What the Elizabeth Holmes documentary reveals about its makers
By Austin Ratner
Photo rendering by Austin Hughes
Spoilers follow.
In the infamous trailer for Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary You Can See Everything, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’s face fills the screen as she stares at Fielder with big, innocent blue eyes and a hopeful smile. It’s the smile of an acrobat balanced precariously on a highwire—the tragic smile that Rainer Maria Rilke calls, in his Duino Elegies, the subrisio saltat. Fielder probes a bit, asking if she was being real just then. She insists she’s always being real because she has nothing to hide. But a grim reality belies her claim: In a matter of days, she’ll be torn away from everything and everyone she cares about, sent to federal prison to begin an 11-year sentence for wire fraud. Clinical psychologist Morgan Starr-Riestis, who studies facial expressions, describes the one Holmes exhibits in the trailer as a “dissociative gaze.”
“When our eyelids are pulled back like that and we’re unblinking, that’s usually a sign of fear or overwhelm,” Starr-Riestis told Today. “When you pair it with a smile, the mismatch is naturally unsettling. Our nervous systems just register it as something off.”
The film’s narrative tension hinges on Fielder’s quest to learn what exactly is “off” about Holmes, the former CEO of blood-testing startup Theranos, convicted in 2022 for deceiving her investors. But as the filmmakers pursue the answer, they perhaps unwittingly raise another intriguing question: Are they engaged in the same kinds of self-deceptions displayed by their subjects?
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Holmes’s rise began with failures in the American patent system. At 19, while a student at Stanford, she applied for patents on devices that could analyze a single drop of blood. Her applications featured mountains of technical terms but no specific scientific advances or technical solutions. In the words of Daniel Nazer of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, her ideas were no more than “aspirational science fiction.” Only because the patent system lacks sufficient guardrails, Nazer explains, was Holmes eventually able to win approval of her dream device. Falsely validated, she began raising money to hire experts and form a company that could make her dream into a reality. With a certain childlike charm, she named the company Theranos, a portmanteau of therapy and diagnosis with potentially more ominous associations: terrible, tyrannus, even Thanatos. From the inception, it seems, she wished for an invention that could turn something terrible into something good.
She pitched herself headlong into the role of quixotic dreamer. She charmed elder statesmen like George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and Jim Mattis, who lined up behind her like Joan of Arc’s lieutenants at the liberation of Orléans. Prestigious board members, massive influxes of capital, and a partnership with Walgreens helped Theranos attain a multibillion-dollar valuation before it had produced a working prototype. As pressure mounted on Holmes to deliver results, the line between aspiration and delusion seems to have blurred even more. She lied about her progress and she falsified data, hoping to buy more time to make the dream device work for real. Her scientists never got there. George Shultz’s grandson Tyler, an intern at Theranos, blew the whistle. Shultz refused to believe him, but The Wall Street Journal did. Her deceptions were discovered.
The documentary begins a month before she’s due to report to federal prison in Texas. She tells Fielder she’s innocent and has plans to start up Theranos 2.0. In the Joan of Arc story, she’s now burning at the stake, refusing to renounce the voices in her head even as the flames rise around her. Her world, which has shrunk down to her small family of four, is indeed burning. Her reputation is in tatters, and she must soon bid goodbye to her partner Billy Evans and their two small children. The cameras capture her putting on a brave face, nursing her babies, and helplessly dissolving into tears. It’s clear that she and Evans hope the film will help clear her name. They’ve invited Fielder into their home so the cameras can see the love that binds her to her family, the heartbreak of the coming separation, and the passion behind her Theranos dream.
[Fielder] is telling himself a lie. The lie is this: I am superior to my subject.
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Many commentators, including the filmmakers, wonder aloud if Holmes continues to lie about Theranos in order to manipulate and garner sympathy. Perhaps she does, but to my mind it’s also evident Holmes believes her own lies. At this point, she has to. The lies are all she has left. We can perhaps “see everything,” but she can’t see the realities that we do. When Fielder shows her the Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on First?” and she doesn’t get it, her partner Evans seems relieved that the filmmakers and the audience can finally see what he sees about her: “She’s not normal.” He means she’s a neurodivergent and lovable dreamer who doesn’t see reality as others do. That doesn’t equate to innocence of the charges against her, but it does arouse sympathy. The frightened blue eyes and wavering smile like a face painted on a child’s balloon do not, to me, suggest a sociopathic scam-artist so much as a psychiatrically complex case of wounds and defenses playing out in a particularly tragic way.
One of many indications of the stress she’s under and the thought-distortions she uses to manage it is her intense identification with her partner Billy Evans. She and Evans both insist they know each other’s thoughts, that their love has essentially fused them into one person. It’s clearly comforting to Holmes to feel Evans will be there with her in spirit when she’s alone in prison, and perhaps to retain a vicarious sense of freedom through him. She won’t be fully in prison as long as he’s free. He even pays for motion-capture recordings so that an AI clone of Holmes can talk to their kids while she’s incarcerated. Substack commentator John Ganz argues that their fusion into one person also serves the defense that Melanie Klein called splitting. Unable to see herself as anything other than purely good, Ganz suggests, Holmes outsources the aggressive or acquisitive parts of her personality to her male partners.
Evans in turn appears to derive a sense of empowerment from his close connection to—and control over—Holmes. Evans tells her what to do, uses her name and image for profit, and adopts her dreams and her plight as his own. He takes her side against a derisive and scornful world as he works alongside her to resurrect Theranos. His intense identification with her comprises love but also hate for their shared enemies, a hate that oozes from his own psychological wounds, inflaming him with alt-right rage. Psychoanalyst Irene Hurford speculates that Holmes has manipulated Evans into being her fierce protector as she did George Shultz and Sunny Balwani, her previous romantic and business partner who is also doing prison time for the Theranos fraud.
Both Holmes and Evans know how to maneuver to get what they want, that’s true. But what makes You Can See Everything so painful to watch is not their manipulation of others. It’s their self-deceptions. Perhaps Holmes’s primary self-deception is, as Ganz argues, the fantasy that she’s morally pure. But a wish for moral purity doesn’t entirely explain her belief that she could create a dream device without any training in biology, engineering, or business. That is a belief not in her purity, but in her power, a wished-for omnipotence that perhaps bespeaks an underlying feeling of helplessness. It’s the helplessness in Holmes’s fantasy that’s so painful. It’s not only painful for the audience, but for Amanda Seyfried, the actress who won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Holmes in the TV series The Dropout and who appears in the documentary. It’s even a little painful for Nathan Fielder, who is not generally known for empathy toward his documentary subjects.
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The filmmakers’ relationships to Holmes are among the most subtle and mysterious in the film, but identification seems to play a big part here as well, as does the filmmakers’ resistance to acknowledging that identification. The documentary implicitly asks whether the filmmakers and the audience could be more like Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans than any of us would like to admit. The trailer summons the audience to the film with the proposition that we’re normal and she’s strange. It’s a circus barker’s call to enter the tent and see a freak show. Surely, freak shows exert an irresistible pull in part because we all secretly feel a bit like freaks, and secretly relish the opportunity to point to someone else as the freak, to separate ourselves from that identity.
Amanda Seyfried plays a role in staging the freak show, reading Holmes’s dialogue in the documentary’s reenactments, but she sometimes appears uncomfortable reprising her performance of Holmes from The Dropout. When she meets Holmes’s family for the first time in the documentary, for example, she seems to recognize that her satirical rendition of Holmes to some extent othered and exploited her subject, whom she hadn’t fully appreciated as a real and vulnerable living person.
Likewise, Fielder comes to empathize with Holmes more and more as the film goes on. Neither he nor his codirector Lance Oppenheim, however, display the kind of remorse Seyfried does about staging a freak show. They’ve both made careers exploiting subjects with reality TV and docudrama. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody criticizes Fielder’s show The Rehearsal for precisely this remorseless exploitation of his subject Kor Skeete: “[B]arely five minutes into the first episode, I wanted to throw my laptop across the room or just to throw Nathan Fielder out of it. … the gaze of superiority and dominance that he casts upon Kor struck me as arrogant, cruel, and, above all, indifferent.”
In You Can See Everything, Fielder and Oppenheim seem to want to justify their exploitative freak show on the basis that their subjects Holmes and Evans are themselves exploitative, manipulative people. It’s a tactic Fielder has used before in reality-TV stunts that expose others’ scams, and a tactic Oppenheim used in his previous feature Primetime, which he calls a “docufantasia” about reality-TV host Chris Hansen. Hansen made a name for himself exposing and humiliating pedophiles on his show To Catch a Predator, preying on them just as they sought to prey on minors, entrapping men in ethically questionable ways and exploiting them for his own gain. Oppenheim gives Hansen the Hansen treatment in Primetime. Hansen has in turn complained, “They are preying upon my name, my image, my likeness to profit.” Oppenheim’s unflattering representations of other living people have embroiled him in further ethical controversies.
There’s no question, Fielder and Oppenheim produce thought-provoking and entertaining work. But they’re in the freak-show business, a fact they obscure by carefully focusing our attention on exploiters (or in Hansen’s case exploiters of exploiters) so we might not notice their own filmic exploitations. The hypocrisy burns bright when the filmmakers react with horror to Billy Evans’s request to share in the profits from You Can See Everything. The directors and producers make it clear they wouldn’t themselves dare cross the sacred ethical line that Billy Evans tramples in pursuit of money and fame. Meanwhile, their footprints sully other ethical lines in their own pursuit of money and fame. When Fielder repeatedly urges Holmes and Evans to do the ethical thing—which is of course to bow to Hollywood norms and just let the filmmakers keep all the profits generated off their subjects’ miseries—I found myself asking the same questions the film asks about Holmes and coming to similar conclusions. Maybe Fielder is knowingly posturing about ethical principles and manipulating the audience here for the sake of a plot point, but it also feels like he is telling himself a lie. The lie is this: I am superior to my subject.
I would argue that, on the contrary, Fielder’s and Oppenheim’s identification with Hollywood success is a means of denying their underlying identification with the freaks. They need the weirdos and failures in order to define themselves by contrast as emissaries from the world of success. They have HBO and A24 and a famous movie star behind them. From this ostensible moral high ground they can then look down on Holmes’s and Evans’s scandalous choices, contemptible politics, and toxic personality disorders.
One wonders to what extent Fielder and Oppenheim recognize that celebrity is a kind of nonexistent dream device, not unlike the Theranos blood analyzer. Both fantasies depend on others’ belief. As writer Joshua Wolf Shenk puts it, “Celebrity is fiction made real by faith: there’s nothing beneath it but attention, yet attention converts to money and power.”
Fielder and Oppenheim may wish it weren’t so, but they live in the same down-and-dirty world of failed dreams as the rest of us. Despite their occasional gestures at self-reflection, I’m still not sure whether the makers of You Can See Everything can see this about themselves: The freaks are running the freak show.
Austin Ratner is contributing editor to TAP and author of The Jump Artist.
Published November 2026