patrickᶜ

Remember when Sarah Polley made Stories We Tell, supposedly about a paternity question in her family history, but it actually turned out to be a meta-documentary about truth, narrative, and subjectivity? Or when Banksy made Exit Through the Gift Shop, which at first seemed to be about street artist Thierry Guetta but in the end turned out to be a meta-documentary about truth, art, and subjectivity? Remember when Rodney Ascher made Room 237, nominally about hidden meanings in The Shining, but really about truth, narrative, and subjectivity? Would you believe me if I told you that You Can See Everything is only superficially about Elizabeth Holmes, that actually it's a meta-documentary about truth, narrative, and subjectivity? Let’s set aside the fact that Amanda Seyfried shows up to atone for her Hulu biopic and that her plotline is copied from The Act of Killing, which itself stole its main gimmick from some Cambodian guy’s movie about the Khmer Rouge. Here we have another postmodern prestige doc which either can't find something to say about its subject or thinks having a subject is gauche, so it throws up its hands and settles for a thematic focus on "unknowability" instead—not out of necessity, not because it’s about the Zodiac Killer and they can’t find him, but just because they think that kind of abstraction is high-minded. Every cliche is here: The filmmaker deliberately entangled with his subject, the film happily exposing its own artifice (because only dolts who believe in “objectivity” would try to hide that), the reflexive, flamboyantly meta structure which I guess is supposed to feel truth-coded, or remind you of truth and untruth in some way. Letterboxd users, who learned in college that truth is hopelessly mired in perspective, certainly appreciate these decisions and feel the movie is a “hall of mirrors,” but I found it boring and legible. I’ve already seen Capturing the Friedmans, Tabloid, F for Fake, Letter From Siberia, etc. I already know about “subjectivity.” I actually discovered it when I was a child and I began to experience the world. So yes, this is another The Ambiguity Is The Point movie. That’s why it's titled You Can See Everything—because you can’t. And that’s why some of the posters show Elizabeth Holmes but kind of blurry, because it’s about truth, which is also blurry. And if you think that’s mind-blowing then you will probably like the movie. Personally, I think the filmmakers are confusing an empirical problem with an epistemic one, so actually their theming doesn't line up, because a lot of their questions are in fact quite "knowable," but whatever