One of the curiosities of Donald Trump’s enduring (if perhaps weakening) grip on his supporters is how they praise him as someone who “tells it like it is.” Trump’s gatekeepers have similarly declared this to be “the most transparent administration in history,” pointing to, among other things, Trump’s willingness to open his sycophantic Cabinet meetings to live media coverage as proof that nothing is being obscured.
The irony of this, of course, is that Trump has been caught in more obvious lies than any president in history. Yet by making himself so ubiquitous, Trump breeds an illusion of openness. To him, a president’s ultimate power rests in his ability to always be in people’s faces—to become inescapable, if not honestly examined; to impose his own self-serving version of reality whenever he pleases, no matter how outlandish.
I kept thinking about this as I watched You Can See Everything, the blockbuster documentary that has become a source of cultural fascination since it started packing theaters a few weeks ago. This might be my Trump Derangement Syndrome showing, but I couldn’t help but view the film as a classic Trump-era parable.
You Can See Everything chronicles the disgraced Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes, and her fiancé, Billy Evans, during their final 34 days together, with their two young children, before Holmes begins an 11-year prison sentence for criminal fraud. In the opening scene, Evans introduces the promise of “radical transparency.” The couple have invited the filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim into their beachside rental house near San Diego. In Evans’s telling, the false narrative of Holmes as a scheming con artist has become so entrenched that they might as well raise every curtain, and allow people see her at this most vulnerable and unguarded time. They have nothing to lose and nothing to hide.
[Read: Can Elizabeth Holmes drop the act?]
Like Trump, Holmes and Evans are rich, famous, and secure in their victimhood. No one should have to go through this, as Trump often says (“no one” meaning himself). No messianic entrepreneur either. Holmes’s aura cries out for caretaking, and not just by Evans, who assumes the role aggressively, or deviously. Her voice goes from insistent monotone at the start to plaintive and soft as her banishment approaches. Everything has been taken from her, unfairly.
Like the president, Holmes is adept at playing to reality-TV sensibilities. She seems to have an intuitive sense for when a flash of frustration or vexation can enhance a scene. The camera loves her, even (or especially) when she is melting down. Holmes recognizes the hypnotic effect of her sad, toddlerlike eyes. “It took me a really long time to be okay with letting someone see me cry,” she confides to Fielder, and then sheds a tear on cue.
Holmes operates not so much with words as with complete denial that she has intentionally hurt anyone. At one point, she claims that she’s never told a lie in her life. And how can anyone doubt her? We can see everything, after all, so maybe the problem is ours. That is the power of radical transparency. It can breed confusion in us, the audience, rather than clarity about the subject.
Fielder, who manages to convey a presence that is both empathetic and dubious, keeps suggesting that Evans and Holmes are not on the level. As the story unfolds, their promise of radical transparency unravels. It becomes evident that Evans is restricting access, manipulating facts, and perhaps exploiting what’s left of his partner’s marketable image.
Over the course of the film, Holmes’s responses to Fielder’s inquiries become mushy pleas of ignorance and confusion. If she is guilty of anything, she seems to suggest, it is of allowing herself to be badly misunderstood. She has erred not morally or legally, but in how she’s communicated. Politicians are always doing this too, placing blame not on their own shortcomings but on their (and their staff’s) failure to properly convey the greatness they’ve achieved.
[Idrees Kahloon: Theranos-style fraud has become the norm]
Many of Silicon Valley’s most charismatic entrepreneurs are skilled at creating belief systems, around their products and themselves, as my colleague David Sims wrote in his review of You Can See Everything. Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder, is considered the virtuoso of this. Holmes fashioned herself a Jobs acolyte. She wore the same black turtlenecks and intense gaze, and modeled her seductive corporate persona after his (notwithstanding that, unlike Theranos, Apple makes products that actually work). Watching leaders—political or corporate—who project total faith in their ability to persuade and inspire can be mesmerizing. They are convinced that just by getting in front of an audience, they can bring viewers around, no matter what they say or what they are selling. Holmes seems to think this too.
Trump has at times taken his own confidence to absurd extremes. Early on in the coronavirus pandemic, he insisted on near-daily press conferences. He had no grasp of the viral menace at hand but seemed to believe that his presence alone could transcend the scary science. He might have made little sense, but he did so with total conviction. And he made himself so relentlessly visible. That had to be reassuring, right?
One of Trump’s superpowers has been his ability to outlast his skeptics. Still, reality shows can become exhausting—whether it’s two terms of Trump or three hours of You Can See Everything. Even the most compelling stories and storytellers can feel overexposed and stale. Customers eventually lose patience. Revelation gives way to repetition. Suspicion creeps in: Is this really everything? Enough already. The audience is ready for the spectacle to end and the sentence to begin.