Elizabeth Holmes has been on my mind lately, ever since the first class of my narrative and management course. I was explaining the corporate nightmare fable, in which the society, firm, and protagonist all are made worse off, and one of my students answered, “you mean Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.” Exactly.

I was primed to watch the Nathan Fielder – Lance Oppenheim documentary about Holmes You Can See Everything, which I did last weekend. My first question watching any film about an entrepreneur is whether it would work in my course. After about 5 minutes, it was clear that this one would not. For the purposes of my teaching, the film focuses too closely on Holmes and too little on her failed startup, Theranos. But if you are interested in documentary films, as I am, it is fascinating.

Lying Eyes?

My first conclusion from the film is that Holmes’s superpower is her ability to convince people to support her vision. I’ll attribute it to charisma, self-confidence, physical beauty, and stunning blue eyes, all shown in closeup throughout much of the film. If I found her so compelling in a film, I imagine that her in-person pitch about the audacious vision of disrupting the blood collection and analysis industry convinced many powerful and wealthy people to believe in and back Theranos.

In addition to the question of whether Holmes lied about Theranos’ technology, the film raises numerous other questions about Holmes and her partner Billy Evans. Why would they want a documentarist to invade their household in what they knew was her last month of freedom? Did they think a sympathetic documentary would change the public’s perception of her? Did they really think the film would scaffold the launch of Theranos 2.0, their new vision? This documentary is critical of Holmes’ assertions and challenges her self-proclaimed “truth” at numerous points.

Not Your Typical Documentary

You Can See Everything is a complex film that has garnered almost unanimous critical support and large audiences. I saw it at a 12:30 Saturday matinee in a suburban theatre that was half full. I expected that later showings that day sold out.

Documentarists insert themselves in various ways into their films, sometimes as narrators or sometimes as interviewers. This film goes farther by showing one of the documentarists, Nathan Fielder, onscreen for most of its 3-hour running time, constantly interacting with his subjects. Conventional Hollywood filmmaking often employs closeups to cue emotional alignment between the audience and characters. In this film, closeups are not necessarily intended to produce alignment. Because a key theme is dishonesty and facial expressions are thought by many to reveal whether someone is lying, much of the film is shot in closeups focusing on subjects’ faces, especially their eyes.

After Holmes goes to prison, Fielder and Oppenheim do not end the story, but Fielder ultimately arranges a visit to Holmes in prison. He uses the actress Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed Holmes in the docudrama The Dropout, for re-enactments. While some documentarists, notably Errol Morris, use re-enactments, Fielder and Seyfried constantly switch between re-enactment and discussion of their re-enactments, which is unusual.

The film has sparked lively discussion both about the motives and character of Holmes and Evans and about the motives and methods of documentarists Fielder and Oppenheim. You Can See Everything will be a better fit in a film studies class than in my narrative and management class, and I’m sure film studies faculty will be writing about it and teaching it.

More Phishing

While waiting for a film about truth and falsehood to start it turned out, ironically, that I received an email that raised the same question. I’ve already encountered scammers who were trying to entice me to give them money for access to bogus book clubs and then were impersonating actual talk radio hosts. In this email they were impersonating an acquisition editor. The email purported to be from an editor for Celadon Books, an imprint of MacMillan, asking about my new projects. I’m not sure at what point I would be asked to put down some money, but I didn’t bother to find out. Celadon now posts on its website a warning about scams impersonating its employees. It is tragic that AI, which is diminishing authorship, is also being used to scam authors themselves.

My next post will be about a topic with which I feel much more comfortable, the serious search for truth.