The surprise of You Can See Everything isn't Elizabeth Holmes — we've already had Amanda Seyfried play her, already watched the Theranos mythology collapse in real time. The surprise is that Holmes, the convicted fraudster with the bathtub-deep stare and the word-salad explanations of her own blood-testing device, ends up being the film's most ambiguous figure. Nathan Fielder, co-directing with Lance Oppenheim, finds himself genuinely unable to determine whether she is consciously scamming him or simply, as the film puts it, reality-divergent. That inscrutability generates something haunting. It is not sympathy exactly, but it is texture. Billy Evans has no such texture. Holmes's partner — they're not legally married, she says, though they've been engaged since 2018, have two children, and conduct themselves entirely as spouses — enters the film as an also-ran and gradually colonizes it as its most legible and most repellent figure. He demands a cut of the documentary's profits, a request typically reserved for musicians commissioning promotional content, not subjects of nonfiction investigations. He insists on privacy while appearing fully nude on camera. He relieves Holmes of egg-scrambling duty mid-scramble because her technique isn't vigorous enough. These are not the power moves of a man who has power. They are the moves of a man who has read about power. The film's second half, after a two-year time jump that covers Holmes's incarceration, sharpens the portrait. Evans listens to podcasts at double speed. He drops the name Charlie Kirk unprompted, brags about carrying a gun everywhere, boasts of his own vindictiveness, and leverages his sketchy administrative control over Holmes's social media to fire off petty clapbacks that are entirely out of character for her public brand. He uses an AI likeness of Holmes — his control of it worn as a trophy — to make a sideways brag about how much better she looks as a prisoner than she did immediately postpartum. None of this is commented upon by Fielder or Oppenheim. They simply point the camera and let the accumulation do its work. The article draws the obvious comparison to the tech-villain genre: the Evil Bro archetype that powers The Social Network, that is currently powering The Social Reckoning with Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg, and the forthcoming Artificial with Andrew Garfield as Altman and Ike Barinholtz as Musk. But Evans doesn't fit the type cleanly, and that's precisely what makes him more useful as cultural shorthand. Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman — whatever you make of them morally — have actually built things, or bought things, or maneuvered into positions from which real damage to the world is possible. Evans has none of that. He has Holmes's damaged brand and his own ambient confidence that the posture of power is indistinguishable from the thing itself. What the film doesn't quite say aloud — but which the Guardian piece makes explicit — is that You Can See Everything is apparently outperforming the Alex Gibney four-hour documentary on Musk, released at the same time. The gossipy nervous laughter of a film about two minor figures is stealing oxygen from a rigorous accounting of someone who has genuinely rearranged institutions and may continue to. That tension is the most interesting thing the piece raises, and the film apparently raises it too, if inadvertently: we process threat most easily when it wears the face of petty absurdity rather than real structural power. Evans is easy to finish off in public precisely because there are no stakes to finishing him off. He is hustle-and-grind culture in its terminal, dehumanized form — scanning everything at 2x speed, absorbing what's useful, moving on. The world as content to be optimized. Fielder and Oppenheim are working in a tradition of documentaries that use access to destabilize the subject-filmmaker relationship — and You Can See Everything is apparently a significant advance on that form. The profit-participation demand alone is a set piece that would function as pure comedy in a scripted film. In a documentary it becomes something stranger: a moment where the subject tries to rewrite the rules of the form he's trapped inside, and the filmmakers document the attempt with the same flat affect they bring to everything else. Evans thinks he is negotiating. He is being filmed negotiating. The film knows the difference. Evans apparently does not.
