your own limited experiences, overgeneralizing those and throwing shade at people who say things you disagree with.
(Also, by the way: the “please stereotype less” response is practically a stereotype in itself. And here you are using it!)
> ... and calling someone else a liar (without actually doing it, naturally).
I mean, when someone blanket generalizes and casts a very wide net, saying that it happens "all the time", and someone with 40 years of theater-going experience in those locales has not seen it happen once, then yeah, they're gonna point out that you're, at the very least, hyperbolically stretching the truth.
Please spare me the high and mightiness about any passive aggressiveness in my post, I just responded in kind to your own passive dig at those locales. If you're going to make tall claims like you did, don't be surprised when people push back.
I've had several awkward experiences lately, in the opposite direction.
You know how cinema is a good opportunity to sit there among several dozen strangers (at least), and enjoy a shared experience, and laugh, cry, scream, whatever you do, together?
Well, I've been to several films where nobody laughed. Like, there were at least a dozen or more other people in the audience, and there were genuinely funny parts of these films, and there was nobody else laughing in there, except me.
And I can tell you which ones: Disclosure Day, The End of Oak Street, and Digger. Now, the first two aren't comedies. But they definitely had comedic, sort of awkward bits that were obviously supposed to be LOL funny, to break the tension and establish some moods. And Digger itself, classified as a black comedy, was thoroughly hilarious, and farcical, although exceedingly awkward in some parts. And I was walking out behind two nerds and they were having an intellectual discussion of how "interesting" it was to them.
But nobody's laughing in the theater. And I am not exactly sure why. It is not long ago when I noticed that younger people were reacting and laughing much faster than I could react, for some reason. But now, the audience has simply stopped laughing altogether.
Is this unique to my experience? Anyone else in the USA noticing this? I know that not a lot of people are attending movies these days. But The Odyssey was selling out, over a month into its run. But there were no funny parts to it, I suppose.
I had this experience watching Eddington. My adult son and I were laughing all the way through and the packed audience was totally silent. Very strange experience.
So I just finished watching the Elizabeth Holmes biopic. It was amazingly well-attended, in a fairly large auditorium. This was a Tuesday evening, less than a week after opening night. I am still not accustomed to films drawing such a large audience like this. It seems that people are actually capable of quitting Netflix on some nights, and putting down their phones for three hours.
I'm happy to report that the 100-200 humans filling the room were laughing throughout the film, and all at appropriate times. The plot really began to peel an absurd onion, and things got quite meta, and we just kept laughing along with one another. It was a very good time, had by all.
As for the film itself, I thought it was quite engrossing, and I am glad that I hadn't seen any real spoilers, because the third act was definitely a doozy. And it didn't feel too long, or dragging or tedious. I thought that the entire question of what's real, what's deception, what is believed, especially by Holmes and Fielder, were very well-explored in this.
I'm thoroughly baffled by this story. Digger was non-stop laughs when I saw it. The End of Oak Street I don't remember as well, but I'm pretty sure there were some moments that got big laughs.
For building startup, you need a story on the person who is going on the front. Example he/she from top university, worked in a big company. That is sufficient to build something with zero revenue and sell it for billions.
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[ 0.36 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadtrying to minimize fraud? what a weird article.
They didn't do their diligence and do kinda deserve to lose their money.
If there were users that were given bad tests, that was due to these investors not doing their jobs.
If a person is found not guilty, they are not guilty. To argue otherwise is to undermine the core institution of western civilization.
Seriously, this is why OJ was found liable for the murder of his wife in a civil case, as they're judged on the balance of probabilities.
And it's why people who have served time, then had a retrial ordered and then found not guilty, can be denied compensation, because decisions on compensation are also done on the balance of probabilities.
So yeah, "not guilty" != "innocent".
Court of law with its ability imprison people must have higher standard for the "guilty" decision. That makes it possible for rich guilty people to not be judged guilty.
You are allowed and expexted to use own brain. You can consider people guilty.
Separately, Theranos' COO and Holmes' boyfriend at the time was convicted by a separate jury for defrauding patients. Theranos also settled multiple lawsuits for ~$50M and declared bankruptcy soon after.
A. Is she truly the most manipulative person we've ever seen
B. Largely oblivious to what's happening around her
and not:
- Is she guilty
This movie I would say does not answer those questions, nor do I think seeks to.
It's worse than reckless. They make not-knowing part of their operating model.
And they make sure nobody else with power and influence does too much knowing either. Silos, stay in your lane, don't ask questions about how your department's KPIs mesh with the next one over, or what conclusions might be inferred.
At her level of responsibility she'd better know. Whatever the case, she's either deceitful or incompetent. Neither answer is flattering or acceptable.
There are some leaders who are extremely good at convincing you about the importance of belief in a particular thing to the point where you avoid even thinking up those questions - if they are ever cornered (and they rarely allow it to get to that point) they will wriggle endlessly rather than responding to a line of inquiry that bursts the collective bubble.
Do they know? It's hard to argue about their internal motivations.
To me the subtext of the movie was that a sociopath's manipulation is so strong that even against the heavy counterforce of the filmmaker's bias, it makes it through. I agree with TFA's general premise that the film forces you to confront how easy it is to deceive you -- but it's not the filmmaker who's doing the deceiving. Sociopathic manipulation is about sparking doubt. Gaslighters don't need to prove anything, they just need to plant a "but what if" in some corner of your mind. The fact that the author felt compelled to write TFA at all is ironically a product of that manipulative power.
Another way to think of it is: the documentary makes you think whether, if you were in the room with her in the years that Theranos was operating, would you have fallen for it?
There’s a story in the movie about a magician performing a trick, but where there is no trick. The magician really does the thing he appears to do. I think that’s more where GP’s question lies, i.e.: Is her unusual processing of the world an elaborate conscious construction, or is it automatic, and to what degree?
That isn’t a direct determination about her merit or culpability.
Probably no. The most manipulative are still not in the jail and are running some well-known big companies.
You just flat out don’t get into these positions without being a psychopath. Partially that it wouldn’t be attractive to you, and partially that you won’t succeed without those behaviors.
I’m a big fan of conscript political assignments. The people that don’t want to do it I think would make better decisions.
Or religions, or religious-like communities.
Here are key observations of sociopathic personalities:
* They are never wrong, but there are rare times they will admit to being wrong if they have calculated an advantage in doing so.
* They don't care about you, or anybody else. They can't. A sociopath is a damaged personality that cannot empathize. What's interesting is that introspection is the same skill as empathy, so they cannot do that either. As such, they have no faults.
* Sociopaths tend to be charming. They want to appear pleasant. A primary goal of any narcissist is admiration. This is all temporary though, because they lack the empathy necessary to adapt and build trust or extend relationships, which means they are more important than you. It also means they will extend an irrationally great amount of energy to inform you of just how charming they are or how wrong they aren't.
* Sociopaths tend to become hostile when they don't get want they want. They live in a world of "i want" or "i don't want" and there is no further action to execute. This also tends to make for controlling and abusive personalities.
* Sociopaths are not necessarily sadists. The goal is not typically to harm other people, but rather to fulfill themselves irrespective of any harm.
Musk, Altman and Zuckerberg all are able to somehow ignore the harm they cause and have an amazing ability to justify it in pursuit of some “greater good”.
[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
A fun one to ask to rile up Fox News listeners is to ask them which specific law Hillary Clinton is guilty of breaking.
Trump just threatened to jail her, so this is still relevant!
That’s just a random example, there are many such biases people hold where they have a strong belief but no clue where they got that belief.
[1] A study showed that many antivaxers would cheerfully get their kid a shot if offered $50! That’s what their “conviction” is actually worth.
Yes, this is a documentary about a person. And how the documentary is presented will color your perspective of the person. This should (hopefully) be apparent to anyone who's watched a documentary about a person before.
But how does it do it? What tools does it use to that effect? I appreciate that this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous, but what makes this unique from other documentaries that deal with ambiguous subject matter?
There's a big difference in ambiguousness and ambivalence, especially in documentaries. "Ambiguousness" represents an uncertain logical conclusion, whereas "ambivalence" stands in for (the strength of) conflicting forces.
I'd wager that an ambiguous documentary would be close to being unwatchable, and I can't remember that I've seen any. Since I've yet to see You Can See Everything, unfortunately I can't comment about it in any way.
Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are interesting characters, true, but there's so much nuts in tech, it's just fertile ground for stories.
It seems that everyone interviewed about this story has their own red flag moment -- the point where they knew that something was way off, and that they should stay far away. Silicon Valley VCs being the prime example. It is incorrect to say that Theranos was a VC company, it was more funded by angels who were incapable of objectively judging what was being proposed.
At Stanford a prof (important to say: a woman) who knew that the idea was technically infeasible. (And interesting to contrast with another very senior prof -- a man -- who left his tenured position to join Theranos). I remember reading a New Yorker profile of EH years before Theranos blew up, and the story described how she had all of these extremely powerful old men on her board: George Schultz, Henry Kissinger. That was my red flag moment. Yes, they are brilliant and powerful, but they are also clueless about biotech and medical tech. So why get them involved? Something seemed very off to me. Lots of people knew that something was very off, and yet ...
Nope. He's barely even in the film. It's not a normal documentary.
If you’re that interested in getting these answers, you probably should watch the film
Been like this with most mainstream documentaries like this one.
I respectfully disagree. It's post-postmodern performance art. It's like a box of Post cereal with a Post-It note on it nailed to a post in from of the lamppost at the corner of Meta's headquarters in the metaverse. It's a relentless onslaught of origami tesseracts made out of pages from a Baudrillard book that an NYU student used to roll a cigarette of imported European tobacco while they post on Xitter in all lowercase. It was pure never-been-stepped-on A24.
I'm glad I saw this film in theaters as the people laughing and shouting was part of this experience but I'll never watch it again, i.e. it was good but definitely not "fun". I agree with those who say that excising the final third would've made it tighter.
Well at least now I know it's not going to be funny, and is way too long.
"We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not."
She speaks for herself. The author then doesn't bring up a single fact, piece of evidence, or anything else besides just restating the pedestrian premise a few times. I don't share her inability to study a topic in-depth, come to a conclusion or challenge my previously held beliefs, and then pass judgment while attaching a calibrated degree of certainty to the soundness of my conviction.
> We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not. Here’s how it actually goes: We form an emotional impression first, then we build a belief around it, and then we go looking for facts that support it. This is my theory as to why we’re so divided in this country. Beliefs built on emotion are nearly impossible to reason with.
This idea is explored in depth in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.
And related David Hume quote:
> Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions
I assume what you meant is that having heard about the person the movie focuses on, you have no interest in seeing more about her. Having felt entirely apathetic about Holmes since the early days of the Theranos scam, I can’t say I disagree with you.
Without spoiling the movie, it's possible for people to be multiple things at once. That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of. The movie is a wild ride.
Thanks!
Surely the documentaries are made in a way that's depicts that very accentued, manipulative, borderline psychopathic person. This is likely more than she was in real life. She might even have been motivated by genuine will to improve the diagnostics field. So yeah you might be "deceived" by these docudramas.
I fear that this kind of poetic write-up muddies the water into "oh, maybe things are more nuanced, and played on her weird personality and background to make things look worse, maybe it wasn't so bad".
People got misdiagnosed and suffered directly because of her. She's every bit guilty of that, as deserving of a harsh judgement as any person directly causing that kind of harm.
Accountability.
The worst crime you can do is take money from a rich person.
Holmes doesn't talk like any innocent person has ever talked. Period. Not even like a naive rube either.
She explicitly initiated this whole thing as a narrative exercise and she just had to stick to the script for what, 45 days? While letting herself feel the genuine self pity all these types of people feel when they are experiencing the consequences for their actions instead of being able to foist them onto someone else?
Her only path forward is to FULLY commit to the bit as a way of deceiving the credulous, even a moment of cynicism and the whole thing falls apart.
Now, did she in fact succeed in that or was it a choice to show no cracks in the facade because it made a more engaging movie?
News flash, I love his media but Nathan Fielder is a monster as well he's my favorite monster but let's not pretend. We can just hold both things to be true instead of engaging in cognitive dissonance.
Other than the children everyone involved in this is a monster, and the only way to hide that fact is to ensure the ending is ambiguous, otherwise it just feels like non-transcendent tabloid pap profiting off of bad behavior.
- The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm
That's an arguable position, but the problem with it is that it lacks any kind of gradient. Is the person who stole someone else's lunch from the fridge at work (an unfathomable act, to me) a monster in the same way that any person in federal prison is?
The film is relevant: initially, Amanda felt like a proxy for us, the viewers, someone to point out the abnormality in what we have seen. But then, she shows her unwillingness to even confront the possibility the miniseries was exploitative. She also shows a voyeuristic enthusiasm for more information and involvement. She blends into the film at this point, and we lose the feeling of her being our proxy. But, can we really not think of a time we reacted defensively instead of with considered reason? Can we not think of a time we dove into a lurid topic that was fully irrelevant to our lives?
There are a number of cases where people involved in monstrous gang violence appear to show genuine rehabilitation. They devote significant effort toward encouraging others to avoid the mistakes they made. Do they do that because they are no longer monsters, or do they do it because it's one of the few acceptable choices available to someone in their position? I'm not sure we can reliably know.
Are you going to pretend that anyone in this film can be rightly considered a representation of the average persons lived experience?
I agree that Amanda Seyfried is an audience proxy in this movie initially. Are you going to assert that her lived experience and her role and place in society is representative of the norm? In this case is it reasonable to accept the films implicit presentation of her as a audience proxy? How is that reasonable? We do not have to accept or enter into the frame the film wishes us to, we do not have to allow it to anchor our starting point in how we engage with the piece of media.
Humans are the only monsters that actually exist, it doesn't make them less human and it doesn't mean they can't change their lived behavior.
Bringing Amanda Seyfried in as a primary character was unnecessary as was the entire third hour of this movie.
Exactly.
To voice the audience's opinions in the movie itself so the movie can directly address some of them.
I felt it as a break from the intensity and absurdity of the initial half, a lull in the rollercoaster. Then the film reduced Amanda's distance from the subject matter and we were off again.
(I do think the intensity of the first half is partly manufactured by a soundtrack that almost cartoonishly conveys 'unsettling' and 'eerie.' That's probably my main complaint about the film.)
I did not suggest anyone in the film had done a single shred of work towards redemption. Not one person in the film recognizes or admits doing anything wrong, which is a usual first step. Nathan never second-guesses his personal rationalization for making a documentary that financially benefits a subject against his own values. Successfully emerging with clean hands in the end does not fully resolve that.
I did not equate anyone in the film with the lived experience of a gang member. When talking about the categorization of people as good or bad or monster, examples where the dichotomy is extreme are relevant.
And yes, of course, Amanda not having our lived experience is part of why she blends into the film. That's no accident. We are shown her farm, horses and a picture perfect fireside setting. Nathan doesn't need to narrate that "Amanda is comfortable and rich with a farm in the Catskills and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan at one of those buildings where you regularly peek into the courtyard you aren't allowed to enter while you walk past" for the film to make that point.
Whether or not the average person has a different lived experience is still a different question from whether or not the average person is classified as a monster by your measure. And the lived experience of the average HN poster could be closer in relative terms of privilege to that of Nathan and Amanda than to that of the much less privileged, even in the so-called developed world.
I do not believe that the average person would agree with your classification of Nathan and Amanda as monsters. That doesn't invalidate your argument, but it does suggest very broad boundaries, and it becomes unclear what, if anything, prevents a plurality or majority of people being defined as a monster by your worldview. My question was about the utility of the binary classification if it ends up being that overarching.
Explain what position you think is being taken? Is it a binary position? A spectrum? Discrete? Continuous? How can anyone understand what you are even arguing against?
The attempt to extrapolate a generalized formalism from a single specific analysis is really building a pattern out of a single data point.
The pattern you've chosen to build is one that allows you to take the negative position but no one knows what position you're actually complaining about?!?
But, monster is a superlative: there isn't much worse you can be. If you are calling a plurality or majority of people 'the worst kind of human,' does the term not lose utility? Do you use it as a mere stand-in for 'bad person?'
That is why I asked: Is the person who stole someone else's lunch from the fridge at work (an unfathomable act, to me) a monster in the same way that any person in federal prison is?
This may seem less serious than I intend it to be. I do think stealing a colleague's lunch is a sign of severely compromised morality, but I wouldn't default to calling them a monster.
This ultimately matters to me, because I am concerned about the outcome. If we characterize people who do bad things as monsters or 'bad people,' it may follow that they be denied any sympathy, humane treatment in prisons or a path to rehabilitation. None of this is to diminish the harm to victims, whose concerns are a priority. I would posit this is a significant reason that sexual assault in men's prisons is tolerated or accepted as serving justice. The larger and more absolute the category, the more people are subject to that outcome.
I also tend to be a bit hypervigilant about anticipated objections. This may appear as a lack of clarity of opinion when it is intended to be concession for the sake of discussion.
No. it is absolutely possible for a society to have deep enough differentiation that a plurality of members can truly be described as monsters.
Look at MAGA. Depraved is too kind to describe them.
It almost as if the comment section is filled with HN-trained LLM-backed bots intentionally being absurdly vague; just like the trailer last month was.
I am seriously concerned this is all some sort of ingenious marketing ploy to get people to watch the movie instead of just saying, “I genuinely don’t give a shit about Holmes any more now than I did a decade ago.”
Yes, these comments look like a serious astroturfing campaign.
Again; I expect better on HN and, in this particular case, I’m not getting out of the community what I’ve come to expect with its candor and transparency.
The general twist is that she doesn’t really come off as the villain of this film (though she certainly does not come off in a flattering light) - her current husband it turns out is actually a pretty terrifying sociopath who seems to possibly have a bit of a cocaine habit (inferred from the excessive sniffles and insane demeanor) - and he really becomes sort of the films main antagonist.
All of this is completely subjective so someone else could come away with a different take, but if there was a twist (which I would not say this is a film with an overt twist) - it would be this.
For me it was a window into insane wealth and privilege and the types of lives these people lead and the engines that power their sense of self importance and delusions. I do think it was a phenomenal documentary.
But yeah, window into insane wealth and privilege.
The big, big "twist" is SPOILER that last second reveal that Nathan did go swim in the ocean with Holmes and might have been compromised (as Seyfried wonders in the last few moments) and the film really is just another case of trying to make it seem like Holmes isn't the villain because Nathan came away liking Holmes.
(But that's also a game Fielder is playing in this film, how much you can trust him to be an "objective" observer, so not necessarily a twist following along from the beginning, but subtext made text in the last few minutes.)
That said, this contains a decent spoiler-included summary of what happens in the film, if you can tolerate or filter the ads: https://www.slashfilm.com/2287438/you-can-see-everything-end...
Almost everything you'd want to say about it would spoil something interesting about the film. (This is not hearsay. I've seen it and I can't think about how to say anything meaningful about it without spoiling it.)
“You sit there believing you’re watching a documentary about a woman who deceived the world, only to discover that you’re also watching a demonstration of how easy it is to deceive you.”
I couldn’t agree more.
If anything that's the part that convinces me it's more than just a documentary, the fact that people apparently don't want to spoil what happens.
Well, yes. We know the plot, but we don't know in what light the movie casts here, and how they do it.
Then what was the point of bringing Amanda Seyfried into the "documentary" as a major character?
What does Amanda Seyfried actually have to do with the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos?
You Can See Everything doesn't have Amanda Seyfried in it as far as I'm aware.
(/s in case it's necessary)
Later in "You Can See Everything" Amanda Seyfried literally becomes an important character in the documentary including voicing her opinions and impressions, arguing with and challenging Holmes' husband Billy (they have just met for the first time) and talking at length with Fielder about his opinions and impressions.
This inclusion of Seyfried in this manner ruined for me any chance of this film feeling like a "documentary." This is the point for me where the film went "off-the-rails" and begins to feel like a very confusing experiment in audience manipulation.
It suddenly feels contrived because of this.
The first is the general public's lack of understanding of documentaries as an art form. Documentaries are essentially narratives presented as unfiltered reality ("facts"). Most folks don't truly understand this, or they lose sight of it through suspension of disbelief. That is, they don't know or forget about the film crew, editing, framing, and other artistic choices that form what they see. The illusion becomes invisible; they see only "facts" rather than a constructed narrative designed to guide their interpretation.
Second, filmmakers often use deception as an artistic device in documentaries. Mockumentaries are a pretty clear example of subverting the conventions of documentary filmmaking. It's a bit meta for most folks, so I could see how someone without much media literacy might totally miss this. But it's definitely a very interesting artistic choice given the subject matter.
So pay attention to the sound track and adjust your "suspension of disbelief" accordingly.
In general, it would help anyone to know more about the craft of how filmmakers get people to feel emotions.
And near the end, that bubbly euphoric/revelatory ascending arpeggio was a common motif.
Nathan spent a good deal of time openly trying to decide if he was being deceived or not and while the music drove the tension, by the end of the movie it was clear that he had an open internal conflict about whether to trust her or not, and ultimately left that choice up to the viewer.
The bigger the budget the more custom scoring and less stock music.
The music was composed by Ari Balouzian, same guy who did Primetime which is also A24 and currently in theatre. Both were Lance Oppenheim projects, they seem to like to work together.
But literally watch any A24 movie and compare the soundtracks. A24 takes a much larger hand in things like this than other production companies. They have their own in-house music label. They forgo typical big composers and prefer to hire awesome indie folks like Alex G or Nala Sinephro and let them do their thing, with some light production notes (eerie, etc) and a design goal to make the music part of the narrative. It's a formula and they do it well.
The same can be said for the news we watch. Or the history we read. Or the stories we tell each other. In 2026, we have swung too far toward the fanciful end of the spectrum of storytelling. We're now beset on all sides by BS generators (both human and artificial) and it's more important than ever to carefully handle truth in our stories.
But make no mistake - the teller of a story is absolutely crafting a reality for you. It's on you to decide whether you trust the narrator, or not.
A workaround is to always shoot everyone the same. If a journalist or interviewer grows a reputation, they can show everyone "on level ground" by keeping the pose, lighting, etc... constant.
It's one reason that long-form YouTube interviewers like Lex Friedman are so popular with a more discerning crowd.
"But he's so bland, monotonous, and boring!" cry the haters.
"Yes! That's the point!"
I don't think this works.
And I think it might be actually easier to exploit. The fraudster knows what you're going to do in advance, and can target their own presentation to maximally take advantage.
If the way you show someone conveys X about them, especially when due to outside cultural cues - here's the millionaire framing, here's the convict one... - and you just use the same X for every subject, then you're just suggesting a particular framing over and over. You're avoiding a layer of "my active framing is telling a particular story" but only with a passive—but still deliberate—framing of "my framing is telling a particular story" that you hold constant across every story.
In some ways this is similar to what Holmes exploited originally! Lots of industry media was willing to uncritically frame and present her with their "visionary tech founder" styles, and she leaned even further in to that with the Jobs-isms.
Would not a truer "fair" framing would've been to dig into the claims and let the evidence determine the visual language, to avoid the visual language of "Steve Jobs!!" bias the reader/viewer into giving Holmes' claims more credence?
If I buy a security product, and the seller sends me nothing, therefore showing how easy it is to scam me. Are they somehow less of a scammer, did I actually buy anything of value? Are they raising awareness of the problem? Or are they just the problem?
Both just apologists for obvious scumbags
You Can see Everything, on the other hand is a masterpiece. The Wunderkind becomes a grownup and makes something serious and meaningful and important. A documentary infused with self-consciousness and introspection. Provocative, innovative and calculatedly brilliant.
Whether that happened entirely accidentally through a confluence of absurdities remains to be seen, I suppose. I am very much looking forward to seeing what Fielder does next.
Elizabeth Holmes doesn't know her own center. She responds to the people around her; everything she does is to please her partners and/or the internalized expectations of her family. In the psychological parlance, she is an extreme fawner with narcissistic traits.
Such people are, in a sense, masters of deceit, but once you understand that they lack a real center outside of how others perceive them (and that they also have real feelings, even if their notions of love are profoundly confused), there's no longer an enigma. You know exactly what you'd looking at.
Its so weird because at one point they really had me and I remarked to them that what I liked about them eas they were always up for it and openminded.
Turns out they were just telling you what you wanted to hear and reflecting your desires back at you while trying to capitalize on new business ideas and have you contribute food/supplies for their gatherings.
Lacan described registers of experience: the Imaginary (visual, sexual, emotional, fantasy), Symbolic (language, associations), and Real (the unsymbolizable, "impossible"). Watching video is immersion in the Imaginary, you get roused, riled up, turned-on, activated, thoughts are connected by paranoia, magical thinking, and aggression. It makes HUGE difference to not not follow the news that way! Again, I'm not bragging, not proud of myself, not espousing a Mr Spock outlook. But it is hard to miss the difference.
The article was written by someone who's never seen any of Nathan's other work and is apparently blown away by his skill at and unquenchable fetish for using and deceiving people. Yeah, that's his whole thing. Congrats, you just watched a documentary about psychopaths.
I'm unsure why you'd think this was a deception, given the probability.
Is this a parody lol?
Maybe when I read about "cinemas are a bad experience nowadays" on american sites (reddit, HN) they mean this but I always felt that they are deceiving me.
Maybe I'm just too Asian-European because I never experienced that in any European or Far East Asian cinemas.
No, that's called "obnoxious virtue signalling" and people do it all the time in places like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland. It's gross and unnecessary. Don't glorify it.
While I understand the stereotype of these places lends itself to that view, I have never, ever seen this type of behavior displayed in a movie theater, from blockbuster showings to small, art-house stuff that touches on controversial issues you think people would be vocal about.
Please stereotype less.
So I don’t know…right back at you with the stereotyping thing? Because what you’re doing is taking your own limited experiences, overgeneralizing those and throwing shade at people who say things you disagree with.
(Also, by the way: the “please stereotype less” response is practically a stereotype in itself. And here you are using it!)
I mean, when someone blanket generalizes and casts a very wide net, saying that it happens "all the time", and someone with 40 years of theater-going experience in those locales has not seen it happen once, then yeah, they're gonna point out that you're, at the very least, hyperbolically stretching the truth.
Please spare me the high and mightiness about any passive aggressiveness in my post, I just responded in kind to your own passive dig at those locales. If you're going to make tall claims like you did, don't be surprised when people push back.
It doesn’t occur to me as to why I would want to do that…
You know how cinema is a good opportunity to sit there among several dozen strangers (at least), and enjoy a shared experience, and laugh, cry, scream, whatever you do, together?
Well, I've been to several films where nobody laughed. Like, there were at least a dozen or more other people in the audience, and there were genuinely funny parts of these films, and there was nobody else laughing in there, except me.
And I can tell you which ones: Disclosure Day, The End of Oak Street, and Digger. Now, the first two aren't comedies. But they definitely had comedic, sort of awkward bits that were obviously supposed to be LOL funny, to break the tension and establish some moods. And Digger itself, classified as a black comedy, was thoroughly hilarious, and farcical, although exceedingly awkward in some parts. And I was walking out behind two nerds and they were having an intellectual discussion of how "interesting" it was to them.
But nobody's laughing in the theater. And I am not exactly sure why. It is not long ago when I noticed that younger people were reacting and laughing much faster than I could react, for some reason. But now, the audience has simply stopped laughing altogether.
Is this unique to my experience? Anyone else in the USA noticing this? I know that not a lot of people are attending movies these days. But The Odyssey was selling out, over a month into its run. But there were no funny parts to it, I suppose.
I'm happy to report that the 100-200 humans filling the room were laughing throughout the film, and all at appropriate times. The plot really began to peel an absurd onion, and things got quite meta, and we just kept laughing along with one another. It was a very good time, had by all.
As for the film itself, I thought it was quite engrossing, and I am glad that I hadn't seen any real spoilers, because the third act was definitely a doozy. And it didn't feel too long, or dragging or tedious. I thought that the entire question of what's real, what's deception, what is believed, especially by Holmes and Fielder, were very well-explored in this.