You Won’t See Everything Unless You’ve Seen The Rehearsal

Spoilers follow for You Can See Everything.

Anyone who’s seen The Rehearsal knows Nathan Fielder is an unusually self-insertive documentarian, one willing to use atypical methods to present a truthful representation of his subject. In season two, he becomes fixated on Captain Sully Sullenberger, sure that if he can recreate the exact experience of Sully’s childhood, he can identify the tiny, specific experiences that gave the pilot the fortitude to land his plane on the Hudson River. Fielder’s new documentary with Lance Oppenheim, You Can See Everything, leans on the same strategy. If Fielder can perfectly recreate Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, he can interrogate her even in her absence. He can press her on his fundamental question — not about the crimes she committed but what she believes about herself. Within this context, You Can See Everything looks like the latest installment in a project Fielder’s been working on for years. He loves oddities and inexplicable human extremes. He’s fascinated by the opacity of human communication. He loves hooking onto a complicated, intractable mystery and identifying some overlooked piece of evidence to explain it, but he does so in the service of his primary area of interest. Fielder’s main character is always himself.

Although Holmes is the central figure of the first half of the film, once she is is incarcerated, Fielder asks Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed Holmes in the Hulu series The Dropout, to reenact interactions and conversations. In her role as Holmes’s stand-in, Seyfried also becomes one of Fielder’s interview subjects. What does she think about Holmes and her relationship with her partner, Billy Evans? Where do Seyfried’s sympathies lie? Seyfried’s role in YCSE creates the same hall-of-mirrors experience Fielder is constantly aiming for in The Rehearsal, where performance and reality become so intertwined it’s impossible to disentangle them from each other. Seyfried begins as a willing and curious creative partner, happily reading the transcripts Fielder has given her to recreate the scenes he was not able to record on camera. But by the end of the film, Seyfried begins pushing Fielder on his allegiances and assumptions. Is he sure he hasn’t left anything out of these transcripts?, she asks him. Is he trying to protect Holmes?

That turn, where Seyfried begins questioning Fielder’s attachment, arrives in the last half-hour of YCSE’s three-hour run time and plays like a mic drop. Fielder insists he is trying to be as objective as possible and has been keeping his emotions out of it. Seyfried is skeptical. Has Holmes persuaded Fielder to overlook all the evidence of her fraud? Has he been hoodwinked by the performance of devotion between Holmes and Evans? The final scene is an admission: Holmes and Fielder swimming in the ocean, laughing and pulling each other through the waves even though he previously insisted he was too scared to ever swim in open water. He’s been compromised. Or perhaps he’s conscious enough of his own potential sympathy for her that he’s hidden this scene at the end because he knows how it will look when it finally arrives. She got him, too, but maybe by acknowledging his bias he can also neutralize it.

Viewers of The Rehearsal will recognize this turn. In both seasons, Fielder begins by asking broad questions about issues outside of himself: Can people prepare perfectly for unpredictable emotional experiences? What happens inside someone’s brain in the split-second moment of a life-or-death decision? And in each installment, Fielder quickly becomes his own subject. He wants to test the rehearsal process on a truly challenging future outcome by helping a woman named Angela “rehearse” motherhood, only to quickly reveal that he, too, would like to learn how being a father would feel. He becomes the subject of that rehearsal, “parenting” multiple child actors at different ages and with different processes to explore their attachment to him and vice versa. In season two, his focus on co-pilot communications becomes an elaborate exploration of his own difficulties communicating with other people. All of it is performance; Fielder deliberately foregrounds his sense of dislocation and confusion, often using carefully written voice-over to narrate his inner turmoil. But the version of Fielder who appears onscreen also came from somewhere within Fielder, regardless of how scripted or studied it was. When does the performance of authenticity become so thorough it’s just authenticity?

The ideas floating through You Can See Everything have direct corollaries to the ideas Fielder plays with in The Rehearsal. His obsession with whether Holmes understands that other people did not interpret her use of the word can or whether she grasps the joke in “Who’s on First?” are reiterations of his communication hang-ups in season two. His reverence for her motherhood — which the film avoids asking her about, substituting discussion with endless visuals of her breastfeeding and swinging her children through the waves — echoes the themes of season one. But mostly, The Rehearsal haunts You Can See Everything in the movie’s avoidance of engaging with Holmes on most of the pertinent scientific and legal facts of her case. Just as in his examination of Captain Sully or his exploration of parenting or an episode about cloned puppies, Fielder is uninterested in the technical realities or the concrete, easily provable facts. They’re the things you skim to get to the more interesting intangibles: Who is this person, really? What made them that way? And then, inevitably: What does this mean for me, Nathan Fielder?

Fielder is largely interested in his own reaction to Holmes and how much the person he’s looking at so closely is a reflection of himself. He positions himself as both a potential Holmes victim, swayed by her sincerity, and as a Holmes doppelganger, staring into someone’s eyes, insisting he’s just stating the facts, passionate and highly visible but also falling back on some degree of cover. (Evans provides cover for Holmes; Oppenheim, as co-director, covers for Fielder by preventing him from being the sole authorial voice.) 

Knowing The Rehearsal changes the experience of You Can See Everything. That last scene, where Fielder swims happily with Holmes, looks like a stolen secret moment between them, and its placement at the end of the film gives it the heft of revelation. But it’s also filmed by Oppenheim, in a shot no doubt carefully orchestrated to give them good framing and lighting, and it’s just as much a part of his performance as anything else has been. Much of the movie seems to be a film about Elizabeth Holmes, but the last scene is the moment it fully becomes the Nathan Fielder project it’s been all along: a project about Nathan Fielder.