[Editor’s note: The following piece contains spoilers for “You Can See Everything.”]
If cinematographer David Bolen and camera operator Jonathan Mitchell were filming verité coverage of the IndieWire office in New York after the release of Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder‘s “You Can See Everything,” there would have been a similar visual sense of transience — a latent, unsettling tension of the kind that characterizes the first half of the A24 film, where Oppenheim, Fielder, and their small team were documenting Elizabeth Holmes’ last month of freedom before reporting to prison to serve her sentence for multiple counts of fraud.
Mostly, this was because we’re moving to a different floor of the office, and there were a lot of cardboard boxes, abandoned Tupperware, and mystery mugs scattered about. But it was also because of the impact of “You Can See Everything” — our individual reactions to it on staff and the wider reactions that we were seeing around the Internet.
The latter led our stalwart TV Critic, Ben Travers, to pose a question: Given the weekend that Fielder just had with “You Can See Everything,” would the filmmaker be more or less keen on a third season of “The Rehearsal,” his HBO series which has allowed him to do everything from bring the recreation of a Brooklyn bar across state lines to fly a commercial airliner?
I, Craft Editor Sarah Shachat, will admit
I, Craft Editor Sarah Shachat, will admit that I wasn’t thinking too rigorously when I said the words, “He’s already made Season 3. It’s this movie,” but they were out before I thought to stop them. And look, we know from HBO Head of Comedy Casey Bloys that “The Rehearsal” Season 3 is in the works. Reddit is already trying to sleuth out whether Nathan Fielder intends to release the Epstein files or successfully transit the Strait of Hormuz, or whatever he’s planning on doing; IndieWire doesn’t know any more than you do.
But certain aspects of “You Can See Everything” do take on a distinct light when considered in the shadow of what Fielder (and Oppenheim) have done before. There are also a number of ways in which it is the Pokémon evolution of their previous work — and in which specifically “The Rehearsal” prepared, if not Fielder himself, than his audience to roll with a self-reflexiveness so recursive that even Peter Watkins would be like, “Wait, they did what?”
One of the core draws of the first season of “The Rehearsal” was its intricate sets — the great Nate’s Lizard Lounge, of course, but also studio builds of apartments. and locations thorough dressed by the show’s art team. “The Rehearsal” teaches us how to see that everything we interact with is constructed. Spaces aren’t ever just real or fake. If they’re real, they’re recreated and repurposed, often more than once while Fielder and his laptop loom in the center. If they’re “faked” for the show, they’re often where the most interesting and emotional exploration among the participants takes place.
Contrast Kor’s introduction in Episode 1
Contrast Kor’s introduction in Episode 1 of the show with Angela’s in Episode 2. We first see Kor in his actual home, and while it’s safe to assume that the scene of the New York teacher playing along with “Jeopardy!” was staged for the cameras, there’s still a sense that we’re observing his day-to-day reality. With Angela, we start mid-rehearsal, first with a wall of surveillance cameras that pulls back to reveal Fielder in the control room/video village alongside the production crew and two mothers of children who’ll be playing Angela’s faux son, Adam. We see the artifice first, the person second. That colors how we move through both stories and understand those people, and Fielder’s relationship with them.
The first season of “The Rehearsal” questions what kind of authenticity can come out of an artificial setup or environment, especially for folks who have trouble expressing themselves. Maybe the artifice of “rehearsing” can lead to something good and genuine. The season becomes deeply concerned with the blurring of true emotion and performance — and how, for good and for ill, it’s much harder to draw a line between those things than it might seem. The question becomes even more fraught when it comes to child actors, where adults have a duty of care to try and keep reality straight for them while putting them in a situation where it starts to bend.
Here’s where the spoilers start — so seriously, don’t read unless you’ve already seen “You Can See Everything.”
When the You Can See Everything returns
When the “You Can See Everything” returns to the rental home in San Diego where Elizabeth Holmes and her boyfriend Billy Evans spent their last few months before moving down to Texas to comply with Holmes’ prison sentence, Nathan Fielder and Amanda Seyfried are looking for a grounding in the details of the space Holmes is no longer in, obviously. They’re also looking to bend reality far enough into artifice that they may actually be able to come back around to some truth. If Fielder and Oppenheim can run back the baffling month they spent in Del Mar through the scenes with Seyfried (as well as a game Christopher Abbott), maybe they can finally understand it, and Holmes.
There’s still some of those nearly invisible touches to it, though. Seyfried finds the now infamous bowl for beating eggs in the cabinet where it’s been the whole time, but when the film cuts to the recreate of Seyfried-as-Holmes and Fielder (as himself) meeting for the first time, a set decoration team has made the house look lived-in again. The rhythmic back-and-forth between the script that Fielder and Seyfried perform and the two of them discussing that scene as Fielder’s memory of a real event is also an intentional grounding of how we interpret what we’re seeing.
That first recreation starts with Fielder and Seyfried’s conversation, cuts to the recreation itself, and continues with Fielder talking to the Seyfried in a makeup chair, getting dressed for the role. The verite footage, conversation within a staged setting, and full recreation all exist on a spectrum of reality, one of that “You Can See Everything” is very careful to guide us through with the goal of helping us come to some conclusion (or grapple with our inability to draw one). It’s similar arc just in that one sequence to the full first season of “The Rehearsal.”
In other words, Nathan and editor Adam Locke-Norton learned it from watching Nathan.
They learned even more from Season 2
They learned even more from Season 2 of “The Rehearsal,” which grapples with the struggle for any one of us to be able to successfully communicate to another person, even when the stakes are life and death. The first episode of Season 2 goes into this in depth, but one only needs to watch the painful interview CNN did with Fielder about the show to see how easy it is for people to dismiss anything said by a comedian, even some extremely saliant points about the safety that rides on good communication between pilots in the cockpit, and how it is in desperate need of improvement.
Beyond that dilemma, the extent to which any of us can successfully understand each other is at issue in both “You Can See Everything” and “The Rehearsal” Season 2. The HBO show does a fantastic job of exploring the pressures and incentives, implicit and explicit, that prevent pilots from communicating better. The recreations in Season 2, be they of a fully functional airport terminal or Fielder embodying Sully Sullenberg for “the miracle on the Hudson” after speed-running thorugh playing the pilot’s entire life, are in service of explicating and exploring those communication hangups — with cheeky a little bit of Evanessance thrown in, too.
The recreations in “You Can See Everything” are about trying to create a fuller picture of imperfect communication to fully understand the extent to which it’s genuine or not. It is a fascinating inverse of Season 2 of “The Rehearsal,” where Fielder actually becomes a pilot rated to fly a 737 and does so, on camera, carrying the entire extended cast of actors that have participated in Season 2 for the finale of the season. Fielder becomes his subject not just within the frame of the show itself, but in his lived experience, and that transformation has an impact on how he thinks about himself.
Grappling with the potential of seeing Holmes
Grappling with the potential of seeing Holmes in prison but not being able to film or record the conversation in any way, Fielder talks it through with Seyfried. The actor is willing to recreate whatever Fielder needs. But Fielder isn’t sure that even she can be fully accurate — that her performance really can give us a chance to judge what Holmes has to say.
Of course they do end up shooting the recreation, intercut with Fielder and Seyfried talking through the script he’s written up before a fireplace that’s lit so dramatically Hitchcock wishes he put it in “Vertigo.” But there are conscious choices made here beyond the choice to do it. The first section of the sequence, where Fielder arrives at the prison and waits in the visiting room for a long time before Holmes shows up, unfolds with normal coverage — wides, medium wides on Fielder, insert shots of the vending machines, and so on. When Seyfried-as-Holmes does enter the scene, she’s covered from the back, in wides, and we’re unable to see Seyfried’s face.
There is a corner of the multiverse where Oppenheim and Fielder stage the entire conversation between Fielder and Holmes that way. The filmmakers could’ve let key moments of what Holmes says fall on Seyfried-as-herself, reading the script, and let whatever “true” version of Holmes — her expressions, her bearing her chemistry with Fielder — there is to be had all live inside the audience’s mind. There is a version of this sequence that withholds Seyfried’s interpretation in the name of “truth.”
Instead, we see Seyfried give a performance
Instead, we see Seyfried give a performance that we can never know is fully accurate; but in moments where she says, as Holmes “I’m tired of having other people speak for me” sure feels true. It feels lived. “You Can See Everything” is the opposite of Season 2 of “The Rehearsal” as well as its cautionary escalation. The film shows how natural it can be to get lost inside of a transformative performance, and that however close to accuracy we can get, it is never close enough.
It is Seyfried herself, arguably the true heroine of the film, who points that out that the more time Fielder has spent with Holmes, the trickier it may be for him not to care about her, and for their relationship not to color what we see.
But as both “The Rehearsal” and “You Can See Everything” point out, time with each other is all we have.
“You Can See Everything” is now playing in theaters.
