Nathan Fielder Co-Directs Elizabeth Holmes Documentary 'You Can See Everything'

Palo Alto, California, is where Theranos once promised to remake blood testing, and it is the backdrop for a new documentary that pairs the company's disgraced founder with one of American television's least conventional comic minds. WIRED reports that "You Can See Everything," a three-hour film about Elizabeth Holmes, is drawing outsized attention not because of its subject but because of its director.

What is "You Can See Everything" and why is it drawing attention?

The film examines Holmes, whose biotech startup Theranos reached a peak valuation of $9 billion in 2014 before its blood-testing technology was shown not to work, according to WIRED. Holmes has already been the subject of books, magazine investigations and television dramatizations, the outlet notes, which raises the question of what a new, three-hour treatment adds. The answer, per the report, is the presence of codirector Nathan Fielder, whose fan base has anticipated a meeting between him and Holmes since reports surfaced last year that he had visited her in prison, WIRED reports.

Who is Nathan Fielder?

Fielder is described by WIRED as a "cult-favorite television auteur" best known for "Nathan for You," which ran from 2013 to 2017, and the HBO series "The Rehearsal." In "Nathan for You," Fielder devised elaborate, often absurd publicity stunts for struggling small businesses — in one case helping an exporter avoid shipping tariffs on smoke alarms by marketing them as musical instruments, complete with an instructional DVD and an original recorded song, according to WIRED.

Why does Fielder's business background matter to a Holmes documentary?

WIRED frames Fielder's own history of staged corporate schemes as part of what makes him a fitting interlocutor for Holmes. The outlet notes that Fielder has joked about graduating "from one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades" — a credential WIRED contrasts with Holmes, a Stanford University dropout. The juxtaposition, as described in the piece, sets up a documentary built around two figures who each built public personas around business ambition, albeit with very different outcomes.

How does Fielder blur the line between performance and reality?

Andrew Bricker, an associate professor of English at the University of Ghent and academic coordinator for the research project Democratic Literacy and Humour, told WIRED by email that Fielder has spent his career playing "an altered version of himself," leaving audiences unsure where the persona ends.

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," Bricker said, according to WIRED.

Bricker added that Fielder's shows cast him as a kind of "outlandish problem-solver" with an "engineer's brain" that reduces the world to problems and solutions — solutions that, in his telling, tend to generate new problems in turn, WIRED reports.

What should viewers watch for when the documentary arrives?

WIRED's guide points to several elements likely to define how audiences read the film:

• Whether Fielder applies the same "heightened unreality" style from "Nathan for You" and "The Rehearsal" to a real-world fraud case rather than staged small-business scenarios.
• How codirector Lance Oppenheim's involvement shapes the documentary's tone alongside Fielder's.
• Whether the film's three-hour length is used to probe Holmes's own blurring of persona and reality at Theranos, a parallel WIRED draws explicitly to Fielder's own career.
• How the film treats the gap between Fielder's actual Canadian business-school education and Holmes's unfinished Stanford degree, a contrast WIRED frames as central to the pairing.

By the numbers

• $9 billion — Theranos's peak valuation in 2014, before its blood-testing technology was revealed not to work, per WIRED.
• Three hours — the runtime of "You Can See Everything," codirected by Fielder and Oppenheim, according to WIRED.

WIRED's full account of Fielder's career and the documentary's buildup is available at the originating story.