For a few years, Elizabeth Holmes was everywhere. There she was on the cover of Forbes in 2014, wearing heavy eyeliner and a black turtleneck, holding a vial pinched between her thumb and her index finger. For Inc. magazine, she kept the turtleneck but dropped the vial, added a faint half-smile, and crossed her arms over her chest. T magazine chose a more artistic vision when it named her one of “The Greats,” in 2015. In its photo, Holmes’s hair looks stylishly wispy as she gazes off into a future that no one else can see. She was 31 years old, the world’s youngest “self-made billionaire,” the celebrated founder of Theranos and inventor of a device that could use a single finger prick to test for hundreds of conditions.

Crucially, she was a woman, a female Steve Jobs in an industry where that was unusual. Most observers knew more about her age or appearance than her scientific credentials or her relationship with Sunny Balwani, the president and chief operating officer of Theranos. The turtlenecks invoked Jobs, her idol, but the red lipstick and mascara set her apart; she stamped femininity on an image she knew the world would recognize. The outfit, her uniform, told us that she was a girl genius. Until she wasn’t. Four days after T published that dreamy photoshoot, reporter John Carreyrou published the first of a series of investigations that ended with Holmes’s image, and company, in tatters. The technology did not work, and Theranos dissolved in 2018. By June 2023, Holmes was in federal prison for fraud.

The black turtleneck does not appear in You Can See Everything, the blockbuster new documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. Instead, a softer and more domestic version of Holmes takes over the screen. She wears neutrals and goes barefaced except for mascara; she often holds a baby, the youngest of her two children with partner Billy Evans. They live in a rental on the beach. In this setting, her blonde frizz makes her look more like a busy mom than a prodigy in charge of her own image. We hear a baby gurgle before Holmes ever speaks. But as there was a knowingness to the younger Holmes’s image, there is a knowingness to how she presents herself in the film. This is the real........

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