Elizabeth Holmes Cried at Pride and Prejudice. On Film, Reportedly.

Elizabeth Holmes cried at the end of Pride & Prejudice — and her husband filmed it. That, at least, is the account of Lance Oppenheim, co-director of You Can See Everything, the new Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim meta-documentary about Holmes and her family, currently the film everybody argues about.

The anecdote surfaced during a talk with Fielder and Oppenheim at the SCAD Savannah film festival, and it's a small masterclass in the film's whole method. Oppenheim recalled that before shooting began, Holmes's husband Billy Evans showed the filmmakers a phone video. Here is Oppenheim, verbatim:

"I remember early on, before we started shooting, Billy showed us a video—because he would sometimes video things on his phone—just of him and Elizabeth, like on a couch, and he'd be like, 'Look at this moment,' and it'd be a video of Elizabeth crying, and he's like, 'We just watched Pride & Prejudice. This is so good.' So I was like, 'Are these the type of moments that you are interested in? You know, what is the object of your guys' inquiry with this?'"

The question got no satisfying answer, apparently. Welcome to the film's central problem.

What is the film actually about?

You Can See Everything documents the weeks before Holmes reports to prison for wire fraud. She invited Fielder and Oppenheim in herself. The source describing it — a Literary Hub essay — calls the result "profoundly strange and thought-provoking."

The press tour, the essay notes, has been "just as revealing and confounding" as the movie. One aside worth flagging: the essay's author argues Oppenheim is being overshadowed by Fielder despite equally strong prior work, naming Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, and Ren Faire.

Why does Austen make Holmes cry?

The essay doesn't answer this, but it does speculate, and the speculation is the fun part. Is Holmes over-identifying with a fellow Elizabeth — a woman who secures a marriage to a man who is proud but ultimately good? Does she cast Billy Evans as her Darcy, or worry he isn't?

The essay's other possibilities:

• She's struck by Austen's claim that self-knowledge and self-actualization are attainable — that one doesn't have to scam and deceive as a way of sublimating unexamined emotions.
• Or she's simply borne along by a good story, "convinced and willing to invest (emotionally) after a well-performed pitch."

That last line is doing a lot of work. It's practically a thesis on the Holmes phenomenon.

Will we ever know?

No. The essay closes with three flat words: "We will simply never know."

That refusal of closure is the point. The film, per the essay, is interested in exactly this terrain: what are everyone's motivations and intentions, what is real and what is a magic trick, how deep the scams and manipulations go. A Theranos founder weeping at a Regency courtship — then having the moment preserved on her husband's phone as a pitching asset — sits squarely inside that terrain. It's Pride & Prejudice re-staged as evidence, and the camera can't tell us which.