[Editor’s note: The following article contains spoilers for “You Can See Everything.”]
If cinematographer David Bolen and camera operator Jonathan Mitchell were filming actual coverage of the IndieWire office in New York following the release of Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder’s “You Can See Everything,” there would have been a similar visual sense of ephemerality—a latent, unsettling tension that characterizes the first half of the A24 film, where Oppenheim, Fielder, and their small team report to Elizabeth Holmes before Was documenting the last months of independence. In jail to serve sentence in several fraud cases.
Mostly, it was because we were visiting a different floor of the office, and there were a lot of cardboard boxes, abandoned Tupperware, and mystery mugs scattered around. But it was also because of the “all you can see” effect – our individual reactions to employees and the broader reactions to what we were seeing on the Internet.
The latter prompted our veteran TV critic, Ben Travers, to ask a question: Given the weekend Fielder had with “You Can See Everything,” would the filmmaker be more or less eager for a third season of “The Rehearsal,” his HBO series that has allowed him to do everything from recreate a Brooklyn bar across state lines to fly a commercial plane?
I, Craft editor Sarah Schacht, will admit that I wasn’t thinking too hard when I said the words, “He’s already made Season 3. It’s this movie,” but they were out before I could even think about stopping them. And look, what we know from HBO’s Head of Comedy casey bloeys “The Rehearsal” Season 3 is in the works. reddit He’s already trying to find out if Nathan Fielder intends to release the Epstein files or successfully cross the Strait of Hormuz, or whatever else he plans to do; IndieWire doesn’t know anything more than you.
But some aspects of “You Can See Everything” come into a different light when considered in the shadow of what Fielder (and Oppenheim) have done before. There are also many ways in which it is a Pokemon evolution of his previous work – and in which “The Rehearsal” in particular is designed, if not by Fielder himself, to roll over its audience with self-reflexivity so recursive that even peter watkins It’ll be like, “Wait, what did they do?”
One of the highlights of the first season of “The Rehearsal” was its intricate sets – of course the great Nate’s Lizard Lounge, but also the studio construction of the apartment. And the locations were completely created by the show’s art team. “Rehearsal” teaches us that everything we interact with is constructed. Spaces are never real or fake. If they are genuine, they are rebuilt and reused, often more than once while Fielder and his laptop appear center stage. If they are “fake” for the show, they are often where the most interesting and emotional exploration occurs between the participants.
Compare Cor’s introduction in episode 1 of the show to Angela’s introduction in episode 2. We first see Core in his actual home, and though it’s safe to assume that the New York teacher scene in “Jeopardy!” Playing with. It was staged in front of the camera, yet it feels like we are observing her day-to-day reality. With Angela, we start mid-rehearsal, first with a wall of surveillance cameras that pull back to reveal Fielder in the control room/video village with the production crew and two mothers of children who will play Angela’s fake son, Adam. We look at the design first, the person second. It reflects how we both move through the stories and understand those people and Fielder’s relationship with them.
The first season of “The Rehearsal” questions what kind of authenticity can come from an artificial setup or environment, especially for people who have trouble expressing themselves. Maybe the trick of “practice” can yield some good and real results. The season becomes deeply concerned with the blurring of true emotion and performance – and how, for good and for bad, drawing a line between those things is harder than it seems. The question becomes even more fraught when it comes to child actors, where adults have a duty to try to keep reality straight and put them in a position where it begins to bend.
this is the place failed Begin – Very seriously, do not read unless you have already seen “You Can See Everything”.
When “You Can See Everything” returns to the rental house in San Diego where Elizabeth Holmes and her boyfriend Billy Evans spent her last few months before moving to Texas to follow Holmes’ prison sentence, Nathan Fielder and Amanda Seyfried are clearly looking for details of the location where Holmes is no longer. They’re also trying to bend reality so far that they can actually get back to some truth. If Fielder and Oppenheim can recall the shocking month they spent in Del Mar through scenes with Seyfried (as well as a game Christopher Abbott), maybe they can finally understand it and Holmes.
However, it still has some almost invisible touches. Seyfried finds the now-infamous bowl for beating eggs in the cabinet, where it has been the entire time, but when the film cuts to recreate the meeting of Seyfried-as-Holmes and Fielder (as herself) for the first time, a set decoration team has brought the house back to life. The rhythmic back-and-forth between the script presented by Fielder and Seyfried and them both discussing that scene as Fielder’s memory of the actual event is also an intentional basis for how we interpret what we’re seeing.
That first recreation begins with Fielder and Seyfried interacting, then ends in the recreation itself, and continues with Fielder talking to Seyfried in the makeup chair, getting ready for the role. Actual footage, interactions within a staged setting, and outright entertainment all exist on a spectrum of reality, one of which “All You Can See” takes great care in guiding us with the goal of helping us reach a conclusion (or grapple with our inability to draw a conclusion). It’s the same arc as that one sequence in the entire first season of “The Rehearsal.”
In other words, Nathan and editor Adam Locke-Norton learned it by watching Nathan.
He learned even more from Season 2 of “The Rehearsal,” which tackles the struggle any one of us faces to be able to successfully communicate with another person, even when life and death are at stake. The first episode of Season 2 delves into this, but one need only watch the harrowing interview cnn Fielder about the show, to see how easy it is for people to dismiss anything a comedian says, even some extremely important points about safety based on good communication between pilots in the cockpit, and this is in desperate need of improvement.
Beyond that dilemma, the extent to which any of us can successfully understand each other is the issue in both “You Can See Everything” and “The Rehearsal” Season 2. The HBO show does a great job of exploring the pressures and incentives, implicit and explicit, that prevent pilots from communicating better. The recreations in Season 2, whether they’re a fully functional airport terminal or Fielder embodying Sully Sulenberg for “The Miracle on the Hudson” after a pilot’s entire life running on speed, are in service of exploring and exploring those communication hangups — with a little bit of Evanescence cheekiness, too.
The entertainment in “You Can See Everything” is about trying to build a complete picture of imperfect communication in order to fully understand to what extent it is or is not real. It’s a fascinating inversion of Season 2’s “The Rehearsal,” where Fielder actually becomes a pilot to fly the 737 and does so, on camera, carrying the entire team of actors who participated in Season 2 for the season finale. Fielder becomes its subject not only within the show’s frame, but also in her lived experience, and that transformation impacts how he thinks about himself.
Struggling with the prospect of seeing Holmes in prison, but not being able to film or record the conversation in any way, Fielder talks it over with Seyfried. The actor is ready to recreate whatever Fielder wants. But Fielder isn’t sure she can even be entirely accurate – that her performance can actually give us a chance to judge what Holmes has to say.
Of course they end up shooting the recreation, with Fielder and Seyfried talking through the script they’ve written in front of a fireplace that’s burning so dramatically it makes Hitchcock wish he’d put it in “Vertigo.” But beyond the choice to do this, there are also conscious choices made here. The first segment of the sequence, where Fielder arrives at the prison and waits in the visiting room for a long time before Holmes arrives, unfolds with the usual coverage – wide on Fielder, medium wide, inserting shots of the vending machines, and so on. When Seyfried-as-Holmes enters the scene, she is covered from behind in veils, and we are unable to see Seyfried’s face.
There is a corner of the multiverse where Oppenheim and Fielder present the entire conversation between Fielder and Holmes in the same way. The filmmakers could have simply let the key moments of what Holmes said fall on Seyfried as she read the script, and let whatever “true” version of Holmes – her expressions, her chemistry with Fielder – all remain in the audience’s mind. There is a version of this sequence that withholds Seyfried’s interpretation in the name of “truth”.
Instead, we see Seyfried give a performance that we can never know is entirely accurate; But in those moments when she says, as Holmes, “I’m tired of other people speaking for me” it certainly rings true. It seems like Use to live. “You Can See Everything” is a contrast to Season 2’s “The Rehearsal” as well as its cautionary climax. The film shows how natural it can be to get lost inside a transformative performance, and no matter how close we get to accuracy, it’s never close enough.
It’s Seyfried herself, sure true heroine In the film, Joe suggests that the more time Fielder has spent with Holmes, the harder it may be for him not to care about her, and for their relationship not to bear the fruit that we see.
But as both “The Rehearsal” and “You Can See Everything” show, time with each other is all we have.
“You Can See Everything” is now playing in theaters.