You Can See Everything, the three-hour documentary co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, is mind-warping in a number of ways. Chief among them is its form-breaking structure, which calls into question the inherent artifice of documentary itself. The film takes aim at a subject that ostensibly could not be more well-tread: the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, whose rise and fall has been chronicled in countless articles, podcasts, films, and television series.
Justifiably, one might wonder what more we could possibly need to see or say about Holmes. But consider everything we know about Fielder, himself an enigmatic pop figure whose trickery, unlike that of his subject, is celebrated (and laid bare in absurdist-comic projects like Nathan For You, The Rehearsal, and The Curse). Oppenheim, meanwhile, has built a burgeoning directorial career through richly cinematic portraits of American vulgarity: Spermworld, Ren Faire, and, more recently, his narrative debut, Primetime.
What begins as a relatively straightforward glimpse into Holmes’ home life during the weeks leading up to her imprisonment shapeshifts once she begins her sentence. Reckoning with Holmes’ absence, Fielder and Oppenheim (and the other surprising collaborators they enlist) make bold choices that knowingly distort the line between reality and fiction—and forces the viewer to reconsider whether there was ever a line to begin with. By the end, once we’ve Seen Everything, we’re left questioning whether any of it was actually real or trustworthy.
This is what will keep us talking about Everything long after the initial froth of surprise guests and full-frontal nudity has subsided. The film asks us to question the machinations of narrative and authorship—not just the means by which stories are told, but the power and the motives of those involved. These themes help the film feel extremely timely, but also position Fielder and Oppenheim in a robust lineage of filmmakers that have similarly dared to deconstruct genre and form.
In keeping with Everything’s obfuscations, we’ve compiled a genre-spanning list of several other films that challenge our ideas about performance, perception, and truth. Nathan Fielder, 2017) This may be an obvious choice for longtime Fielder fans. But for the uninitiated, the feature-length series finale of Nathan For You is a prerequisite to understanding his creative journey from deadpan prankster to performance artist-cum-investigative reporter-cum-anthropologist.
Fielder facilitates and documents an elderly man’s search for his long-lost high school sweetheart, a search that takes shocking turns as Fielder uncovers murky truths about the relationship. Fielder eventually puts himself under the microscope, effectively laying the groundwork for the rabbit hole down which he’d descend in The Rehearsal. Finding Frances even features what might be the first instance of Fielder’s Rehearsal method at work, when he stages an opportunity for the film’s subject to practice reuniting with his old flame in advance of the real event.
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