You Can See Everything is a brilliant and deeply evil film about the utterly cursed world we live in. It is the only world we have, so it’s worth getting good at living in.

I am going to be free with the spoilers. There is nothing to spoil. There is actually no true content in this three-hour film. Well, about 90 seconds. You can see it twice and you probably should. The concept, editing, cinematography and performances are absolutely superb. It should teach you that, in an evil world of lies, only the truth can save you – and not always.

The starting point of You Can See Everything is charisma. Nathan Fielder, the director, and Elizabeth Holmes, the subject, both have it, to Jedi mind power-level. They can look into your eyes and make you believe. Hitler had this too. There are accounts of German generals who commanded armies in the Great War coming to Hitler, this mountebank corporal, with their full professional contempt and skepticism, meeting one on one (it always works best one on one), and walking out as true believers. While not in this league, I have enough of the knack to know how it’s done. Like any talent, charisma can serve both good and evil.

In Ernst Topitsch’s thin, forgotten book Stalin’s War, his conclusion is simple. “Hitler was a master. But Stalin was a grandmaster.” So indeed it proves with Holmes and Fielder. The grandmaster is in control of his natural talent. The master is not.

From the start, the film shows you the cruel, predatory expression on Fielder’s face when his subjects aren’t looking. A good sociopath can play a character he isn’t. Fielder, mostly off camera, has formed a real human bond with his subjects – and the bond is connected to nothing at all, except the burning need to make a good movie and get an Oscar and earn ten million bucks. He can fake feeling. He’s great at it. It’s scary AF.

Yet this is a normal talent of good journalists. The First Amendment, at least as restated in NYT v Sullivan (1964), leaves us ruled by utterly unaccountable sociopaths. But we normally don’t see the sociopathy. You Can See Everything shows it, revels in it, implicates the audience in it. And the audience loves it. Yet there is a case for it: there will always be sociopaths, so shouldn’t they be working for us? For we, the people, for Our Democracy?

Let me start with the truth about Theranos and Holmes. No one will tell you this truth, so why not here?

Theranos was a real company which was also a shitshow. It was built by a mid-tier, fake-it-till-you-make-it Indian scammer named Sunny Balwani, with Holmes (his two-decade younger girlfriend) as a frontwoman, seer and ringmistress. Holmes and Balwani went to jail for wire fraud – for lying to investors and taking their money. She is certainly guilty. And yet, there is context.

One of the great unknown startup memoirs is Slide Rule, the autobiography of Nevil Shute, a British aviation engineer better remembered as a novelist. Shute, who designed the R100 zeppelin and cofounded the aircraft startup Airspeed, writes that every new venture is “caught between palace and prison.”

When you’re raising money, the right level of fake-it-till-you-make-it is never zero. A naive technical founder will go into a pitch meeting and lead with the warts. It’s what he’d want to hear on the other side of the table. But the investor will assume he is running a limited hangout. If you lead with the warts, it probably means you have tumors. Don’t do that. Don’t hide the warts, either –........

© The Spectator