Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes Film Reads as Performance Art

About ten minutes into You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder locks eyes with Elizabeth Holmes and holds the gaze. If that scene recalls Marina Abramović's "The Artist is Present" (2010), that's precisely the comparison one art historian wants you to take seriously: Fielder may be less a documentarian than a performance artist playing one on screen.

The film, co-directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, follows Holmes, her partner Billy Evans, and their two children for 34 days. Fielder eventually moves into the guesthouse of their California beachfront rental, just before Holmes begins her 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors and patients of Theranos, the company whose blood-testing technology falsely claimed it could run a wide range of tests on a few drops of blood.

What makes this performance art rather than documentary?

The genre has a testable definition. Artist Martha Wilson recently defined performance art as an intervention that unfolds in real time, often placing the artist's body at the center of the action. The canon backs her up, and it's a canon of extreme bodily stakes:

• Chris Burden had himself shot with a .22-caliber gun in "Shoot" (1971).
• Yoko Ono invited audience members to cut away her clothing in "Cut Piece" (1964).
• Carolee Schneemann pulled a scroll from her vagina in "Interior Scroll" (1975).

The works differ considerably, but each makes the artist's actions — and the responses they provoke — central to the work itself.

Fielder works the same mechanism from inside a documentary frame. His proximity to the family becomes part of the experiment, shaping the very behavior he records. Observation turns into participation.

How does the film stage that participation?

In one scene, he films himself lurking at a distance as Billy and Holmes embrace. In another, he sits close to Holmes on a couch; a hand strokes her shoulder, and for a moment it seems to belong to Fielder, until the camera reveals Billy on the other side. The film invites viewers to imagine a silent intimacy growing between Holmes and Fielder — one it never confirms.

Holmes herself texts flirtatiously at one point: "fyi you can totally see everything." The title begins to feel less like a promise of transparency and more like provocation. Who is watching whom? What does each person want seen?

What does this change for how we watch the film?

Holmes and Evans frame their participation as an act of "radical transparency," hoping to persuade the public that Holmes is innocent. They chose Fielder as their documentarian, they explain, because he "thinks outside the box" just like they do. Game recognizes game.

That's the trap the film sets for its audience. If Fielder is performing the role of documentarian, then the "radical transparency" on offer is a layered fiction — every gesture calibrated for the camera. Watching You Can See Everything, you're no longer evaluating Holmes's innocence. You're evaluating who is performing, for whom, and whether any of them can stop.