IIt’s likely that most viewers who attend the surprise documentary You Can See Everything are familiar with either its nominal subject (and its literal, intense-looking poster girl), Elizabeth Holmes, the tech founder who is serving prison time for defrauding investors; or the film’s co-director, Nathan Fielder. Holmes, as the film points out, was all over the media as his company Theranos was headed to the moon and then spectacularly imploded; she was also played by Amanda Seyfried in the highly rated Hulu miniseries The Dropout. Fielder, meanwhile, may not have graced as many magazine covers, but he’s also familiar to prestige TV acolytes thanks to his reality-comedy series Nathan for You and its successor, the more realistic series The Rehearsal. A third character not included in the film’s advertising campaign will become a key part of the film in the second half and will also be familiar to many viewers.
This should leave Billy Evans as a strange man. Evans, Elizabeth Holmes’ partner (she has said they are not legally married, although they got engaged in 2018, have two children and seem to treat each other like spouses), is a not particularly famous man whose screen time rivals the other three well-known faces in what is essentially a four-character drama. But even if Evans isn’t limited in terms of screen time or memorability, he’s still an odd man out in the sense that in all the discussion you can see everything has stirred up about manipulation, shifts in likability, and who can and can’t be trusted, everyone seems to agree on one crucial point: Billy Evans sucks.
Well, everyone except Holmes, who never indicates the slightest moment of doubt or hesitation regarding his common-law spouse, at least as far as Fielder or co-director Lance Oppenheim show us. But the film shows Fielder seeming baffled by Holmes – her absurd claims that she never lied in her adult life; his tautological and absurd explanation of how his blood testing device actually works (which essentially amounts to “if everything worked, it would work”); her inability to understand Abbott and Costello’s most famous comedy routine – to the point of having difficulty discerning whether she is consciously ripping it off or simply, say, diverging from reality. In comparison, Evans comes across as a slightly confusing but recognizable nuisance.
When he calls a meeting to demand a percentage of the film’s profits – the kind of arrangement that might typically be reserved for a promotional piece commissioned by a musician, not a non-fiction film interviewing a notorious subject in depth – Fielder and Oppenheim focus on whether Holmes knew about this demand and what happened to it. But it’s Evans who violates documentary standards by asking for profit sharing (and getting it, at least temporarily). Earlier, he demands privacy when he becomes visibly uncomfortable with the questions asked of Holmes while appearing fully and frontally naked in the film. In a short but emphasized moment, he casually relieves Holmes of the task of scrambling the eggs because he thinks she is not stirring vigorously enough.
And those are just a few of his antics before the film’s two-year time jump, after which Evans appears to exert even more control over his partner. Given Holmes’ reputation as a Silicon Valley grifter, it would make some sense to classify Evans as a real-life version of Hollywood’s favorite villain: the evil tech bro. The film even references Holmes’ turn in this particular hot seat as the subject of The Dropout, which isn’t exactly a story of heroes and villains, but certainly exists alongside tales about cutting-edge monsters.
Evans has a lot of grimly hilarious signifiers, both before and after his partner’s incarceration. Beforehand, he can be seen listening to podcasts at double speed like a true #content consumer/aspiring timemaxxer. Subsequently, he shows repeated signs (not commented on by Oppenheim or Fielder) of posturing but of increasingly intense post-“woke” radicalization: he spends time at a shooting gallery, pretends to carry a gun everywhere, voluntarily declares that he is a fan of Charlie Kirk, and boasts of his own supposed vindictiveness. He uses his cursory control of Holmes’ social media to indulge in little clapbacks that seem totally out of character; he uses his cursory check of her AI resemblance to brag about how much healthier she looks as a prisoner than she did immediately after giving birth.
With paranoia, delusions of grandeur, ambitious plans that amount to nothing, and an apparent possessiveness towards the woman in his life, Evans ticks a lot of tech-bro boxes – but without even a modicum of demonstrated technical expertise, apparently not even in his feverish imaginations. Yes, Elon Musk presented himself as a genius based on other people’s companies and his immense fortune, Mark Zuckerberg is a dead-eyed egomaniac whose famous invention is a Friendster clone that bought out a bunch of other already successful websites, and Sam Altman’s career is littered with failures that in no way qualify him to command us all to see AI as the future. But even if you consider these guys almost on par with Holmes, they have the distinction of having managed to make money and, in the case of Musk and Zuckerberg, put some of their power behind products that people actually use (in some cases, whether they really want to or not). One of the reasons they’re evil in fictional true stories like the ones that drive The Social Reckoning (starring Jeremy Strong as Zuck) or the upcoming Artificial (starring Andrew Garfield as Altman and Ike Barinholtz as Musk) is because they actually amassed power in the first place. There are issues in their existence.
Evans has no claim to fame, or even the widespread notoriety that could inspire something like Alex Gibney’s four-hour Musk documentary, released alongside You Can See Everything. It also seems notable that the equally lengthy You Can See Everything has seemingly distracted from the more traditionally rigorous article on Musk, a far more influential individual than Holmes or Evans. Holmes was certainly a destructive force for the cancer patients whose hopes she raised, and Evans comes across as a restless creep, but it’s telling, and a little disconcerting, that the nervous, chattering laughs elicited by You Can See Everything prove far more engaging than a film laying out the case against a maniacal, on-again, off-again billionaire who has caused real damage to the world and is poised to do so much more. Does anyone have to be as petty, strange and obviously a failure as Evans to be truly finished off in public?
Then again, Evans makes a compelling villain precisely for this restless lack of success. He’ll never be as influential as someone like Musk or Zuckerberg, but he apparently craves that kind of overlord-level bravado (why else would you use your wife’s social media to pick fights?). He’s the type to fake it until you make it and then keep faking it, closer to former reality TV star turned mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt or any number of filibustering podcasters. Instead of Facebook, Tesla, or a portfolio of Donald Trump-style scams, he can simply manipulate the damaged brand that is Elizabeth Holmes – almost literally, when he shows his AI version. Holmes is clearly manipulative (and based on the information available from Theranos, an unambiguous liar), yet Fielder locates, or perhaps even fabricates, a kind of humanity through her inscrutability. There is something obsessive about her, sometimes in spite of herself. Evans is a strange man in You Can See Everything because he seems to lack that kind of turmoil. It represents agitated culture in its final dehumanizing form. The world is just something he has to absorb and seek benefits at 2x speed.
Gn entert
