I had a habit of getting really close to textbooks at university. I would bring my eyes to an inch of the page. I used to do that when I was struggling to understand an equation. It was a way to remove all irrelevant stuff from my vision and focus on what the characters were trying to tell me. The framing of You Can See Everything reminded me of that. The close-up shots ensured not even a single facial movement went unnoticed, unanalyzed.
The movie left a lot of us feeling uneasy. It was like a three-hour-long feast - at the end your stomach was full but your appetite remained unsatisfied. It left a lot of negative space for you to fill in with your thoughts. Two thoughts kept throbbing afterward:
Look at every scene, every interaction as an opportunity to either weaken or strengthen your viewpoint. In mathematics, that’s called Bayesian probability. The concept is simple: don’t drop your prior beliefs as soon as you come across your first contrasting viewpoint. Instead, use the new evidence to weaken your conviction in your prior belief or vice versa. Update your belief only when the evidence negating your prior POV outnumbers the evidence supporting it. In mathematics, you can use an equation to decide if you’re at the tipping point but in real life you have to rely on your intuition. And again, this movie is structured in a way that you can watch each scene as if you're studying a petri dish under a microscope – you can literally see everything.
Second, know what question your thoughts are trying to answer. And avoid pairing unrelated questions with unrelated answers. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman talks about the Halo effect. It’s when we take one attribute of a person - for example, their beauty - and use it to create isomorphic answers for unrelated questions i.e. is the beautiful person also kind? Yes. This is a fallacy. A person can be cunning and also a victim. Don’t fabricate contradictory relationships between two concepts that have nothing to do with each other.
Alright, now I’ll put my serious person’s hat aside and dive into the gossipy details. I’ll try to convince you why my POV is right using specific details from the movie. There are heavy spoilers ahead, please leave if you haven’t watched the documentary yet.
My POV: Elizabeth Holmes is the devil personified AND also in a relationship (intentionally or unintentionally) with a batshit crazy person. The former is clear so I won’t dive deep into that. The latter became abundantly clear as the documentary progressed.
A disclaimer: before the documentary, I had thought about Elizabeth Holmes only twice in my life. First, when I was a student of entrepreneurship back in the mid-2010s. She was an aspirational figure: a founder who wasn’t going down the beaten path of SaaS companies and was instead trying to solve a real problem with cutting-edge technology. The second time was when she was convicted as a fraudster. When the news cycle died, I stopped thinking about her. I haven’t watched the documentary or the Hulu series.
So I went into the theatre with a slightly rough but mostly clean slate. And, towards the end of the movie, I was convinced of her guilt. Here are all the details supporting her deceitfulness:
- Fielder entered the set that Holmes built to sell her story. The rented beach house was one part of it. Another subtle part was her cellphone and laptop that she used as props. She interacted with them, seemingly busy, while listening intently to Nathan’s and Billy’s conversations. When the camera captured her mindlessly typing the same sentence while “writing” her book, she became irate. But instead of confronting the crew, she shared her frustration with Billy. Her character was that of a tame and helpless mom. Showing anger would have shattered it.
- Billy was pouring his time and effort into building Theranos v2. At the same time, he couldn’t stand people talking crap about the OG Theranos. He had no involvement in the original company. To convince someone to try to copy and be protective of a publicly ridiculed idea requires the highest tier of manipulation.
- I was amazed by how she cried on cue. I am sure there were genuine moments where emotions overwhelmed her. The prospect of being away from one’s kids for so long would be earth-shattering for any mom. But some of them were clearly crocodile tears. For example, when she said she had never cried in front of anyone and then immediately shed a single tear.
- The eye contact trick that she used on Billy.
- The hiding behind a bandage and glasses to avoid being recognized. And then lying about being scratched by a dog.
- The phone call with Amanda Seyfried and the “I’m not sure if I knew you were coming” line.
- The beef jerky scene was interesting. She got Nathan to feel bad and buy her some beef jerky. But the final scene shows Billy handing her another piece of beef jerky. If she knew her BF would get her beef jerky, then why ask Nathan for it?
- Nathan said that in their first meeting he talked about David Blaine and how people were incapable of accepting the truth about his pencil <> palm trick due to its absurdity. Then he said her eyes instantly lit up when he suggested that she might be speaking the truth but in a way that caused other people to perceive it as a lie. It was clear that she latched on to that angle.
- The producer meeting was mind-blowing. Her reading a chapter of her book might have felt random, but it wasn’t. She needed a reason to call all the producers to their friend’s home. Reading them an excerpt from her autobiography was “her” reason. That gave her the ability to walk away from the room looking innocent while Billy did the dirty job of asking for a cut.
- At the start, she was having a phone convo with a reporter when she complained that she didn't have enough money to cover her legal fees. Then Billy, later in the movie, brags about coming from means and exacting vengeance on everyone who had hurt Elizabeth. So they had money to hire assassins but not to cover legal fees?
There were many others that I left out. Regardless of what you feel about Elizabeth Holmes by the end, there’s no denying that the documentary was a masterpiece. There will be an army of people debating the meaning of it all. For them, as for me, the end has no end.