Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary, You Can See Everything, has quickly established itself as a cultural seismic event. The expansive three-hour film opened with a historic weekend at the box office and is already generating serious award season buzz. Rather than focusing on a traditional cinematic subject, the film follows disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes and her family during her final weeks of freedom before beginning an 11-year federal prison sentence. For many tech journalists and industry observers, the film serves as much more than a standard documentary, forcing a hard look at the structural vulnerabilities within modern media reporting.
Fielder’s career has long tested the boundaries between fact and fiction, dating back to Nathan For You and continuing through ambitious projects like Finding Frances and The Rehearsal. In this latest documentary, those boundary-pushing techniques are turned toward narrative control, the unknowability of another person's interiority, and the extreme difficulties of pinning down truth. By examining a disputed quote published in The New York Times that helped bolster the case against Holmes, the film frames its investigation as an unreliable narrator story that challenges viewers to question how stories are constructed, packaged, and consumed.
For reporters covering the technology sector, the film holds up an uncomfortable mirror regarding access journalism. The temptation to trade critical distance for exclusive proximity remains an industry-wide hazard, echoing the subtle biases and familiarity-founded blind spots explored by Fielder on screen. Understanding how a massive corporate fraud like Theranos managed to secure positive media framing requires examining these very dynamics. Ultimately, the documentary functions as an urgent wake-up call, instilling a much-needed baseline skepticism about how companies and executives are presented to the public through the press.
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