There are surprise hits, and then there’s You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder’s documentary-psychodrama about disgraced American entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes. It arrived in American theaters with plenty of buzz: it was, after all, an A24 production, helmed by one of television’s greatest performance art pranksters. But You Can See Everything has surpassed all expectations to become an undeniable success and is now the highest-grossing American documentary in 15 years, just two weeks after its release.
Co-directed by Lance Oppenheim, it is a surreal and masterful epic; at a press screening in London, audiences seemed alternately fascinated by its comic elements and repelled by the crudeness of some of its characters. This crudeness, it is worth mentioning, is not just about Holmes, who was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison (this figure has since been reduced several times) for defrauding investors, after the collapse of her fake blood testing start-up, Theranos. It also – perhaps unsurprisingly – led audiences to other media inspired by Holmes’ downfall. Journalist John Carreyrou’s book, Bad Blood, returned to the bestseller list; ABC News podcast The Dropout, hosted by Rebecca Jarvis, reported a 900% increase in listeners; while the Disney/Hulu TV series of the same name saw a 700% increase in viewers and is now ranked 47th on IMDb’s “Most Popular TV Shows” list, despite airing in 2022.
With Holmes mania abounding, I decided to start the podcast, a show I listened to when it came out in 2019. Unlike You Can See Everything — which explores whether Holmes can convince us of her innocence, as much as whether she is innocent — the Dropout podcast takes us back to her halcyon days, when she was named America’s youngest self-made billionaire. It was a time when his Steve Jobs-esque black turtlenecks, seemingly fake baritone voice, and knack for wooing super-rich investors made up a big part of the story (the first episode is called Myth-Making).
But it wasn’t just about the person Holmes – it was about what her company did (or rather, didn’t do) and served as a stark reminder that the claims she made never matched reality. In one episode, we hear Holmes state that it is possible to perform “any lab test from a drop of blood from a finger,” juxtaposed with a clip from a deposition hearing where he is asked how many tests his machine was capable of performing: “I don’t know exactly what the number was…I think there were probably dozens of tests…” (If that sounds like a simple lie, Holmes offers his own explanation of his claims in You Can See Everything.)
The TV adaptation of The Dropout recycles the story that the podcast investigated so thoroughly, albeit with a bit more artistic license (Holmes dances like a robot to Lil Wayne, and there’s an entire plot point that was reverse-engineered to incorporate Katy Perry’s song Firework). It’s entertaining, of course: I find myself oddly captivated by the stilted professional relationship/romance between Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) and Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), 19 years her senior, who are obsessed with each other but also suggest a cold indifference (see also: an actual text exchange between Holmes and Balwani, where she wrote: “You are the breeze in the desert to me. My water. And the ocean. Meant to be only together tiger”, to which Balwani replied: “OK”).
But for the first few episodes at least, The Dropout is mostly like watching a campus drama that sometimes turns into an episode of Law and Order. Seyfried is great – all bulging, marble-like eyes, unsettling jaw placement and off-kilter speech patterns – but one gets the sense that this is an almost meme-like enterprise, gleefully ripped from the headlines (You Can See Everything wonders, in its own way, whether that might actually have been the case). At the end of the first episode, Elizabeth looks at her finger and – deus ex machina – the idea for Theranos comes up.
But The Dropout series, like the podcast that preceded it, was built on inescapable facts and what the Guardian described at the time of its release as the “breathtaking mental gymnastics” of it all: the technological inadequacies of Theranos’ equipment; the culture of surveillance that left employees feeling like they couldn’t speak up; third-party machines that the company used in place of its own equipment; false positives for HIV, cancer and other serious illnesses. This may sound easy, but it’s a reminder of the weight of what Holmes’ company has done and its ability to combat the most legitimate concerns. It also brings up the suicide of Ian Gibbons, the company’s former chief scientist, who killed himself before testifying against the company. It would be irresponsible to place the blame for this death solely on Theranos. But it is clear, in the middle of this overwrought comedy, that its writers had a lot of difficulty coping with mine.
Holmes’ story first captivated the world during what was a big moment for scammers, from fake heiress Anna Delvey to the Fyre Festival, with its schadenfreude-inducing tale of influencers stranded in the Bahamas under disaster relief blankets. In the years since, the conversation around such scams has become less clear-cut: Delvey has become a total media caricature, while – conversely – many of Fyre’s participants have turned out to be normies who got their tickets on Groupon.
Perhaps fittingly, in an age so focused on untruths, the narrative of the “golden age of scamming” is now being rewritten again, in real time. Fielder and Oppenheim have done something bold and brilliant with You Can See Everything, incorporating a new era of technofascism and AI into the process, and meeting Holmes not as a Silicon Valley lover but as a mother and soon-to-be doomed. But the facts – whether on television or on a podcast – remain as disturbing as ever. “The world believes a reality about me that is not true,” Holmes says in the film. And yet, much of it is hard to ignore.
Gn entert
