YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING (EXCEPT THE LAUNDRY)...

Since this movie is about total transparency, I’ll start with a confession. Everyone I know in New York and LA is obsessed with You Can See Everything, and they should be. It’s the most original thing I’ve seen in years. It’s the kind of movie you text people about from the lobby, then talk about at dinner until someone who hasn’t seen it quietly decides never to eat with you again.

My problem is the title.

I’ve spent eight years writing about the gap between what we show and what we actually do: the curated life, if you will, versus the one with a sippy cup fossilizing under the passenger seat. So when someone promises full access, I give them the look I give any mother who tells me her children never fight and  make their beds every morning. How lovely. What else are we lying about?

Quick background for anyone who hasn’t been cornered at a dinner party yet. Thirty-four days before Elizabeth Holmes reported to federal prison, she and her partner, Billy Evans, let filmmaker Nathan Fielder into their rented house by the ocean. The infamous woman in the black turtleneck who sold the world a blood-testing machine that didn’t work was now going to show us who she really was.

Let’s be honest about what that is. It’s a rebrand. It’s the second product launch. And I’ll admit I was curious about the pitch, because when the whole country already thinks you’re a liar, you have exactly one card left to play, and she was holding two of them: a toddler and a newborn.

Then the movie starts, and what got me wasn’t anything she said. It was what I couldn’t hear. The beach house is hushed. People speak softly. There are long pauses. The ocean contributes tastefully. And I sat there thinking: WTF- aren’t there two children under three in this house?!

That house should sound like a smoke detector chirping its low-battery warning from a room nobody can find. Perhaps a toddler who has just discovered the word “mine” and is applying it to everything, including his sister. Somewhere, whatever the modern day version of Dora the Explorer is, should be playing at a volume that makes you forget whether you went to grad school. A house with a toddler and a newborn doesn’t whisper. 

It shrieks, it leaks, and by four in the afternoon it smells faintly of the yogurt that went into somebody’s hair at nine that morning.

Instead we get long, unblinking close-ups, as if the secrets of the universe were somewhere behind her eyes. There were moments, and I’m not proud of this, when I didn’t care whether Elizabeth Holmes would crack sitting two inches from Nathan Fielder’s very porous face. (and, yes, how to politely tell someone to get a facial will be a whole other essay.)  

When the emotion does arrive, it’s a cry. A careful cry. The kind you do when you know exactly where the camera is. A tear that looked like it had been through legal.

Here’s what kills me. As manipulation, it’s bad work.

This is a woman who got Henry Kissinger onto her board. She talked some of the most powerful people in America into believing one drop of blood could tell you everything. She is, whatever else she is, a world-class closer. And for the most important pitch of her life, she went with the tear?

Everybody cries. Politicians cry. Quarterbacks cry. People on The Bachelor cry in the back of limousines. Nobody in the history of public relations has been forgiven for a single well-lit tear. 

If anything, a tear makes us lean back and fold our arms. Oh, here we go. If you actually want sympathy, you don’t cry. You show the kid about to eat the crayon. 

That’s it. That’s the whole campaign. A toddler, a crayon, and a mother lunging across the frame in a sweatshirt with something on the shoulder. No speech. No close-no up. Every woman in that theater would have half-risen out of her seat. That isn’t a sympathy play, it’s a reflex. For one second we’d stop thinking about fraud and start thinking, “Grab it, grab it, GRAB IT.” And by the time the crayon was safely out of his mouth, we’d be on her side, and we wouldn’t even know how we got there.

Show us that house and the rebrand writes itself. Show us the pouch that squirted across the couch, the mountain of laundry on the chair nobody has sat in since the baby came, the bra that isn’t fully hooked, the third attempt at the same cup of coffee. Show her saying, “Can someone please take him for ten minutes,” in a tone that makes it clear ten minutes is no longer a request. By the second hour we’d have started a meal train. By the third, we’d have been at the prison gates with a casserole or, at the very least, sent some DOT cakes. 

Instead: composure. Measured answers. Sustained eye contact. After I gave birth I couldn’t sustain a thought, and here she was holding Nathan Fielder’s gaze as though nobody in the next room might be eating a crayon.

Sure, there could be help.  I get that.  Naps. A night nurse named Deirdre who deserves a producer credit. Hours of footage of someone screaming about the wrong spoon. I understand how movies work. But in a movie entirely about what’s real and what’s performed, nothing is just outside the frame. Somebody decided where the frame goes. The sympathy was right there in the next room, crayon in hand, and somebody shushed it.

I know this is an embarrassing response to a film about fraud. People lost money. Patients trusted test results they shouldn’t have. That part isn’t funny, and I’m not pretending it is. But I think that’s exactly why the crayon matters. 

She already sold us one tiny, perfect thing that was supposed to tell us everything. Now she’s selling us one drop again. Just a tear this time, instead of blood.

That’s also why she picked Nathan Fielder. His whole career lives on the line between real and rehearsed. She didn’t hire a documentarian. She hired a co-star.

Here’s where I keep my promise about transparency: Part of me wanted her to snap at the toddler for the movie’s sake, and part of me wanted it for mine. I’d had plenty of postpartum mayhem. I resented the possibility that a woman about to report to federal prison for a decade was handling the newborn months more gracefully than I handled my daughter leaving the house without a coat today.

There. Total transparency. No crying.

So yes, I loved it. Go see it. 

Just know that the most unbelievable thing in You Can See Everything isn’t a machine that runs hundreds of tests on a single drop of blood.

It’s a house with two children under three where you can hear the ocean.