A few months A few days ago, Nathan Fielder’s publicist sent me an unexpected email: Would WIRED be interested in having Fielder for a fall cover of our magazine?
The answer, even before having a reason, was yes. It turned out the reason was that Fielder was soon going to release a project so top secret that I would have to sign an NDA to even hear about what it was – let alone watching it. I signed, I heard, then I saw, counting myself among the few dozen people who had projected You can see everything before the film debuts in early September as a secret addition to the Telluride Film Festival.
If you’re a human being with access to the Internet, you know that the buzz following Telluride was nothing short of an online thermonuclear event: Reddit forums exploded; the best memes are born overnight; every journalist on planet Earth, including the WIRED staff (who didn’t know their boss was under NDA, and seemed confused when I repeatedly ordered them do not contact Nathan Fielder’s publicist), pines, pleads and fights to access the film. Or, better yet, to access Fielder himself. After all, the notoriously inscrutable artist became a cult hero for his ability to transform human discomfort into great art. He built a coffee shop called Dumb Starbucks, creating an international news event. He built a fake bar so a man could practice having a difficult conversation with a friend. He trained to become a commercial airline pilot – crazy! – and flew a 737 full of passengers (the Miracle over the Mojave), in what can only be described as the most transcendent television moment I’ve ever seen. To a certain kind of viewer, Nathan Fielder is a comic god among us mere mortals.
It is also, unsurprisingly, rather special. Fielder was going to be on the cover of WIRED; so maybe he wasn’t. A week has passed. Our feature director and I didn’t sleep. Then we were about to leave. Great! For a few days, at least, until things get dicey again. This kind of back and forth is normal when booking celebrities. But given the secrecy, the buzz, the Nathan in it all, the stakes for WIRED were high. I’ve told several people in my life that I hated Nathan Fielder. Then we started again. I’ve told several people in my life that I love Nathan Fielder.
You may be wondering: If I found the excitement leading up to Fielder’s interview so stressful, why didn’t we cut the coverage entirely? Maybe see if Aaron Sorkin was still available, or another guy involved in another tech-adjacent fall movie. There are plenty of them.
The thing is that You can see everything is a singularly astonishing film. I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen. Co-directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, it begins as a strange, gripping and sometimes hilarious 34-day psychological dance between Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans before Holmes’ incarceration, and then transforms into something so seductive and brilliant that it is futile to try to describe. After the screening You can see everything By early September, I was thinking about the movie every day until I saw it again a few weeks later. I’m still running it through my brain. When a small handful of WIRED staffers screened the film ahead of Fielder’s coverage, we then spent hours debating facial expressions, relationships, and even the meaning of simple sentences. We agreed on very little, other than that Fielder – known for his meticulous world-building – ultimately seemed to have stumbled upon a world far stranger than anything he could have imagined.
Gn entert
