I, Too, Have Thoughts On “You Can See Everything”

I, Too, Have Thoughts On “You Can See Everything”

Some people are missing something important about Amanda Seyfried’s role and other people are being intolerable scolds

You Can See Everything is great. I saw it last week, after having been exposed to weeks’ worth of buzz making it sound like a documentary created in one day by Jesus himself, so I went in with certain expectations.

I’m not sure it was as good as social media and the most enthusiastic reviewers said (a dumb standard, to be sure), but it’s a great documentary. It will stick with me for a long time.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I think Nathan Fielder is a capital-G Genius, I believe Nathan for You is one of the, say, seven (?) funniest TV shows ever produced, and I think The Rehearsal (particularly season 2) is one of the most interesting and original TV shows ever produced. I am just a giant Fielder fanboy in general, even as I acknowledge that he is Not For Everyone (for some of the same reasons I Think You Should Leave is NFE) — not everyone can handle the level of cringe he tends to bring to his projects. (I thought The Curse was good and I’m glad I watched it, but it bounced off me a bit in a way none of his own work ever has.)

I went in knowing as little as possible about YCSE given the insane level of Discourse, and you should do the same. This post is going to have spoilers. If you’re at all worried this will detract from your enjoyment of the film and you haven’t seen it yet, see the film first.

I Think the “Who’s on First” Scene Has a Pretty Clearly Correct Interpretation

This is one of the highlights. The moment in question is mentioned by John Carreyrou, the journalist who broke the scandal wide open (you have to read Bad Blood if you haven’t), in a New York Times article about the film and his own interactions with Holmes and her entourage:

One of the film’s many highlights is a sequence where Mr. Fielder shows Ms. Holmes Abbott and Costello’s famous “Who’s on First?” routine. Ms. Holmes says she’s not familiar with it, which is credible given that she was born in 1984, decades after the duo’s heyday. But after they watch it together, she claims to still not grasp the joke. When Mr. Fielder explains it to her, she says softly: “I didn’t get it.”

You would expect someone who hadn’t initially understood a joke to blurt out “Oh!” or show some flicker of recognition when it registers, but Ms. Holmes has no visible reaction. To me, it was another tell: She had understood the joke but was playing dumb.

Why would she do this? Because in a previous sequence, Mr. Fielder had floated the notion that she interacted with the world differently, which might explain why past statements she saw as innocent were viewed by her investors as lies. By pretending not to understand the Abbott and Costello routine, she was reinforcing that notion and casting herself as the neurodivergent entrepreneur who operated on a different wavelength.

I’m not sure I agree that it’s credible that someone from Holmes’ background would have been unfamiliar with “Who’s on First?” given how ubiquitous that sketch is, but in any case, yes: The weirdness is the point here.

Some viewers of the film seemed to interpret it as exculpating Homes, or attempting to do so. At one point Fielder gets into a painfully long and cringeworthy exchange with her about her prior claim that her Theranos machine “can” perform the tests she said it could. It’s one of several mind-melting sequences in the film, leading us into frankly Clintonian territory in which a fabricator tries to convince us words don’t mean what they mean.

Fielder and director Lance Oppenheim (who I am furious at for being only 30 years old) linger on these moments, often heightening the weirdness with painfully long close-up shops, not to make sure Holmes has her say or that we’ve really heard her out, but to attempt to simulate, to the extent possible via film, the extent of falling under her sway.

Except it’s too late for that. She’s been convicted and is headed to jail, so now we’re dealing with a diminished version of her that has only a camera crew and Fielder to plead her case to. And she’s doing so not from glamorous digs but from a dusty beachside Airbnb.

But it’s the same thing: She’s a bullshit artist, and bullshit artists are going to bullshit. She will use whatever tactics are available to her, in a given situation, to attempt to cast a spell over whoever she is trying to bullshit. But she’s trying to bullshit a bullshit artist — and the difference is that Fielder is very open about being one.

The film is “about” a number of different things, all interesting — that’s what makes it great. And the more you watch it, the more layers you notice. But Fielder is almost always playing “Nathan Fielder,” at some remove from himself, when he’s on camera in supposedly documentary settings. And for the first half of YCSE, he plays the part of someone who just might be falling under Holmes’ sway.

Yes, in a couple of instances Fielder expresses skepticism, such as when he presses Holmes on her claim that she never lies, but it’s always in the service of drawing her out and getting her to expose more of the contours of her persona. And by the end of the film, clearly Fielder and Oppenheim want us to think that Fielder is falling in love with her. Why else mention Fielder’s supposed recent breakup, or film Fielder waiting for hours in a New York hotel room, rain pattering outside, hoping she’ll call, or raise the possibility that her boyfriend is the film’s real antagonist?

Along those lines. . .

I Bet Way More of the Amanda Seyfried Stuff Was Scripted, at Least Lightly, Than People Realize...

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial

A subscription gets you:

© 2026 Jesse Singal
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104