“You Can See Everything” and the Nathan Fielder Effect

About this episode

Nathan Fielder’s onscreen persona—flat, literal-minded, and seemingly baffled by ordinary social behavior—has made him one of our most distinctive cultural figures. On his Comedy Central series “Nathan for You,” his approach collided with the eagerness of ordinary people to be agreeable, and on the HBO series “The Rehearsal,” it became a kind of social science, as Fielder staged elaborate simulations of real life. Fielder’s latest project, “You Can See Everything,” a documentary he made with the director Lance Oppenheim, trains that deadpan gaze on Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, who invited the filmmakers into her home in the weeks before she reported to prison for defrauding investors. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the film and the strange mirroring between its two central figures: Fielder, performing an unnerving bluntness, and Holmes, wide-eyed and doll-like, who seems to remember almost nothing and insists she did nothing wrong. The hosts also consider what the movie says about the documentary form itself, and whether it can, or should, get at the truth. And with “You Can See Everything” e