You Can See Everything documentary Elizabeth Holmes, Digi Mart USA News (New York): Breakout hit documentary “You Can See Everything” has spawned a cultural moment, according to a New York report by AFP.
The three-hour film plunges audiences into the surreal world of Elizabeth Holmes, the one-time Silicon Valley doyenne imprisoned for fraudulent claims about her supposedly revolutionary blood-testing technology. The film begins one month before Holmes heads to prison.
A smash box office success, the film has spawned ubiquitous internet memes, lookalike contests and commentary from influencers enamored by the darkly comic, deadpan style of her mock inquisitor, Nathan Fielder. Holmes’s legend as a rare woman tech founder has also proven fertile ground for numerous media postmortems of her sham business’s implosion.
Filmgoer Alexandra Lesnik, 29, said she had followed the story for years and called the screening she attended in Brooklyn a new, different perspective on Holmes. It was the first time she had watched a documentary in a theater.
Another cinemagoer, Nathan Sayers, 53, said he had read a lot about Holmes before the release and that the A24 film made his top five movies.
Kate Rennebohm, assistant professor of film studies at Lawrence University, said students wait after class every day to talk about the film and email her unprompted.
Weaving together reality TV, mockumentary and exaggerated naivety, Fielder peels back the layers of a convicted liar who nonetheless does everything to convince the viewer, and perhaps herself, that she is truthful. Viewers are invited to grapple with whether the former billionaire businesswoman truly believed she had created a medical marvel, and whether she was manipulated by others.
New Yorker Avery Smith, 27, said the story changes in many ways and that the villain also shifts throughout. Nora Stone, an assistant professor of film production at the University of North Alabama, said the film has fully transcended the documentary label.
She noted that it has generated persistent Oscar buzz and pulled in some $80 million at the domestic box office, benefiting from the marketing of the A24 studio.
Columbia University researcher Geoffrey Lokke said the filmmakers’ call to fans not to spread spoilers added to its intrigue and mystery. None of the film’s participants emerge unscathed, and the producers themselves face criticism for their handling of the film’s anti-heroes, including Holmes’s husband.
According to Rennebohm, Holmes becomes a cypher for the power and influence wielded by tech giants in the age of AI. “She inevitably represents the broader ethos of self-delusion and reality-denial underlying Silicon Valley and the American tech industry,” Rennebohm told AFP.
Stone said the film is about something even bigger, mirroring the political moment. “It is a perfect encapsulation of the post-truth era,” she said.
“Elizabeth Holmes does exactly what Donald Trump does — deny, deny, deny.”
