You Can See Everything 2026
10/18/2026
Last night I saw You Can See Everything at the Freegal with Lou and Sam and Hellie. I spent all of dinner worried about being late and then we were right on time. Something I’ve been complaining about recently is the problem that films are made mostly by filmmakers, who spend a lot of time with other people who care about film. This was frustrating to me in Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s other film (which I also saw at Freegal, also with Sam), which uses the whole To Catch A Predator thing as a pretext to make loving tribute to the noble and humble Aspiring Actor. This is to say that in cinema, questions about the nature of truth tend to get litigated through meditations on the nature of performance. If you know a lot of actors and think of them as smart and interesting, it must be easy to collapse the two.
I left the theater feeling ambiguous about YCSE. By the time I got home, I had pretty much soured on it. In a Vanity Fair interview (which I didn’t and won’t read in its entirety: it’s quoted on the film’s Wikipedia page), Fielder says he knew the film would be interesting because the conversation he was having with crew after the initial shoot was “We're all smart and we're really working at the top of our intelligence. Why can't we make sense of what's happening in this house?” Ultimately my sense of the film was that Fielder and Oppenheim failed to develop an angle that was adequate for the material they had. I don’t think a lot of people will agree with me on this, especially because the film is angles city. If you’re frustrated by their angle, so are they, and a new one is right around the corner. They’re working at the top of their intelligence!
I’m aware all this is very inside baseball, but I find the documentarian self-hatred thing profoundly self-aggrandizing. Look at my medium’s unique potential for harm! The weight of the world is, of course, on my shoulders. Look how I bear it. Look how afraid I am of what I might do. This is sleight of hand. What he might do is what he’s done, is doing: exploiting a subject for entertainment in a way that is absolutely, nakedly self-interested. As always, Fielder is totally fascinated by himself, in what his face and body are doing, in how quietly he’s able to express power. The problem is that the film is nothing so much as an intimate portrait of an unconscionably abusive marriage, whether he wants it to be or not.
He’s openly fascinated by relatively minor incidences of evidence of it (the eggs, the tweets), which he puts back on screen by asking a woman to react to them. (Amanda Seyfried: “No woman wants to see another woman in a relationship like that.”) But his sticking point (of repeated frustration) is a question that he keeps swallowing, one that is fascinating and victim blaming in equal measure: Why does she seem to want it? What kind of person would allow themself to be put in this situation? In the climax of the film, Fielder confronts Holmes in the visiting room of the prison (staged as reenactment starring Seyfried) about his sense that her husband is dishonest and controlling, and concludes: she authentically loves him. She’s right where she wants to be. He seems fascinated by the fact that, beyond the question of whether she knew about a given instance of dishonesty, if she just found out she has already categorically forgiven. Fielder’s obtuseness, here, was exhausting and frightening and cruel. She’s incarcerated, and he has not only the kids and the money but also the hope for a future, the promise of being absolutely understood. You’d forgive too. You wouldn’t even have to think about it.
The thing that makes Elizabeth Holmes a brilliant liar is that she understands herself to be a truthful person, leading to a total refusal to be caught. Where her husband reacts with anger, distain, turning outward (you’re asking the wrong questions; you don’t understand; cut the cameras), Holmes is more internal (I don’t understand why no one believes me; I don’t know where the problem started; I have nothing to hide). Early in the film, Her father says the problem began when she was raped. It never comes up again. The paradigmatic experience of an abusive relationship is believing a lie, from yourself and your partner in equal measure. You nurture your lie together. It is a profound expression of love.
All day I’ve been thinking about docufiction. I guess the positive thing I’d say about You Can See Everything (other than that it looks great! Lance Oppenheim’s tendency towards asinine “bisexual lighting” style color grades has been miraculously tempered) is that it has made me think about it quite a bit. I’ve seen some people comparing it to Kiarostami or Portrait of Jason,* which aren’t inapt. I’ve been thinking a lot about Betty Tells Her Story, (Sam’s comparison!) a 20-minute short from the early 70s in which a woman tells the same story twice: once like it’s funny, and once like it isn’t. It is both very good and unbelievably efficient at thinking through the ways that narrative has a distancing function. Leo told me this week that when I write about my dad every story has a punchline. Sometimes in therapy I like to try telling my therapist a story I’ve told my friends a million times but with all the jokes taken out. This is a good way to identify ways you’ve been cruel to yourself.
The feminist valuation of narrative construction as a method of recovery from trauma is precisely about creating distance: in imposing a structure, you feel it less. In feeling it less, you live alongside it better. In feeling it less, you see it clearer: an analysis emerges. The hermeticism of documentary works best, for me, with the veneer of consciousness raising, which has a permission structure for reflexivity that I don’t chafe under. Wanting to live better under patriarchy is a worthwhile endeavor, at least personally if not always cinematically. At least it turns back towards the collective.
But all documentary is the synthetic imposition of narrative on actuality: doing this to anyone else is an act of epistemic violence. Examinations of this have diminishing returns: it has been the abiding concern of documentary film for three quarters of a century. What if it’s wrong to make a documentary? Get over it! If you really thought it was so wrong, you wouldn’t do it: lacking satisfactory answers that aren’t wholly self-negating, “asking questions” about ethics has come to substitute having them. I feel most immediately devastated by this when I see a documentary camera incidentally capture abuse, decide it’s not adequate to the task, and continue. I struggle every time with this refusal, whether it goes unremarked, or they call attention to it, as in YCSE. And I struggle, too, with the ways I see audiences mirror the film’s refusal.** But, you know, like when filmmakers love to think about actors, this is a “when you have a hammer” situation for me too: my interest in cinema and my distaste for actors are both about abuse, which is also what I think most movies should be thinking more about.
This essay keeps getting away from me. I have at least two or three more films I’d like to digress into, which seems excessive for a film I ultimately thought was fine. I’d love to see Nathan Fielder get a new set of strategies, or be funny again, but he is going to be so thoroughly rewarded for this that his worst tendencies are only going to continue to calcify. Lance Oppenheim, too. I think you should watch Not A Pretty Picture. It’ll make you feel awful, guaranteed.
****I’ve written before about my frustration with the propensity to engage with art on the level of “gratitude for documentation,” which I think tends to preclude actual criticism and assumes a level of naïveté on the part of the filmmaker in this case. Neglected subjects are chosen precisely for their neglect, their vulnerability in lacking a narrative or having a violent received one. Moments where they impose on the film index the filmmakers’ thinking, their ability to manipulate: seeing cracks in this should not be treated as incidental but rather as part and parcel of this manipulation. Jason’s performance is amazing: the film is repellent.
**My example of this is always The Exiles (1961, Kent Mackenzie), a docufiction about the urban native community in Bunker Hill. In an essay about the film’s rediscovery and restoration, a member of production says of the final scene: “The central fight was staged, but real violence and sexual assault were taking place.” In an NPR interview, Yvonne Walker, the woman who anchors the film, says she wishes it stayed lost: “Because this thing here, I mean, it's just - it's nothing. I mean, you know, I didn't accomplish anything or I didn't - it seemed like I didn't. And well, like I said, I was asked, but I just didn't want [my children to] see it. And then now, they know about it, and they want to go see it.” The interview ends with a plug to purchase tickets. Writing about it tends to euphemistically say that it’s “gritty.”
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