You Can See Everything: A Masterpiece in Cognitive Dissonance
A mother’s uncomfortable review.
Written by Katie Coffee VBN Medical Reporter
Editor’s note: The Culture Desk is Vital Biomedical News’s arts and culture section. This is a personal film review and reflects the author’s opinions. It is not medical or legal analysis. Factual claims about the Theranos case are cited and linked to their original sources at the end of this piece.
The line between genius and insanity is thin.
Some context: I’m a photographer, my husband is a cinematographer, and we’ve both recently moved into medicine as heads of marketing for different companies. We’ve also been watching Nathan Fielder together for years. A Nathan Fielder documentary about the most infamous fraud in modern medicine? You Can See Everything, co-directed with documentarian Lance Oppenheim, was practically made for the two of us. So, there we were with the best seats in the house. No contest. The theater was packed out, and the whole room was on the edge of their seats like it was 2001 again.
The line between genius and insanity is thin. So is the line between a documentary and a script, apparently.
A24 brought exactly what you’d expect from A24: deliberate lens choices moment to moment, flawless color grading, and an uneasy feeling that this genre is taking you further than you can imagine. Ari Balouzian’s original score matched the brand: symphonic, haunting, a little quirky, and always right on time. Scene by scene, as the shots got tighter and tighter, Nathan peeled back the mystery of Elizabeth Holmes. Like a savant holding a paintbrush, methodical and unhurried, Nathan painted a portrait that left us exactly as confused as when we sat down. And I mean that as a compliment. Only the Sistine Chapel and my second husband have ever left me this breathless.
Nathan brought himself just like you’d expect if you’ve followed him for any amount of time in Nathan for You or The Rehearsal… that dry, logical, quietly devastating, awkward humor. I felt like my opinion was being formed right alongside his, in real time. The egg scene broke me in ways so relatable it’s embarrassing to admit. Frankly, he brought the humanity back to Holmes. I felt for her the same way I felt for Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad. Except this isn’t fiction, and nobody gets to leave it in the theater.
And I have to keep reminding myself of this, because the documentary makes it so easy to forget: real people got real misdiagnoses. False positives. Diseases they didn’t have. Brittany Gould had already lost three pregnancies when two Theranos tests showed her hCG dropping. hCG is the pregnancy hormone that should climb steadily in the first weeks, and a falling number pointed to a fourth loss. It wasn’t. A test from another lab showed a healthy pregnancy. She carried that baby to term. On the stand, she put it plainly: “You can’t provide accurate patient care with inaccurate results.” (CNBC) Erin Tompkins got a positive HIV antibody result from a Theranos test at an Arizona Walgreens. She didn’t have HIV. “I was quite emotional at the time,” she told jurors. (Fortune) Theranos eventually threw out every Edison test result from 2014 and 2015 and sent tens of thousands of corrected reports to doctors and patients. (TechCrunch) That’s somebody’s mother, somebody’s kid, sitting in a doctor’s office getting the worst news of their life… for nothing.
Then there’s Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in The Dropout. I was struck by how easily she seemed to separate herself from whatever pain that portrayal caused Elizabeth. But then again, maybe they have more in common than meets the eye. An actress who can’t quite own the hurt she caused, playing a woman who can’t quite own the hurt she caused? The irony is jaw-dropping. Coincidental… you’d think. But nothing is a coincidence here. Tangled webs don’t get weaved by accident.
I felt for Elizabeth. She has been in abusive relationships, more than one, and that’s undeniable. She let herself be played like a fiddle, and somewhere along the way she learned to enjoy the music. I’ve been there. Was she on the spectrum? Was this all just a catastrophically bad PR job? I had a million thoughts consume me. The media did her dirty. Between social media and the Hulu series, the public reached its verdict long before the jury did. No matter how hard we try not to be biased, the persona gets built for us, guilty or innocent, before we ever meet the person.
So, what was the conclusion? Double down on the concept. Double down on the lie. Frankly, I’ve watched a lot of women double down as the victim, and I’m not exempt. I could teach a master class. It’s easy, right? With patients’ lives at risk, how can she be okay with this? There has to be a line between an entrepreneur hitting “roadblocks” with an invention and a lie that is actively hurting people long after the gig’s up. Every story’s lead hits a wall, a moment where a flaw that seems impossible to overcome finally has to be faced. Herein lies the chance to pivot, to learn, and to cough up those three mouth-drying words: “I was wrong.” I know that wall. I’ve hit it face-first more times than I’d like to admit, and I’ve left my own pile of wreckage I struggled to even look at. Those three words are the hardest to hear when no one ever actually says them…
"Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?"
Sorry to disappoint, but those are three words you will not hear once in the entire 174 minutes (2 hours and 54 minutes). The closest Holmes ever came was at her trial, after admitting she personally put Pfizer’s and Schering-Plough’s logos on Theranos’s own lab reports: “I wish I had done it differently.” (CNBC) Differently. Not wrong. Just… differently. When a doctor’s tool is the very thing making someone sicker, can you knowingly sweep it under the rug and plead innocence? Ignorance is only bliss if it’s truly ignorant. Can a one-word difference, “could,” convince an entire generation it was all just a misunderstanding? I’d love for it to be that simple. Unfortunately, there are about nine billion reasons to believe she isn’t all that clueless.
Perhaps I’d think differently if not for the kids. It’s hard not to see two children, born right before an eleven-year prison sentence, as a Hail Mary for a lighter one.
That isn’t fair to the children who will grow up without a normal childhood.
Perhaps I’d think differently if not for the kids. It’s hard not to see two children, born right before an eleven-year prison sentence, as a Hail Mary for a lighter one. Sure, it’s the right PR move, but that isn’t fair to the children who will grow up without a normal childhood. That intentional decision is the part of Holmes I can’t get past. Yes, an abusive relationship can push you into things you’d never choose.
But does it let you forfeit your responsibility as a mother? Her protection of her own children seems to go about as far as her protection of her patients did. I’d love to see someone study what happens to maternal instinct under duress. Until then, must I conclude that she lacks the empathy of a mother? I don’t love that answer… but I can’t find another one.
The line between genius and insanity is thin.
The line between could and can is not.
What the Record Shows
The tests: Theranos claimed its finger-prick tests could run a wide range of lab work from a few drops of blood. At trial, Holmes acknowledged that tests were run on modified commercial analyzers rather than Theranos’s own technology. [4]
The patients: Patients testified at trial to false results, including a false miscarriage indication and a false positive HIV antibody test. [1][2]
The corrections: Theranos voided all Edison device results from 2014 and 2015 and issued tens of thousands of corrected reports to doctors and patients. [3]
The verdict: In January 2022, a jury convicted Holmes of defrauding investors. She was found not guilty on the counts of defrauding patients. [2]
The settlement: Arizona negotiated a $4.65 million consumer-fraud settlement with Theranos for people who bought tests at its Arizona retail locations. [2]
References
CNBC, “Theranos test gave false miscarriage diagnosis, witness testifies,” Sept. 21, 2021
Fortune, “False HIV results, miscarriage, and cancer diagnosis: the Theranos patients Elizabeth Holmes was found not guilty of defrauding,” Jan. 4, 2022
TechCrunch, “Theranos reportedly voids two years of results from its Edison blood-testing devices,” May 18, 2016
CNBC, “Elizabeth Holmes admits she added drugmakers’ logos to Theranos reports,” Nov. 23, 2021
