There has been abundant coverage of Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley fraudster whose biotech startup Theranos was once valued at $9 billion in 2014 before its promised blood‑testing device turned out to be a sham. Books, magazine pieces, documentaries and TV dramatizations have piled up over the years. So why is the three‑hour documentary *You Can See Everything* generating fresh buzz?
The excitement centers on one of its directors, Nathan Fielder, who co‑directed the film with Lance Oppenheim. Fielder has become a cult‑favorite television creator, and fans have been waiting for his encounter with Holmes ever since rumors of a prison visit emerged last year. With Fielder now poised to bring his unique style to a wider audience, it’s worth understanding what makes his approach distinct.
**Business credentials**
Fielder’s own history of corporate mischief makes him a fitting interlocutor for one of tech’s most notorious con artists. In his breakout series *Nathan for You* (2013–2017), he devised outlandish publicity stunts for struggling small businesses. He jokes that he “graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades,” and unlike Holmes, he actually holds a degree.
Andrew Bricker, an associate professor of English at the University of Ghent and coordinator of the Democratic Literacy and Humour research project, notes that Fielder has always performed an altered version of himself, leaving audiences unsure of his true identity. Bricker says Fielder “has made the borderlands of persona and person so ambiguous, so indeterminable, so indefinable, that none of us is entirely in on the joke.”
According to Bricker, *Nathan for You* and Fielder’s later HBO series *The Rehearsal* cast him as an “outlandish problem‑solver, someone possessed of what I sometimes call the engineer’s brain, which sees the world strictly through the radically simplified framework of problems and solutions, even if the solutions themselves, ouroboros‑style, always lead to new problems.”
In *Nathan for You*, Fielder pursued convoluted loopholes with relentless dedication. To help an exporter avoid high tariffs on smoke alarms, he marketed the devices as musical instruments, produced an instructional DVD, formed a band that recorded a track featuring the alarm’s beeping, and secured a news segment to legitimize the tariff dodge. His schemes often required careful legal reading, such as the viral “Dumb Starbucks” coffee shop, a staged video of a pig rescuing a goat that fooled social media and news outlets, and the creation of Summit Ice, a nonprofit winter‑apparel brand that opposed Holocaust denial and attracted mainstream attention.
Holmes, meanwhile, used savvy public relations to present herself as a modern Steve Jobs, convincing investors and the press of a nonexistent medical breakthrough. If anyone can appreciate the scale of deception required to sell a phantom product, it is Fielder.
**Awkward, possibly neurodivergent … and blunt**
Early in his career, Fielder appeared on the satirical CBC program *This Hour Has 22 Minutes* in a segment called “Nathan on Your Side,” a parody of consumer‑advocacy investigations that showcased his deadpan humor. In a 2008 clip, he pretends to be a customer at an electronics store, inviting a salesman to pitch an MP3 player while repeatedly insisting he is “just browsing.”
Throughout *Nathan for You* and *The Rehearsal*, Fielder leans into this discomfort, allowing silences to linger, maintaining steady eye contact, and never breaking character, even when the situation becomes absurd. He often repeats what others have said in a flat tone that highlights the ridiculousness of the original comment. Bricker observes that this technique can catch interview subjects off guard and prompt unexpected confessions.
Holmes is a prime target for such a poker‑faced approach. Kate Rennebohm, a film professor at Lawrence University, has written about the ethics and artifice of HBO’s *The Rehearsal*, which follows Fielder as he builds elaborate simulations of pivotal life events to study human behavior. Rennebohm says Holmes represents “an ultimate test of Fielder’s methods.” She describes Holmes as “a woman whose infamy rests solely on her apparent ability to totally disregard reality,” and predicts that Fielder’s performance and provocation skills will face their toughest challenge in this encounter.
Bricker adds that the upcoming film may become a “bizarro‑land Frost/Nixon, where both interviewer and subject have almost…” and leaves the sentence hanging, underscoring the unpredictable nature of the collaboration.
In short, fans can expect a documentary that blends Fielder’s signature blend of engineered absurdity with a deep dive into Holmes’s elaborate fraud, promising a viewing experience that is as unsettling as it is insightful.