Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s admirable directive has been out for some time: Among the groups frowned upon in the new, non-woke armed services are “beardos” and “weirdos.”
Alas, this demographic appears to still be represented in the health technology field, or at least those who have failed in it, as well as those who have formed romantic relationships with those in it and comedian-filmmakers who document it. In fairness, among the participants in A24’s startling and almost irresistibly watchable documentary You Can See Everything, only one is (to greater or lesser degrees) a beardo: Billy Evans, the consort, object of worship, power of attorney, and apparent business partner of Elizabeth Holmes, the now-imprisoned founder of the fraudulent blood-testing outfit Theranos — the film’s actual subject and the chief weirdo on view.
How is Holmes weird? Let me count the ways. Her head has the gyrations of a bobblehead doll, she smiles incessantly and inappropriately, she claims to have led a life free of lying, she whisks eggs in an insufficiently vigorous fashion (more on this later), she works the phones in furtherance of her dream of a kind of Theranos 2.0 while holding one of the two young children she has with Evans and awaiting her imminent imprisonment.
Yet no less weird is the man who has set up shop in the lives (and home) of Holmes and Evans, one Nathan Fielder — the star of Comedy Central’s Nathan For You, here recast as a prying interlocutor who lacks even the social graces of his subjects. With the days ticking to the commencement of Holmes’s federal sentence in Texas in May 2023, Fielder roams the rented house Holmes and Evans share in southern California. His standard position is to install himself on a couch with one or more of his subjects, stare silently for a bit, and then lob deadpan questions. (So many of these sessions took place on couches that I was, at times, reminded of the 1980s children’s show The Big Comfy Couch.) Admittedly, he has a better sense of his own limitations than the people he is mildly interrogating. “I’m a bad communicator,” he says at one point. “I don’t know a lot of words.” This is true.
In one already-famous sequence, Fielder desperately wants Holmes to comprehend the source of comedy in Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine, but instead of getting to the heart of the matter, he comes across essentially like every nerd in history who wants a comely female friend to appreciate an arcane piece of popular culture. Who cares if Holmes doesn’t get “Who’s on First?”? In the plus column, when Holmes produces components of her Theranos equipment, Fielder offers the following rejoinder: “So this is the famous scam device?” This time, Holmes seems distantly aware that this is a joke, but, as noted, she smiles so ceaselessly that we stop perceiving her grin as an indication of good cheer. Could it be nothing more than a mask of sorts?
Which brings us to Evans, who made Holmes’s acquaintance at a party in 2017 while she was donning another sort of mask — sunglasses, a hat, a bandage on her face (the result of a dog scratch, she says). He says their conversation went on for about an hour before he became aware that she was the head honcho of Theranos and thus the object of mass opprobrium, but, once you get to know him, he does not seem blessed with a great deal of awareness, including self-awareness. Why else would he consent to being photographed while power-brushing his teeth in the shower or stealing his significant other’s bowl of eggs to whisk in a more manly fashion? I could spend an entire review — maybe two or three — enumerating the peculiar things said or done by Evans, including proposing that he and Holmes have a weekly “patent session” after she is behind bars and suggesting she grab a smoothie on her way to the big house.
Evans is set up to be completely unlikable, but since Fielder is as annoying as a housefly, we can kind of understand it each time Evans shooes him away so that he can spend more time with the soon-to-be-imprisoned mother of his children or complains that the camera crew interferes with their WiFi. Even if the viewer thinks that Holmes is guilty of various crimes (and the film, which barely delves into Theranos itself, gives us no reason to think otherwise), Evans’s requests are not utterly unreasonable. Fielder the nebbish does not know how to take an alpha male like Evans, even if Evans is completely obnoxious.
But so is everyone else. That includes Amanda Seyfried, who, with Holmes locked up and unavailable except by hologram (don’t ask), is pressed into service as Holmes’s stand-in — literally, as she resumes the role she played in the Hulu series about Holmes, The Dropout, and recreates various unrecorded encounters between Holmes and Fielder. Seyfried seems to regard herself as both Fielder’s Girl Friday, assisting our interviewer in getting to the bottom of the Holmes-Evans relationship, and, oddly, as Holmes’s defender. She has particular antagonism toward Evans, whom Fielder arranges for her to meet in an almost unbelievable scene. But Seyfried’s antipathy, couched in feminist terms, comes into greater focus when she and Evans argue over Charlie Kirk (she hates him, he likes him). Hmm. Could Evans have something to recommend in him after all?
To their credit, Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim use the final stretch of their three-hour documentary to complicate what has been our rather benign enjoyment of all this strangeness. Fielder has been beating the drum that Evans exercises too much control over Holmes, which is certainly true, but he challenges Seyfried — isn’t she speaking for Holmes, too? And when Fielder observes a prison visit between the couple, he says he is more persuaded than not by the love between them, a view validated in the film’s pitiful final image: Holmes, Evans, and their children playing in the prison yard.
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Maybe Holmes wants a protector, even one as intolerable as Evans — as offensive as that is to the feminist mindset. Maybe Holmes is drawn to Evans’s aggressive persona because, whatever her manifold sins, it was the only way she could cope with the daily reality of having her young family torn asunder. And make no mistake, it has: Holmes has to tell Evans where the milk is for their children just before she surrenders. Which is no excuse for Evans taking Holmes’s seeming trust in him to egomaniacal heights, as when he says to Fielder that her goal in life is to build “monuments of love” to him. Uh, OK. But even weirdos are human.
Just before she goes to prison, Fielder gives Holmes a greeting card that reads, in part, “Goodbye and Good Luck,” or words to that effect — the sort of card one might purchase at the grocery store for a high-school graduate going off to college. This is both some kind of odd joke (one whose irony seems to completely elude Holmes) but also a summation of this incredible film’s ultimate message: If America in the 21st century is this weird, we’re all in need of good luck — lots and lots of good luck.
Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.