By Michael Marano

Nathan Fielder’s You Can See Everything turns the Theranos saga into a revelatory, Philip K. Dickian inquiry into artifice, identity, and truth.

You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder. Screening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline and the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square.

Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything. Photo: A24

In the early 1990s, when I was a fledgling science fiction and horror writer living in Berkeley, my buddy and colleague Howard V. Hendrix mentioned something that burned into my skull as we drove from a writers’ conference.

He described a visit to Universal, where he saw the production of a promotional film about the creation of a proposed amusement park attraction that would have been about the filming of Jurassic Park.

“I saw the filming of a movie about an amusement park attraction that was about the filming of a movie that was about an amusement park,” he said, as distinctly Californian sunlight glinted off the windshield and his glasses.

“Reality,” he said, “is pleated.”

Aside from Howard’s knack for great turns of phrase, what struck me—lifelong Philip K. Dick fan that I am, suffering the culture shock of living where Dick wrote his most reality-warping work—was how Dickian his insight was. It crystallized for me why I hated pastiche artists who used Dick’s broken realities as playthings. They didn’t treat broken realities as manifestations of Dick’s inner emotional and spiritual crises. These writers lacked the chops to confront what were, in essence, Dick’s cries from the abyss. (A notable exception: Michael Bishop’s outstanding Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas.) They took Dick’s terror at confronting an alien, profoundly inhuman God as the veil of the mundane is lifted and turned it into a gag on par with the ending of Blazing Saddles, when the climactic Old West brawl bursts through the set and spills across the backlot.

I bring this up for two reasons.

One: the uniquely Californian story of disgraced, convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, as rendered in Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything, is not merely a work of pleated reality but maybe an articulation of it. It externalizes reality-breaking inner turmoil more fully than most films actually adapted from Philip K. Dick can dream of approaching.

The second reason: the studio asked us critics to reveal as little as possible about the particulars of the movie, a request that usually makes me roll my eyes at what is likely to be a film without actual surprises, only tired gimmicks. But in this case? I’d sooner use a burning bamboo splinter as a catheter than spoil this movie. And articulating how You Can See Everything pleats reality lets me say a great deal about this brilliant film without saying anything directly.

That indirection is foundational to the alienation at the heart of what makes You Can See Everything such a breakthrough. If the reality of the movie is pleated, it is the ambiguity of words and syntax that creates the folds.

Elizabeth Holmes was convicted for not saying anything directly—for muddying and obfuscating the science behind her Theranos diagnostic machines. That obfuscation let her land such backers as George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Larry Ellison, and Rupert Murdoch—guys, yes, all guys, really old guys, who should know when they’re being played. Holmes pleated reality, persuading the gerontocrats who rule the planet that they did not need to hire a chemist at two hundred bucks an hour to protect investments of hundreds of millions of dollars. Theranos is a cautionary Silicon Valley fable built on the myths of figures like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

You Can See Everything chronicles Fielder living with Holmes and her hunky boyfriend, Billy Evans, on the California coast for about a month before she reports to prison—and then chronicles what happens after she does. Central to the film’s first part is the ambiguity of a Holmes quote in the New York Times about the mythology surrounding her, and just who created it. This seemingly small matter of journalistic fact-checking is the first teeny warping of reality in You Can See Everything: the first fold of the first pleat. Soon after comes another ambiguous turn of phrase, uttered by Holmes herself—one Fielder likens to one of the greatest comedy routines of the twentieth century.

Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder in a scene from You Can See Everything. Photo: A24

But that fuzziness of meaning is more than the foundation for comedic misunderstanding. This language reforms reality as surely as Orwellian Newspeak. It externalizes Holmes’s inner reality; we see how it interacts with Evans’s inner reality, perhaps how it affects Fielder’s—and our own.

The first half of the film, leading to Holmes’s surrender to federal custody, is very good, if at times a bit pedestrian, documentary filmmaking that leans on an awful lot of info-dumping via news reports of her trial and conviction.

It is in the second half that You Can See Everything becomes an extraordinary cinematic experience, one that will be taught in film schools for decades.

With Holmes in prison, she becomes a mystery—despite the fact that we have spent the first, at times uncomfortably intimate, half of a very long movie with her. Holmes becomes negative space, a vacuum demanding to be filled. All the ambiguity embodied in her language multiplies. Reality breaks and pleats further. We are deep in Dick country now, grappling with questions of humanity and fractured selves, minds, and identities. The myth of Holmes—and the possibility that she may be a (misunderstood?) monster—takes on overwhelming proportions. We witness the cybernetic creation of what can only be called a Holmes Replicant. Each clue that solves the mystery of Holmes brings forth a hundred new questions. Portrayal and artifice become true; truth becomes portrayal and artifice.

All of this leads to a kind of implosion, a singularity that produces revelations of emotion I can only describe as personally apocalyptic.

Let me share how that apocalypse was personal for me.

I never thought I would feel sympathy for Elizabeth Holmes. I knew only the myth of her. But then again, until I heard Roy Batty’s “Tears in Rain” speech at the end of Blade Runner, I never thought I would feel sympathy for a killer android.

That revelation broke a bit of my reality, and I am deeply grateful to You Can See Everything for the breakage.

As homework for this assignment, author, critic, personal trainer, and writing instructor Michael Marano watched a few of Nathan Fielder’s shows and the biographical miniseries about Holmes, The Dropout. He’s really glad he did.