Motivation / You Can See Everything

"He turns the empty glass in his hand and considers biting off the rim."
- Raymond Carver, "Are These Actual Miles?"

1. Personal story about the recipe and how I learned it from a family member and now make it for my family

I've been trying to find a quote from Robert Altman. Based on this Senses of Cinema essay, it may be from an interview about Nashville in Film Quarterly or a Short Cuts commentary track that didn't make it to the Criterion reissue. My memory of this line is Altman saying we don't need to be told or shown a character's motivation because everybody has their own complex internal life and people do things for reasons we can't understand. Senses of Cinema quotes him as having thought that we seek justification for a character's actions, "but there doesn't have to be one."

It's important to consider the source of this thought. Robert Altman was a genius filmmaker whose characters usually had understandable motivations. He was also often adapting other people's novels or working on scripts he'd written with people like Joan Tewkesbury. He wasn't using "there doesn't have to be one" as an excuse for his own underdeveloped writing, because the writing was often good and often came from another person he was admiring. You can wonder why Chris Penn does the horrible thing with the rock in Short Cuts, but that same thing happens in a Raymond Carver story. That wasn't Altman throwing an idea on the screen and shrugging at the audience. You can find the end of McCabe & Mrs. Miller too elliptical and you can hold that against Altman even though it comes right from a novel– he's still the one who decided to adapt that novel, he's still responsible for the movie– but I don't think his philosophy there means "Don't blame me for my plot holes" as much as it means "The ambiguity and lack of rational explanations are one of the things that drew me to the source material in the first place."

This is all just me saying, when the police find out about that thing I did with the rock, give me some grace, you can't know my motivation.

Sorry, bad joke.

Altman is talking about all art as much as he's talking about his own. It's a general philosophy.

Keeping the Altman quote in mind, I've probably given the benefit of the doubt to a lot of work I could have been frustrated by. Like, I love Don DeLillo's Point Omega. People hate that book. I haven't even read Underworld, I'm not a good DeLillo admirer, I'm not saying Point Omega is the peak of what he can pull off, but that book has one or two inexplicable moments of character inaction I've allowed myself to marinate in, and I love them. You keep expecting the plot to kick in, but then a character will leave the story or a person who's been working up the nerve to talk to another person simply won't do that.

I'm somewhat muddying things up here. I'm talking about character motivation but I'm also talking a little about what the audience wants or expects from a character. It's inexplicable the DeLillo character chooses to vanish, but it also takes some work for the reader to figure out why DeLillo himself would write a story where that happens. In Short Cuts terms, it's Chris Penn with the rock, but it's also wondering why Altman would build to that moment at the end of his 3+ hour ensemble movie. The same bit of violence happens in the Raymond Carver book Altman's adapted, but in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, it came at the end of a discrete 4-5 page short story called "Tell The Women We're Going," and it was in the company of a bunch of other short stories that didn't have overlapping characters, so it was less of a crescendo. It's a totally different context.

That book changed my life, incidentally. It was assigned reading for my creative writing class before my senior year of high school. I waited to start What We Talk About..., still my favorite Carver collection, until only a week or so of summer remained, and then I read it and had one of those "You can write a story like this?" moments that sounds silly and unbelievable in retrospect. The way the story "One More Thing" ends, alone, man. There's a type of ambiguity (whether intended by Carver or forced on him by Gordon Lish) in a lot of those stories that I wasn't used to in art, and I'd say it's related to but a little different from the character motivation piece Altman was talking about.

2. Recipe

All of that is to say, I have no idea why Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans do what they do they in You Can See Everything. Sometimes I still feel like I need an explanation, Bob.

Holmes didn't direct the movie (that's Nathan Fielder, hero, and Lance Oppenheim, guy I thought was cool but now have very little respect for, at least until he explains why he essentially stole confidential mitigation videos that were only supposed to be seen by a handful of people and not just anybody with a New York Times account, ultimately doing to that group what sniveling lump of clay James O’Keefe did to ACORN). And Holmes isn't a fictional character, but come on. There’s a whole thing with a New York Times profile here, where the reporter says Holmes admitted she created a character and Holmes says she meant Amanda Seyfried created an “Elizabeth Holmes” character to play in her Hulu show. Reading more about this, my belief here is the reporter fairly created a space where Holmes dropped her guard enough to talk about her Theranos experience intellectually, and she admitted she created a character, even if she meant it in the sense of a public persona, rather than a mountain of lies. It's weird to not record a conversation you're having for a profile you're writing, but the lack of a recording device was probably part of why Holmes felt safe to open up a little more than she normally would. Also, the reporter hasn't been caught lying in an international scandal, which will be a major point in favor of anybody Elizabeth Holmes accuses of bullshitting. Until she starts beef with Richard Nixon or the trickster god Anansi, Holmes will be the more famous liar in any argument. So I believe the reporter, though this is all still thorny and confusing to parse through.

Regardless, Holmes is both sides of what I meant when discussing Robert Altman, Chris Penn and the rock he bashes a woman's head in with. Holmes reportedly reached out to A24 to see if they'd be interested in filming her. That's the Robert Altman side, that's her agency in creating what I watched this weekend, the person at least initially guiding the narrative. But she's in somebody else's documentary and they got final cut. That's the Chris Penn side, that's her as a character being observed and at least somewhat controlled by an outside force.

Approving Nathan Fielder to make your film is surprising, but I don't think Holmes' motivation for reaching out to A24 is too hard to understand. When it came out that Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, had gone to A24, people seemed surprised, but that's how this kind of thing happens. A24 is the cool production company with name recognition right now and I'm sure Holmes and Evans had their people shop their story around, telling A24 (and maybe Netflix and HBO) "Hey, we're open to pitches if you want to make a movie or TV show about us." Holmes and Evans wanted attention and money and this has clearly been a good way to get one of those.

You Can See Everything goes a little overboard in acknowledging its own artifice, reminding you that any ideas you have about Holmes and Evans are filtered through the filmmakers' decisions, and that you've been led into any assumptions you make about their motivations. The first time this hits is pretty early, when a boom mic is lowered into frame. It isn't brushing up against the shot, it's fully immersed in it, and then it slowly, jerkily ascends. It's showy. It's way too low. There's no way a pro capable of getting a job doing sound on this movie would be that bad at holding the boom mic. It's a fake mistake, an intentional reminder of what you're watching, as insincere as anything Holmes says.

That becomes text at the end of the film, as Fielder tells Amanda Seyfriend about visiting Holmes in prison and she asks if Fielder's tailoring his story to make Holmes seem better than she is. She says "I feel like there's something you're leaving out," and Seyfried's great here, but my partner and I both wondered if that line was scripted. Thematically, it's too perfect. Documentarians nudge moments along all the time, it isn't a big deal if Fielder fed that line to Seyfried to set up the shot of him swimming with Holmes, but it sticks out as a little too tidy in a movie focused so heavily on unreliable narrators.

Talking about You Can See Everything later, Johanna ("my wife" - Ali G voice) made a brilliant observation. There's that whole bit about whether Holmes was being deceitful in hyping up her product, telling press her Theranos box "can" check for a bunch of diseases. Holmes says she thought it was clear she was promising the box has the capability to one day perform all of those tests, even if it couldn't at that moment. This leads to the "Who's on first?" sequence.

And Johanna pointed out the "can" in the film's title. When Holmes tells Fielder she's an open book, she wouldn't lie to him, "you can see everything," was she saying he would see everything, or that he could theoretically be capable of seeing everything? Subconsciously or not, she never stopped playing word games with her promises.

I don't have any sympathy for Holmes. I have a lot of sympathy for her children, brought into this world to emotionally blackmail her punishers into giving her a lighter sentence, but Holmes did what she's been accused of. The John Carreyrou book, everything the whistleblowers have said, all the subsequent reporting, the physical evidence of untested vials of blood, etc. are not part of the world's best coordinated conspiracy to defame a random start-up founder. If you believe Elizabeth Holmes never intentionally misled anybody, you have to also believe hundreds of other people have lied about her for very little benefit.

Whenever we see Holmes, her face is at least 70% of the way toward a toothpaste commercial rictus and her eyes are always glassy. The smile reads fake, but the incoming tears are about the only thing I found sincere about her. She's a month out from spending the first decade of her kids' lives in prison, I've got no problem buying she's more scared and sad than she's ever been in her life, and maybe she's exaggerating the exasperation but some of that feels like an honest reaction to reaching the end of the line. Whether you think the film's too sympathetic to Holmes and she's putting on a Regular Person mask, I think she, like any of us, fears jail and that it's possible to both have committed fraud and to be terrified of the consequences of being caught.

The argument You Can See Everything is in Holmes' corner begins with who she's compared to, the context that she could cop to being the person who came up with datacenters and COVID and she'd still be the second-least likable character in the film. Billy Evans fucking sucks. So many things click into place when we get to the scene where he praises Charlie Kirk to Fielder and Seyfried.

Kirk comes up because, shortly after he was killed, Seyfried correctly called him "hateful." A lot of people have pointed out that Kirk was a bigot right up to his final moments, that his last words were a dog whistle. I don't think we've spent enough time pointing out those last words were also almost unbelievably dumb.

Here's the conversation:

Audience Member: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?

Charlie Kirk: Too many.

Audience Member: It's five. Now, five is a lot, right? I'm going to give you– I'm going to give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?

Charlie Kirk: Counting or not counting gang violence?

And then the bullet hit Kirk's neck.

Unless Kirk woke up that morning with a completely new outlook on things, "gang violence" is being used here to mean "racial minorities." And plenty of trans people are also racial minorities, but trans people aren't usually in gangs. MS-13, the Crips, the Bloods, these gangs Republicans make people think are on their doorstep... nobody would argue they're admitting a bunch of trans people. Gangs also aren't really pulling off mass shootings. MS-13 doesn't have its members opening up on shopping malls and schools, they're targeting rival gangs and whatnot. They've got incentives to take out the people cutting into their businesses, not school children. If the audience member had played into Kirk's dog whistle and replied "Counting gang violence," the percentage of trans mass shooters would go down. The percentage of mass shooters who identify as trans is already vanishingly small and it's going to sound smaller if you "count gang violence." If the audience member didn't want to count gang violence, the number would still be a fraction of a percent. If Kirk wanted to make his audience irrationally fearful of trans people, he'd say something about how they don't commit mass shootings, but they do x, y and z. And x, y and z would still be bullshit. Most of the right isn't Charlie Kirk-level stupid, so they lie about what trans people do in public restrooms and not what trans people do with AR-15s.

It isn't just that Charlie Kirk's last words were racist, it's that they were setting him up to sound even dumber. He wasn't debating, he didn't care about free speech or even crime statistics, he just wanted to say enough bigoted shit to get people thinking his name, relevance and accuracy be damned. On the day he died, all that blood was the only honest thing to come out any of the holes in Charlie Kirk's head.

That's the kind of grifter Billy Evans wants to be when he attacks people in his wife's name on Twitter. It's the kind of grifter he wishes she had been. Throughout You Can See Everything, we run into Tesla charging stations, a cybertruck drives by, Evans operates out of a WeWork building. As Theranos 2.0's main (only?) hire says, people like Elon Musk make false claims all the time. But Musk finally ascended to being one of the richest people in the world over the pandemic, after Holmes' downfall. The cybertruck is so stigmatized because it was released after Musk had quieted any doubts he was a miserable pile of shit. Adam Neumann doesn't run WeWork anymore, but his buyout was worth around $1.7 billion and he personally owns enough real estate to keep his future grandchildren from having to take day jobs. WeWork didn't buy the offices it set up around the country, Adam Neumann did, and then he leased the property to WeWork, who in turn leased it to start-ups. Neumann doesn't have a desk at WeWork HQ anymore, but he still owns the building where his desk used to be.

Elon Musk and Adam Neumann will never go to jail. They faked it until they made it and they only became wealthier. Sam Altman will degrade everything beautiful about life but he'll do it legally and he'll never be in danger of losing his fortune to all the artists his company has stolen from or to the families of the people who killed themselves at a chatbot's urging. Elizabeth Holmes has always been a liar, but she lacked the special something needed to become Musk or Neumann. That's why she had Sunny Balwani and Henry Kissinger and Billy Evans, people who aren't afraid to play bad cop. She's hid behind all of them and now she's hiding behind her infant children, farming prestige, legitimacy and pity from the people she surrounds herself with. This is not new for the Tech Asshole, but most of them, like Holmes' hero Steve Jobs, did their best to minimize the public's familiarity with their entourage, creating the idea of the lone genius. If Fielder and Oppenheim dug into the sexism that holds Holmes accountable for the same kinds of lies Musk's profited from, You Can See Everything would be 1,000 hours long. In 2019, Jezebel correctly and hilariously described Holmes' fake baritone as "Stupid Man" voice. She's still doing it to an extent here, even though we've heard her break and know her vocal range doesn't naturally overlap with Paul Robeson's. She's still trying to make it work for her and it never will again.

When Nathan Fielder says he still doesn't know why Elizabeth Holmes gave him all that access, it's hard to give a Robert Altman "She doesn't need a reason." Her involvement is the big question of the movie and I don't think you can fully answer it by pointing to her partner, Billy Evans, so clearly trying to buy his way into becoming Elon Musk, saying outrageous shit, baiting the world, listening to podcasts at 3x speed until he internalizes enough science lingo to not get laughed out of the room.

But that's what we've got. What is her motivation? She doesn't have to have one. Maybe she's just a shitty person and you and I can be grateful for our inability to relate. She's bottomed out and she's flailing and that's as far into that brain as we're going to get. I've watched everything Fielder's made and I've never seen him break character this much, because it's one thing to play a person this weird and it's another to be that person.

There's a great interview Nathan Fielder did with The A.V. Club 11 years ago, right as the third and final season of Nathan For You premiered. That site's John Teti (who I believe was EIC before The A.V. Club died for the first time and replaced all its employees with scabs) used to host a podcast with his mother, Bonney Teti, where he got her takes on pop culture. In one episode, Bonney said she didn't like Nathan For You or its host, and Fielder heard this and was intrigued, so when he did press that year, he wanted to talk to both John and Bonney.

Here's the exchange I think summarizes the philosophy behind so much of Fielder's work. As it begins, Bonney Teti is asking Fielder why he's so odd. She wonders if it's because he's Canadian. She says she speaks her mind and posits she's uncomfortable with him because he doesn't speak his, at least on the show:

Bonney: What do you think? Because I think what you do is, you wait. You open up a little hallway of silence that people seem to fall right into.

John: What a beautiful way to put it.

Nathan: You're thinking, "What does Nathan actually think about what's going on here?"

Bonney: Yes.

Nathan: What if there is no clear answer? A lot of the stuff we do on the show, it's not really– we're not overtly political. A lot of it's just about human nature and the struggles of these very minor situations. Something that I was thinking about a lot with the show, too, is– this is maybe a different perspective. [Pause.] You know how the mortgage thing happened in 2008? The housing market collapsed. The stock market collapsed. I got really obsessed with it because it was kind of the first big recession in my lifetime.

I started reading all these books about it, trying to understand, "How did this happen?" Because we're this culture of corruption, but [corruption] that was just legal enough to squeak by. It all came down to these minor interactions that people would have with each other where someone would know something's wrong or unethical, but the other person just wouldn't want to speak up because the social environment wasn't conducive to that.

So all these terrible things that happened, these big world events, came down to basically two people in a room with one person too uncomfortable to speak their mind. I'm delighted a lot by how you speak because you talk your mind, and you say exactly what's on your mind. But I find very few people actually do that. If they're worried about, maybe, coming across as rude or offending the other person, or getting fired, if they speak up. Maybe it's more of a Canadian thing, too, but I think it's everywhere. People do that everywhere. in Canada, maybe, people are even less likely to rock the boat. Maybe starting there, I picked up on that stuff. I find that a lot of bigger things come down to these smaller moments.

Eight or nine years later, he'd make the second season of The Rehearsal, which is explicitly about all the horrible things that can happen when a pilot makes a mistake and their co-pilot doesn't feel comfortable calling them on it.

There, Fielder pointed to institutional problems that could lead to that dynamic, i.e. pilots not knowing each other and not being allowed therapy.

Here, he's got Elizabeth Holmes, a person who very much fits into the "corruption just legal enough to squeak by" niche he's fascinated with, only she wasn't able to squeak by for more than a couple years. You Can See Everything isn't about the room where one person does something terrible and the other keeps their mouth shut. It's about the rare time the second person called the first person out. Fielder isn't analyzing why a person would do any of this, he's trying to figure out how they recover, how they rationalize everything to themselves, how they attempt to get powerful enough to walk back into that room.

Fielder isn‘t preventing plane crashes here. He isn’t emboldening the less powerful person in the room to speak up. Theranos is gone and no amount of lasers can bring it back. It's more like he's interviewing the ghosts of the pilots who crashed a plane.

In Nathan For You, Fielder often acted as the immoral person and waited to see if his counterpart would have the nerve to say anything. He was the pilot. He’d force people to camp out on a mountain for a $5 gas rebate or he’d make a clothing store look like Auschwitz and let the people he was messing with decide how normal all that was and how much they'd put up with. And that's why he breaks so much and that's why we'll never fully understand Elizabeth Holmes' motivations: He's been the person in the room who needs to be corrected, he's been the person trying to do the correcting and Elizabeth Holmes is both those people at once and she's also neither of them.