"You Can See Everything" Is a Fraud Where Everyone Profits
***I would highly recommend seeing the film before reading this post***
After just two weekends, the new A24 film from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim has made $45.1 million at the box office and is heading towards revenue at least ten times its $7 million budget. That performance means that Billy Evans – the partner of Elizabeth Holmes and the chief antagonist of the film – has already netted $11.25 million, thanks to the deal he negotiated for his participation in the project.
At least we could have lived in that timeline, one where moviegoers became funders of the Theranos sequel – and we have only Evans himself to thank that we don’t. We don’t know the exact terms nor Evans’ reasons for scrapping the deal. We do know that A24 and the directors agreed to pay Evans a portion of sales, that everything we see on screen is produced under the color of that deal, and that we have no reason to believe they would have backed out themselves. In addition to the due critical appreciation for the film’s transcendent creativity and virtuosity, You Can See Everything should also be understood as something both more base and familiar: an act of fraud.
It reveals these facts itself. From what’s shown on screen, we can conclude that the filmmakers, the studio, and Evans conspired – with or without Holmes’ knowledge – to make a film where at least one core subject would be compensated in proportion to its sales, while this product would be sold to the public as vérité documentary. This is what we see in the first half of the film. The scheme only falls apart when Holmes casually mentions to Fielder that she is not participating for money, raising the prospect Evans had left her out of the deal. It is entirely reasonable to believe that had this discrepancy remained quiet – instead of metastasizing into the film’s second act – that neither party would have ever disclosed the compensation agreement to the public. While, as Evans himself argues, documentary subjects are sometimes now paid for their participation, the studio would have every incentive to hide this deal with this recipient and in a film about this subject matter. Moviegoers out to witness a retrospective on a scam would have been unwitting investors in the subjects’ current lives. The studio, filmmakers, and producers will keep the money instead, but that does not mean there are no other implications of the attempt. After all, conspiracy to commit fraud on investors – one of Holmes’ four convictions – does not require successful completion of the fraud.
Everyone involved here will benefit from the effort. Without a doubt, Elizabeth Holmes has become a much more sympathetic character than she appears in prosecutorial documents outlining the full extent of her crimes or the many testimonials to a darker side of her character. Billy Evans, despite his unsavoriness, has been granted a stratospheric rise in publicity. Our attentional economy will allow him to leverage this attention into power, at the very least among his peer aggrieved, right-wing tech bros. With critical and financial success, and in discussion as the first documentary to possibly be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, Fielder and Oppenheim get to make the jump from cult favorites to top-tier stars. A24 cements its status as a studio capable of centering national attention. The fact that we as an audience get to enjoy this film free from the guilt of paying, er, blood money, seems to be pure luck.
There will be no consequences from the proposed racket that made this film possible and then made it what it is.
To categorize the film as a fraud does not contradict its excellence: rather, the cohesion of its subject matter and form should serve to emphasize its slipperiness. That slipperiness is critical to its wild success, both exploring and embodying our modern fascination with the scam. It mingles among the glut of podcasts, books, television shows, and movies about scams, frauds, and crimes of this millennium and then jumps to another dimension. The traditional structure of this genre is a reconstruction of an economic magic trick: we saw the result and now we get to learn the methods of our deception. You Can See Everything is yet another illusion presented as the reveal. Judging by the pleasure, debate, and thought the film has provoked, viewers absorb this duplicity – we are both the mark of the scam and included as a beneficiary.
The film’s success, however, is less ambiguous for the documentary genre. A willingness for pay-to-play production fits the proliferation elsewhere of sponsored content and paid influencer videos, but it conflicts with the journalistic identity and expectations for nonfiction film, particularly those promising to “see everything.” The film’s breakout success may further change those norms — or it could spark a necessary confrontation with the financialization of truth. Where a lesser production would be widely condemned for its complicity, Fielder and Oppenheim have not faced any concerted campaign against them from critics or their peers. With enough charm, they seem to have learned, you really can get away with anything.
