I think a big part of why there are so many potential reads of the film is that Fielder and Oppenheim didn't really have a plan when they started making it. They took up the offer to film at the house, watched everything unfold, and basically followed the threads that they found most interesting from there. A24 agreed to do it with no guarantee an actual movie would come from it and Fielder wasn't even supposed to be so front and center!
The movie is so compelling because we're watching the story unfold as naturally as it did for the filmmakers, but this also makes what it's "about" feel muddled. I think each part of the film is about different things as Fielder/Oppenheim explored various aspects of the story they found interesting and that it's tough to pull those together into one or two overarching themes, which ends up being both a strength and weakness of the final product.
I tend to lean towards your third point as far as which theme stood out the most and felt the most cohesive, though, as I find it most interesting as an exploration of deception. Knowing the details of her crimes, it's pretty fascinating watching her calculate her answers and put on the performance as a misunderstood genius, but also somewhat relatable as we all try to convince ourselves of our own reality and perform a more idealistic version of ourselves at times. Wrote about this aspect in more detail here: https://erikjohnson.substack.com/p/the-psychology-of-deception-in-you
And now you’ve added another layer to this labyrinth of people wondering how you ever get at the truth that’s in another human! Delightful. (No sarcasm here, I loved this piece.)
Great piece. I love that you included that passage from the Ganz review which (despite my lack of knowledge of either Lacan or psychoanalysis which the piece dives into) is the review I have read so far that best speaks for me.
But I have one significant disagreement with your take. I did leave the theater believing that Holmes' reaction to the "Whose on First" routine was genuine. I think it was partly a function of her not paying all that close attention, but I did believe she was simply nodding along and responding to Abbott and Costello's audience laughing rather than really tracking what was being said in the routine.
Stepping back, here's why it matters. I remember reading Melanie Thernstrom's book "Halfway to Heaven" (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/03/diary-of-a-murder) about the 1995 murder in Dunster House at Harvard and feeling incredible pity for Sinedu Tadesse, the Ethiopian girl who murdered her roommate. Tadesse's diaries were one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever read; the story of someone who lived among other people but was totally incapable of connecting with them, while also being (painfully) aware of this inability.
I cite this because I remember when watching The Dropout years ago, I got the same vibes from that portrayal of Holmes; the feeling of someone who was going through life unable to really relate to other people, and aware of this inability, but who still desperately wanted to be successful.
But, of course, I had no idea if this portrayal was accurate. And when asking Gemini before seeing the movie, it suggested that people who knew Holmes disagreed with this aspect of The Dropout. So I went into the movie somewhat skeptical of that narrative but still wondering if it might be true.
So while admitting that perhaps my predisposition is leading me astray, I did see in Holmes a neurodivergent inability to really connect and understand others and thought her reaction to the Abbott & Costello routine was a great example. It wasn't that she is incapable of understanding wordplay; it's that she is on some level incapable of understanding others and is constantly going through life trying to gauge what she is supposed to say in situations rather than simply reacting to them. So I don't think she was really paying attention to the routine; rather she was simply reacting to the audience laughter as a cue.
Anyway, I left the movie feeling great pity for Holmes. Which doesn't mean I think she is not guilty or shouldn't be in prison. She definitely was guilty and definitely should have served some time. But I don't think she is a master manipulator.
My favorite part of the movie is when Fielder says to Seyfried he needs to talk to Holmes in person because what she thinks is the important part of the documentary and Seyfried boasts “you know people thought my performance was a documentary?!” It was a tiny glimpse into the type of delusion that exists in everyone but Holmes has embraced as her entire being. Like who tf cares about your performance lady? You’re not her!
My brother was at San Diego State University with Kristin Rossum, a graduate and student toxicologist, who murdered her husband in 2000. He said she was a high performing perfectionist and an incredible manipulator. I think there's something about the illusion of control that both these women share. When I saw the movie, I thought of Kristin, and how Holms is probably capable of leading a highly complex, compartmentalized life.
Two of the most popular and most discussed movies of the year have been “The Odyssey” and “You Can See Everything.”
“The Odyssey” by Christopher Nolan’s telling, is a story about performative virtue and the motivation for profit leading to the death of Wisdom in the form of Athena. Sound familiar to our own time? (We are “the sea people.” Armies of bots and billionaires, extracting everything possible from ourselves in the name of ‘getting home’. How many people get home?)
“You Can See Everything” is the result of that world. It’s a world in which the more a person sees, the less a person knows. It’s a world in which individuals use the power of avatars to distract and manipulate. A world in which facts and opinions are hopelessly unintelligible. A world in which the idea of “perfect information” leads to an existential crisis in which individuals look for some clarity amidst a sea of noise that doesn’t exist unless our Robot God brings it to us.
Elizabeth Holmes is our Athena. It’s why we feel unhappy.
Your Kierkegaard insight has literary analogs, and so does the word “performance” itself. Hamlet says, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Fielder’s performance art is the thing wherein he hopes to catch the conscience, or the lies, of Elizabeth Holmes.
Cervantes got there too. Holmes is a Quixote addled by the myth of Steve Jobs and by her own George Washington persona: she insists she never lied, an “I cannot tell a lie” that is itself a pious fiction. Sunny Balwani and now Billy Evans are her roguish, reverse Sancho Panzas. In Part II of the novel, characters who have read Part I stage performances for Quixote and Sancho, who, in effect, play themselves. Playing yourself and watching yourself be played is four hundred years old (both Cervantes and Shakespeare died in April 1616).
As for the word itself: “perform” originally meant “to carry all the way through,” and Fielder, Holmes, and later Seyfried all "commit to the bit." Even Billy Evans commits to the bit of the quixotic lab-in-a-box project and trying to restore Holmes's reputation by lying: attributing his own words as hers, and making an AI simulacrum of her. Then there is Fielder and Seyfried’s re-creation of scenes: “recreation” first meant restoring the sick to health. Holmes watching Seyfried play Holmes is a performance of a re-creation, and perhaps the start of a healing. But, as with Theranos, healing would require reliable and accurate diagnosis: admitting the truth, and self-awareness. She could perform and lie all day long, but watching Seyfried perform her, re-create her, made the usually imperturbable Holmes sick.
It strikes me that the ingenious orchestra leader in this brew is Fielder. My guess is that some years from now, this film will be viewed as having set back Holmes' attempt to rehab herself by doubling down on the lies and victim persona. Too bad naive Billy and her kids get to look back on this illness in film.
The line about how Fielder "loves asking his subjects to play themselves and watch themselves be played, always searching for a way to depict the act of self-awareness" made me think of The Act of Killing, but then I realized I was mistaking Oppenheim for Joshua Oppenheimer, who directed the latter
I think a big part of why there are so many potential reads of the film is that Fielder and Oppenheim didn't really have a plan when they started making it. They took up the offer to film at the house, watched everything unfold, and basically followed the threads that they found most interesting from there. A24 agreed to do it with no guarantee an actual movie would come from it and Fielder wasn't even supposed to be so front and center!
The movie is so compelling because we're watching the story unfold as naturally as it did for the filmmakers, but this also makes what it's "about" feel muddled. I think each part of the film is about different things as Fielder/Oppenheim explored various aspects of the story they found interesting and that it's tough to pull those together into one or two overarching themes, which ends up being both a strength and weakness of the final product.
I tend to lean towards your third point as far as which theme stood out the most and felt the most cohesive, though, as I find it most interesting as an exploration of deception. Knowing the details of her crimes, it's pretty fascinating watching her calculate her answers and put on the performance as a misunderstood genius, but also somewhat relatable as we all try to convince ourselves of our own reality and perform a more idealistic version of ourselves at times. Wrote about this aspect in more detail here: https://erikjohnson.substack.com/p/the-psychology-of-deception-in-you
Your full piece is very good Erik. I'd encourage others to read it.
Second Gordon’s recommendation, if you were as taken with the intellectual exploration of human deception in the film as I was.
Thank you so much!
I enjoyed this commentary and other writing about this film, but you couldn't pay me enough to get me to watch it. It just sounds painful. Yuck.
And now you’ve added another layer to this labyrinth of people wondering how you ever get at the truth that’s in another human! Delightful. (No sarcasm here, I loved this piece.)
Great piece. I love that you included that passage from the Ganz review which (despite my lack of knowledge of either Lacan or psychoanalysis which the piece dives into) is the review I have read so far that best speaks for me.
But I have one significant disagreement with your take. I did leave the theater believing that Holmes' reaction to the "Whose on First" routine was genuine. I think it was partly a function of her not paying all that close attention, but I did believe she was simply nodding along and responding to Abbott and Costello's audience laughing rather than really tracking what was being said in the routine.
Stepping back, here's why it matters. I remember reading Melanie Thernstrom's book "Halfway to Heaven" (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/03/diary-of-a-murder) about the 1995 murder in Dunster House at Harvard and feeling incredible pity for Sinedu Tadesse, the Ethiopian girl who murdered her roommate. Tadesse's diaries were one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever read; the story of someone who lived among other people but was totally incapable of connecting with them, while also being (painfully) aware of this inability.
I cite this because I remember when watching The Dropout years ago, I got the same vibes from that portrayal of Holmes; the feeling of someone who was going through life unable to really relate to other people, and aware of this inability, but who still desperately wanted to be successful.
But, of course, I had no idea if this portrayal was accurate. And when asking Gemini before seeing the movie, it suggested that people who knew Holmes disagreed with this aspect of The Dropout. So I went into the movie somewhat skeptical of that narrative but still wondering if it might be true.
So while admitting that perhaps my predisposition is leading me astray, I did see in Holmes a neurodivergent inability to really connect and understand others and thought her reaction to the Abbott & Costello routine was a great example. It wasn't that she is incapable of understanding wordplay; it's that she is on some level incapable of understanding others and is constantly going through life trying to gauge what she is supposed to say in situations rather than simply reacting to them. So I don't think she was really paying attention to the routine; rather she was simply reacting to the audience laughter as a cue.
Anyway, I left the movie feeling great pity for Holmes. Which doesn't mean I think she is not guilty or shouldn't be in prison. She definitely was guilty and definitely should have served some time. But I don't think she is a master manipulator.
My favorite part of the movie is when Fielder says to Seyfried he needs to talk to Holmes in person because what she thinks is the important part of the documentary and Seyfried boasts “you know people thought my performance was a documentary?!” It was a tiny glimpse into the type of delusion that exists in everyone but Holmes has embraced as her entire being. Like who tf cares about your performance lady? You’re not her!
My brother was at San Diego State University with Kristin Rossum, a graduate and student toxicologist, who murdered her husband in 2000. He said she was a high performing perfectionist and an incredible manipulator. I think there's something about the illusion of control that both these women share. When I saw the movie, I thought of Kristin, and how Holms is probably capable of leading a highly complex, compartmentalized life.
Two of the most popular and most discussed movies of the year have been “The Odyssey” and “You Can See Everything.”
“The Odyssey” by Christopher Nolan’s telling, is a story about performative virtue and the motivation for profit leading to the death of Wisdom in the form of Athena. Sound familiar to our own time? (We are “the sea people.” Armies of bots and billionaires, extracting everything possible from ourselves in the name of ‘getting home’. How many people get home?)
“You Can See Everything” is the result of that world. It’s a world in which the more a person sees, the less a person knows. It’s a world in which individuals use the power of avatars to distract and manipulate. A world in which facts and opinions are hopelessly unintelligible. A world in which the idea of “perfect information” leads to an existential crisis in which individuals look for some clarity amidst a sea of noise that doesn’t exist unless our Robot God brings it to us.
Elizabeth Holmes is our Athena. It’s why we feel unhappy.
Your Kierkegaard insight has literary analogs, and so does the word “performance” itself. Hamlet says, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Fielder’s performance art is the thing wherein he hopes to catch the conscience, or the lies, of Elizabeth Holmes.
Cervantes got there too. Holmes is a Quixote addled by the myth of Steve Jobs and by her own George Washington persona: she insists she never lied, an “I cannot tell a lie” that is itself a pious fiction. Sunny Balwani and now Billy Evans are her roguish, reverse Sancho Panzas. In Part II of the novel, characters who have read Part I stage performances for Quixote and Sancho, who, in effect, play themselves. Playing yourself and watching yourself be played is four hundred years old (both Cervantes and Shakespeare died in April 1616).
As for the word itself: “perform” originally meant “to carry all the way through,” and Fielder, Holmes, and later Seyfried all "commit to the bit." Even Billy Evans commits to the bit of the quixotic lab-in-a-box project and trying to restore Holmes's reputation by lying: attributing his own words as hers, and making an AI simulacrum of her. Then there is Fielder and Seyfried’s re-creation of scenes: “recreation” first meant restoring the sick to health. Holmes watching Seyfried play Holmes is a performance of a re-creation, and perhaps the start of a healing. But, as with Theranos, healing would require reliable and accurate diagnosis: admitting the truth, and self-awareness. She could perform and lie all day long, but watching Seyfried perform her, re-create her, made the usually imperturbable Holmes sick.
It strikes me that the ingenious orchestra leader in this brew is Fielder. My guess is that some years from now, this film will be viewed as having set back Holmes' attempt to rehab herself by doubling down on the lies and victim persona. Too bad naive Billy and her kids get to look back on this illness in film.
The line about how Fielder "loves asking his subjects to play themselves and watch themselves be played, always searching for a way to depict the act of self-awareness" made me think of The Act of Killing, but then I realized I was mistaking Oppenheim for Joshua Oppenheimer, who directed the latter