It’s impossible to talk about You Can See Everything without spoiling it. This is one of the most genuinely surprising and bonkers movies I can remember seeing in some time. I think the surprise is part of its joy, and the affect those surprises generate contributes to the very destabilizing feelings the movie creates. If you haven’t seen You Can See Everything, I would personally discourage you from reading this blog post. I will be talking about the movie frankly as I work through some of my thoughts about it, and I will spoil elements up to and including its ending.
Earlier this week, I published my quippy review of You Can See Everything to Letterboxd: “The Citizen Kane of the twenty-first century in more ways than one.” Some of my friends messaged me about this with raised eyebrows. What exactly was I saying in making this comparison? Was I saying my knee-jerk reaction is that this is the best movie of the century, as GOOD as Citizen Kane?! No, no, no, no. Time will tell, obviously. But I do think there are some really weird and interesting connecting points between Fielder/Oppenheim’s movie and Welles’s, and they speak to very specific arguments about the respective moments those movies were created.
Before getting into this. You are going to read me try to work out my thoughts in real time here. This is a messy, kind of weird post, and it felt fitting to publish it in this form rather than try to carefully edit and sculpt it, because I think YCSE sort of inspires a lot of weird riffing on what is happening and what it is about. There is an endless font of discussion, debate, and analysis of this movie all over the Internet right now, so if you want more comprehensive and detailed writing there is no shortage out there, but I want to explore this specific angle I kept thinking about after the movie ended.
Citizen Kane is not-so-secretly inspired by the life of William Randolph Hearst and other media tycoons of the early twentieth century; Charles Foster Kane is sort of a composite of different figures who used control of mass media to build extraordinary wealth and political influence. David Fincher’s film Mank and the Richard Meryman biography of the same name portrays screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as using Citizen Kane’s original script as, in part, a way to attack Hearst’s behavior after being cast out of his social circle. Without going too deep on Hearst, suffice to note that he took over managing the San Francisco Examiner from his father in 1887 and then bought the New York Morning Journal in 1895, using his money to build a staff of renowned journalists and columnists. Hearst’s rise to power in the newspaper world arguably culminate with the use of aggressive “yellow journalism” (what we would now call tabloid journalism or sensationalism) to bolster support for U.S. involvement in the Spanish-American War in 1898. There are so many books and articles about Hearst that you can go deeper on this if you want.
I mention this because it’s important to underscore that Kane (as a fictionalized variant of Hearst) represents a very specific concern about the power of people who control the intersections of mass media, politics, and the economy. His capacity to have outsized cultural influence through the exaggerated styles of his newspaper was a cause of real concern, and remains an important historical touchstone in how we teach mass media and journalism history. While the analogy here is somewhat shaky, Elizabeth Holmes has also become a touchstone figure who is synonymous with a Silicon Valley style of grifting. She was able to exploit different links between economics (venture capitalism), technology (specifically health testing), and politics (lest we forget James Mattis served on Theranos’s Board of Directors for three years) in accruing massive investments for a technology that did not work. Holmes’s ambition was not focused on public opinion and the power of media in the same broad way that Hearst was, but she is operating in a different conjuncture: rather than the journalism hub of New York in the late-1800s, she was courting Silicon Valley in the 2000s. She also engaged in sensationalist claims about what Theranos “could” (a word that is, for better or worse, central to the legal case against her and her interpretation of her own innocence) do that could be interpreted as a version of “yellow public relations” or something like that. Like Hearst, there have been so many detailed accounts written of Theranos and Holmes, and if you’re unfamiliar with them you really should dig into this story before seeing YCSE. These are two historical figures—Hearst and Holmes—who stand a century apart from one another and who remain endlessly fascinating for the ways they used their own ambition to try and build empires of newspapers and health technology, respectively. Hearst was largely successful, parlaying his newspaper business into a political career, whereas Holmes is now in prison and largely disgraced.
Enter Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, whose film You Can See Everything is going to be—if it isn’t already—the film of the year in terms of how much conversation and discussion it generates, how influential it is, and how much it captures something about this moment. YCSE marks, for Fielder, a moment that is actually kind of close to Welles’s Citizen Kane. Welles had made a name for himself with his productions in theater and radio, and while his work was consistently praised for its artistry and its ability to refract contemporary political sensibilities (his staging of Julius Caesar, for instance), his mythos was arguably most associated with the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast that attempted to blend together radio reporting techniques and drama. The first 30 minutes or so of the broadcast are meant to sound like a “real” alien invasion. Newspapers around the country reported widespread panic, itself a myth that was highly exaggerated and has been largely nuanced in the decades since as a touchstone into the way we talk about media effects and media audiences. Fielder has developed his own cult celebrity around the ways he blends reality and fiction in his shows Nathan for You and The Rehearsal. Lest we forget, one of the first episodes of Nathan for You involved the creation of a fake video of a pig “saving” a drowning baby goat at a petting zoo that actually went so viral it was featured on multiple national news programs before people realized it was fake. Fielder has consistently demonstrated his own keen understanding of how to blend television and Internet cultures into consistently captivating, funny, and probing examinations of human psychology. His work is invested, among other things, in performance, in the construction of reality, and in the edge between authenticity and fabrication. Like Orson Welles, Nathan Fielder also has a love of magic, which feels obligatory to note.
Fielder’s collaboration with co-director Lance Oppenheim on YCSE is, of course, quite different from what Orson Welles experienced working with RKO Studios in the early 1940s, but Welles credits Kane cinematographer Gregg Toland as being the source of that film’s technical bravado and visual inventiveness. Oppenheim’s background in documentary, and his 2020 film Some Kind of Heaven, clearly serve as the aesthetic basis for YCSE, with he and Fielder working together to build the narrative. The way this movie is framed, lit, edited, and scored is phenomenal. It generates a pervasively uneasy tone, which is all the more impressive given how small the crew was and how most of it is shot in fairly small rooms.
Citizen Kane begins—after its prologue of Kane whispering “Rosebud” on his deathbed—with a newsreel overview of his life. Using all the contemporary tactics of journalism from that time, the movie lays out the facts of Kane’s life before we cut to a room where the journalists and producers have just finished watching the cut of the newsreel and express dismay that it doesn’t actually tell us anything substantial or important about Kane himself, that he remains shrouded in mystery. Even from the beginning, Kane is arguing that news and documentary can only go so far. Implicitly, there’s a suggestion that people may need different modes of representation to get closer to the truth; perhaps by aestheticizing people’s subjective recollections, we can get closer to something that feels closer to the psychological and emotional truth of a person. Welles was clearly a believer in the capacity of representation to achieve these goals (even beyond Kane and War of the Worlds, his political work—which I’ve written about in Orson Welles in Focus—speaks to this). They dispatch Thompson to interview figures from Kane’s life and try to figure out what “Rosebud” means, and the film is largely told as a series of flashbacks based on archival memoirs and interviews Thompson conducts over the film. The zig-zagging chronology of Citizen Kane is part of what gives it its power, as some events come to be repeated or returned to from different points of view, showing how each person Thompson speaks to has their own interpretation of Kane. Everyone has their story, but no one has an answer. The specificity of Kane remains elusive.
At the end of the movie, Thompson is wandering around Kane’s giant castle Xanadu as items are being packed up or thrown out, conversing with members of the staff. The final exchange of the movie sums up Thompson’s futile quest to understand Kane: “If you could have found out what that Rosebud meant, I bet that would have explained everything.” “No, I don’t think so. No. Mr Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn’t have explained anything. I don’t think any word could explain a man’s life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. A missing piece. Well, come on everybody. We’ll miss the train.” Of course, Kane continues with a crane shot over top the wreckage of items being culled from the house, finally landing on his childhood sled, Rosebud written across its face, as a worker shouts to “throw that junk” and it’s tossed into the fire.
The irony of Citizen Kane is that the film camera shows us what Rosebud is. No other character in the movie gains any sort of closure around this word. The “truth” of it is provided to us, the viewer, but we’re still haunted by Thompson’s closing remarks: does it actually explain anything? Yes, insofar as it points back to the trauma of his mother giving him up, and it suggess that he was thinking about his lost childhood the moment he died, but one of the conversations the film asks us to have as we depart it is whether or not this missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle actually completes a picture.
Alright, so what does any of this have to do with You Can See Everything?
Near the beginning of YCSE, Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans are reading and critiquing a feature on Holmes in The New York Times which was written by Amy Chozick and published about a month before she went to prison (so about the point where the movie begins). Chozick interviewed Holmes for the feature, and at one point they discuss actors playing Holmes in movies and television. In the profile, Chozick quotes Holmes as saying “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” Evans and Holmes spend what feels like a small eternity quibbling over this quote, suggesting Liz would never say “I created” and she must have said “they created” (“they” meaning journalists). They claim they recorded every conversation with the reporter, but they don’t offer those tapes to Fielder to review. The Times recently published a follow-up conversation with the reporter, where she confirms she didn’t record the conversation or keep her notebook but she stands by the quote, suggesting it followed from a conversation where Holmes was talking about how she consciously created a public persona and how “Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn’t.” The final title card of the movie, in its epilogue, even returns to this to verify that Fielder/Oppenheim could never get a definitive answer on what the quote actually was.
As with Kane and Rosebud, we’re focusing on a single word, but in a much different capacity. Whereas Thompson and his cohort think Kane’s last word may be a cipher that unlocks the meaning of him as a person, Holmes/Evans/Fielder focus on single words and exchanges as points to make larger claims about Holmes’s psychology, motivations, and intent. Throughout the movie, Fielder’s mode of interrogating Holmes, and later Evans, is to often focus down onto single words and what they mean. Holmes insists she has never consciously lied about anything in her adult life, to which a gobsmacked Fielder replies, “Liz, what?!” and has them both go on an extended conversation about the parameters and definitions of a lie. Holmes relitigates the differences between saying Theranos “could” or “can” do tests, and whether saying “any” test or “every” test pointed to material differences. To try and ascertain how much Holmes is being serious about misunderstanding communication and language, Fielder shows her and Evans the “Who’s on first” skit and they have an extended conversation about how “Who” is a pun because Holmes claims she doesn’t understand the joke. Again, whether this is a genuine lack of understanding language or if she is giving a performance because that was the basis of her legal defense is up to you to decide.
In many ways, Nathan Fielder becomes Thompson the reporter over the course of YCSE. In an interview at the Lincoln Center following a recent screening of the film, Oppenheim described Fielder as accidentally becoming an investigator of everyday interactions. The film crew is trying to see something. Liz insists, via text message, “FYI you can totally see everything,” but once Liz walks into prison there is, for a few minutes of the film’s runtime, a crushing sense that despite all the genuinely fascinating scenes that have been edited together, there may not be anything there. Of course, then you check your watch and realize there’s still eighty minutes left. The second half of the film takes up this investigative mantle more seriously, as Fielder’s interactions with Evans two years into Liz’s prison sentence make him uneasy. He and Oppenheim seek out Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in The Dropout, and show her the first half of the doc to get her opinion on how Holmes presents herself. From there, using Fielder’s notes from conversations that took place before filming even started, they recreate several scenes where Fielder and Oppenheim provide direction to Seyfried, who draws on her own performance of Holmes that was itself based on her deposition and public interviews. Getting dizzy yet?
The narrative crux of the second half of the movie is around whether Liz knew Evans had pressured A24 into giving him a cut of the film’s profits, and generally whether she is aware of the ways Evans is representing her on social media, building AI models of her, etc. What Liz knows and when she knew it becomes a narrative driver that might confirm, for Fielder and Seyfried and us as audience members, whether this whole enterprise was about deceiving the production team into rehabilitating her image and funneling profits to her family while she’s behind bars, with the contracts written in a way that would circumvent her need to pay restitution. The climax of the whole movie is a reenactment of Fielder’s visit to prison to talk to Holmes about all of this. Because, of course, electronic devices are not permitted, the scene is reconstructed using Nathan’s memory of the conversation and Seyfried’s performance as Holmes. But that reenactment is intercut with Fielder and Seyfried reading the script and going over the language, to the point that Nathan changes a single word: From Holmes saying “Well, I knew he was talking to you about it” to having her say she “Well, I knew he was talking to you about something.” There are many ways to read this moment. Seyfried is taken aback, and it leads her to directly ask Fielder whether he’s protecting Holmes; maybe he, too, has been conned. The altering of the language, and leaving in the conversation where Fielder chooses to alter the language, seems to suggest the point isn’t about what Fielder or Seyfried or even Holmes “actually” believe, but rather that the single word itself can meaningfully change Holmes’s awareness of and culpability in her partner’s strategy. Just like “can,” “Who,” “any,” and “I” in earlier conversations, the semiotic differences between “it” and “something” are a gulf. But then we have to ask ourselves, much like with Rosebud, does either word actually change anything? If we go back through the entire movie and unpack all the semantic arbitration, does any of it meaningfully alter our perceptions of Elizabeth Holmes, Billy Evans, and Nathan Fielder? On one hand, this suggests the movie is about interpretation. On the other hand, I think there is a much grander structural ambition to the film. YCSE is made not only as a response to the specific articulation of capital-technology-politics-power that enabled Holmes in the 2000s-2010s, but also as a movie about deception at a precise moment where deception has become its own structure of feeling.
This is the thing that I think so many people are responding to with YCSE. It is genuinely well-made and thrilling in its construction. The way it becomes this sort of hall of mirrors is completely destabilizing and almost leaves you breathless. It’s really unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. But beyond that, it is actively participating in the structural conditions of deception that have come to define everyday life in the mid-2020s. Raymond Williams described “structures of feeling” in The Long Revolution as “the particular living result of all the elements of the general organization,” and they have to do with general shared affective states that speak to the broader cultural experiences of emergent periods of time. When we are constantly inundated with AI slop, or even when AI reasonably tricks people into believing a fake event actually happened, when disinformation and propaganda from coordinated troll farms destabilize attempts at authorizing something close to reality, when influencers on video platforms like TikTok have reignited conspiracy theories like Flat Earth, and when scams are proliferating across social media and text messages, it creates entirely new forms of anxiety each of us has to live with and negotiate every single day. This, I think, is really what YCSE is preying on. Hell is other people, as Sartre wrote, and this is a particular kind of Hell where Fielder is constantly trying to make sense of these people he is interacting while we as audience members are in our own kind of absurdist Hell trying to make sense of how Fielder and Oppenheim are making sense of Holmes and Evans. The movie’s intense scrutiny on the particularities of facial movements, word choices, cadences, and other markers of interpersonal communication are meant to destabilize us completely and ask us who is being deceived, who is doing the manipulation, what they are gaining, and why. (There is also a lot to talk about with performativity generally and the specifics of neurodivergence and social scripting, but that’s kind of a separate conversation even though it’s worth mentioning at least once.) Even though the narrative of You Can See Everything is highly specific, part of the reason it has become such a zeitgeist-y phenomenon so quickly is because I think it resonates so deeply as a text about living in a deceptive world.
In the first half, deception forms the core of many conversations where Fielder is sort of alternating between confronting Holmes about her past actions and sitting back and letting her just talk, and it takes on this sort of cat-and-mouse vibe where the movie is constantly circling around the degree to which Holmes is being performative versus authentic, whether those performances are intentionally deceptive, whether she’s trying to shield her real opinions due to her precarious legal situation, or whether she genuinely believes she is worthy of redemption and completely innocent. In the second half of the film, the introduction of reenactments with Amanda Seyfried and the focus on whether Holmes and Evans are conspiring with the attempt to make money off the film changes the entire form of how manipulation works inside the film itself. Just like how flashbacks in Kane animated different perspectives and arguments about Charles Kane’s psychology and motivations, Fielder’s reenactments interrogate what Holmes or Evans knew, what their motivations were, and why they were pursuing the documentary in the first place. But they are based on his memories, his notes, how Oppenheim directs the scene, and how they both direct Seyfried. The film consciously invites us to consider all of it as a fabrication and all of it as true simultaneously and in tension with itself. By the end of the climactic reenactment of their conversation at prison, there is no answer. Clearly, Fielder’s script and Seyfried’s performance lean towards some interpretations, but whereas Kane ends with the authority of the film camera showing the audience what Rosebud is (even if its meaning is left to us to interpret), YCSE does not have any clear final image. The last time we see Holmes and Evans is shot through a distance looking at them sitting in the prison yard. There’s no definitive answer on whether their collaboration with A24 was an attempted scam, whether Holmes genuinely believes her own innocence, or how everything we learn about the two of them interacts with her legal record of deceptive and fraudulent practices. The camera doesn’t give us any final irony. It just gives us a final spin of disorientation.
Although Citizen Kane and You Can See Everything may appear to be irreconcilably different texts, I think each of them is ruminating very intricately on film’s relationship to truth, how people use media to gain power, and how these personal dramas are constitutive of very elaborate structures and conditions of their respective moments. I also think, as mentioned above, there are genuinely compelling resonances between how Welles and Fielder respectively think about what media can achieve, and the blends between artifice, reality, and magic at play when you bring a camera and editing into someone’s life. They’re also beautifully made, genuinely thrilling, and compulsively watchable, so there’s that, as well.
This really only hits at the tip of the iceberg of thoughts I have had about YCSE after seeing it earlier this week. Reading this post over, it feels kind of rambling and flailing at times. But that’s kind of what this movie does to you, I think. I hope to get it onto a syllabus and teach with it as soon as possible, because I can only imagine trying to work through all this (and more!) in conversation with students. If you have your own off-beat connections and thoughts about what’s going on in this movie, please share them with me!
