Making Elizabeth Holmes.

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s recent film You Can See Everything is, on the face of it, a documentary about two things. One is Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted fraudster and disgraced founder of Theranos. The other is the practice of documentary film itself. Thinking about what goes on in the film in Ancient Greek terms, however, suggests another reading. You Can See Everything is about a single phenomenon: the making, the ποίησις (poiesis), of Elizabeth Holmes.

The central conceit of the film goes something like this. Near the end of the film, Fielder interviews Holmes in prison and asks her if she was aware that her partner, Billy Evans, negotiated a share of the film’s profits while she was away caring for her newborn. Fielder and his confederate Amanda Seyfried—who portrayed Holmes in the dramatized miniseries The Dropout, and who has been playing Holmes in re-enactments in You Can See Everything—have two theories. One is that Holmes is genuinely unaware that Evans will be turning a profit off of her involvement, and that Holmes sincerely cares nothing about money, as she claims. The other is that Holmes’s naïveté is an act: she arranged for Evans to make the deal while maintaining her ignorance as an appearance. As Fielder and Holmes discuss this question in Holmes’s prison, Fielder has nothing to rely on beyond his memory to record their interaction, since the prison forbids any recording devices. After exiting the prison, he returns to his car and scrawls a transcript of their conversation—as he recollects it—on his arm.

Later, Fielder returns to Seyfried with the transcript, and the two re-enact the scene in a set representing Holmes’s prison. Seyfried, as Holmes, reads the line: “I know he was talking to you about it”. If true, this resolves Fielder and Seyfried’s suspicions: Holmes did know about the deal and was feigning ignorance. Fielder replies that he made a mistake in his recollection, and changes the script. The new line reads: “I know he was talking to you about something”. Seyfried accuses Fielder of retracting evidence that would incriminate Holmes, perhaps out of affection for her; Fielder maintains that the correct line reads ‘something’. In any case, the issue of Fielder’s documentary integrity has now been raised.

One question the film raises is: What even is documentary? A very natural answer is what I call the Received View: documentaries aim at truthful representation, and some succeed at this aim while others fail. The Received View says that Planet Earth succeeds as a documentary. It also says that You Can See Everything may well succeed in its first half—but by the end Fielder’s bias has revealed itself, and the film fails to meet its aim. On the Received View, You Can See Everything is a self-deprecating exposé of Nathan Fielder having done a bad job.

Things are more interesting if we entertain a nihilist view: that there is no such thing as documentary. One argument for this nihilism is that so-called documentaries, no matter how much they approximate truthful representation, necessarily fail to fully achieve that aim. As Trinh Minh-ha¹ quotes:

There isn’t any cinéma-vérité. It’s necessarily a lie, from the moment the director intervenes—or it isn’t cinema at all.Georges Franju

I take Franju to be arguing as follows: cinema requires intervention, intervention necessarily falsifies, falsification disqualifies from documentary, so cinema cannot be documentary. Franju proposes an alternative:

You must re-create reality because reality runs away; reality denies reality. You must first interpret it, or re-create it.

Reality eludes the documentarian’s grasp, but documentary can grasp a created pseudo-reality, which “has to be more beautiful than realism”.

Another nihilism is Trinh’s own view, which adopts a skepticism about the purported ideal of truthfulness altogether. Trinh understands the aspiration for truthfulness not as a given but as the result of

the advent of a whole aesthetic of objectivity and the development of comprehensive technologies of truth capable of promoting what is right and what is wrong in the world and, by extension, what is “honest” and what is “manipulative” in documentary.Trinh Minh-ha

Truth is one possible end among many, and it is by means of convention and technologies—such as, to use Trinh’s examples, wide-angle shots that capture the environment, directional microphones that make dialogue decipherable—that films lay claim to the truth. ‘Documentary’ is not a natural kind; it is an aesthetic in which films can be clad. Since this view calls into question the very category of documentary, I’ll call this view Category Nihilism. Category Nihilism does not deny that there are films clad in the documentary aesthetic; it denies that any film is a documentary by nature. Trinh, a Category Nihilist, goes further, calling for filmmaking which is itself aware of the fact that films are documentaries by convention, not by nature, since filmmaking “can also be the very place where the referential function of the film image/sound is not simply negated, but reflected upon in its own operative principles”. This might play out in “film about film”, though Trinh cautions against reflexivity sliding into a banal formalism that both depends on and inadvertently reinforces the aesthetic of documentary.

I think that Category Nihilism yields a compelling reading of You Can See Everything. The film is not a failure by the established standard of documentary. Nor does it simply indict itself. Instead, it shows us something about the practice of documentary; in Trinh’s terms, it instantiates the interval between what the film means and what is depicted as truth within the film.

But I think Category Nihilism also leaves part of the film on the table. One major point of contention within the film is an interview of Holmes published in the New York Times, where journalist Amy Chozick attributes the following quote to Holmes, who is disparaging the various actors portraying her: “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” In the film, Holmes denies saying it. By her account, she said that the actors were “playing a character they created”. Evans says that the two of them recorded all of their conversations at the time, though he has not been able to find a recording from that period. The film ends with a screen of text stating that the New York Times confirmed the quote but declined to provide recordings.² Disagreement aside, the point I want to highlight is the notion of creating a character. What is so bad about creating or making a character that Holmes and Evans would go to such lengths to contest the quote?

Part of it, I think, has to do with the way we think about creating or making in English. We make breakfast, we make art, we make love. But we also make things up, we make others do what we want, and authors make their characters do things like puppeteers make their puppets dance. The act of making, especially when its direct object is a person, carries with it the thoughts of causation and artifice, bound up together. Consider when we say that Shakespeare made Hamlet kill Claudius. Shakespeare has authority over how the play goes, so he can make Hamlet do whatever he wants as he makes up the story. When I think of the claim that Holmes made a character—the baritone-voiced, turtleneck-wearing, visionary CEO—I hear that instance of ‘made’ in much the same way as Shakespeare made Hamlet, at once causing and fictionalizing.

What strikes me as infelicitous, however, is this: “Fielder makes Holmes say ‘something’ rather than ‘it’”. Yet this is the claim I will try to defend by turning an eye to what the Ancient Greeks might say about the film—not what they thought, but literally how they would talk about it.

In Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle begins with a discussion of ‘virtue beyond us’, which is ‘so to speak, heroic and divine’ (τὴν ὑπὲρ ἡμᾶς ἀρετήν, ἡρωικήν τινα καὶ θείαν). To exemplify his point Aristotle draws on a Homeric allusion: the kind of virtue he has in mind is what Priam thinks about Hector in the Iliad, when Priam says that he seemed to be the child not of a man but of a god. At least, that is what Homer represents. Aristotle’s exact words, though, are:

ὥσπερ Ὅμηρος περὶ τοῦ Ἕκτορος πεποίηκε λέγοντα τὸν Πρίαμον ὅτι σφόδρα ἦν ἀγαθός

A literal translation: “just as Homer has made (πεποίηκε) Priam saying about Hector that he was exceedingly good”. The key observation is the grammatical construction around the verb πεποίηκε used, as here, to denote poetic representation: the subject of the verb is the poet (Homer), the direct object is the party depicted (Priam), and the accusative-case participle agreeing with the direct object is what they are depicted as doing (saying, λέγοντα). Similar usages—indeed, one also about Priam in the Iliad—appear in Book III of the Republic, where Socrates says that the founders of the city should ask Homer and the other poets not to make (ποιεῖν) Achilles lying now on his side, now on his back, grieving Patroclus, nor to make Priam rolling in the dung as he begs the Trojans to let him go to Achilles. In both cases the construction is direct object + accusative participle: ποιεῖν Ἀχιλλέα κατακείμενον, to make Achilles lying down; ποιεῖν Πρίαμον κυλινδόμενον, to make Priam rolling around, ‘cylinder-ing’. The upshot: ποιεῖν + direct object + accusative participle means to ‘make’ someone do something, in the sense of representation.

This act of making, however, is not causal. The causal sense of making someone do something—more perspicuously, bringing it about that they do it—never uses the accusative participle, but rather the infinitive. When Socrates argues in Book I of the Republic that injustice, wherever it arises, will make people hate one another, the verb μισεῖν, to hate, is an infinitive (μισεῖν ποιήσει ἀλλήλους, it will make them hate one another; to represent people as hating one another would use the participle μισοῦντας). Homer does not, in this causal sense, make Priam say that Hector was good. Priam is the object of Homer’s making, his poiesis, only as the one depicted.

Predication is where the two senses overlap and differentiation falls to context. In Book V of the Politics, Aristotle discusses tyrants who make the ruled poor (πένητας ποιεῖν τοὺς ἀρχομένους). The adjective πένητας, ‘poor’, is syntactically compatible with representation, but context dictates that this making is causal. In Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that Homer makes Diomedes and Hector men of this kind (τοιούτους … ποιεῖ); in this instance making is representational. So a Greek sentence of the form ‘she makes herself such-and-such’ can therefore be true in the causal sense, in the representational sense, or in both at once.

In one sense, I concede, even making in the sense of poetic representation is a kind of causing. In the Symposium, Diotima tells Socrates that every cause of something coming into what is from what is not (ἐκ τοῦ μὴ ὄντος εἰς τὸ ὂν ἰόντι ὁτῳοῦν αἰτία) is a making, and that poetry has merely taken the name of the whole genus. What the poet causes to come into being, however, is the work itself, not the person. Homer is the cause of the Iliad. Homer is the maker qua representer, on account of the participle, of Priam saying that Hector was good.

Let us return to the prison. As the Ancient Greeks would put it, Fielder has made (πεποίηκε) Holmes saying, “I know he was talking to you about something”. The sentence attributes to Fielder no causal power over Holmes or what Holmes said, only the depiction of her saying it. Nor does it reveal anything about whether the depiction is accurate. In Book II of the Republic, Socrates proposes that the god must always be rendered such as he really is, whether one makes him (ποιῇ) in epic, in lyric, or in tragedy. The rule is non-vacuous only if one can make the god either as he is or as he is not. Aristotle goes further in chapter IX of the Poetics. The historian says what happened and the poet the kind of thing that might happen; but even if the poet turns out to make things that happened (κἂν ἄρα συμβῇ γενόμενα ποιεῖν), he is no less a poet (οὐθὲν ἧττον ποιητής ἐστι). Getting things right does not turn making into reporting. Fielder made Holmes saying ‘something’, whether what she said was ‘something’ or ‘it’. In that sense—which is the sense in which Homer ‘makes’ Priam—Fielder makes Holmes say ‘something’ rather than ‘it’.

This is the part of the film that Category Nihilism leaves on the table, since Category Nihilism concerns the film’s claim to truth and not its relation to the person it depicts. Fielder, moreover, is not the only one making Elizabeth Holmes. Seyfried has made her, Chozick has made her. The Holmes-makers who matter most, however, are Billy Evans and Holmes herself.

Evans, with his broad power over Holmes, makes her doing all sorts of things. Evans runs Holmes’s account on X. He makes her saying that she will never watch The Dropout. (Fielder and Oppenheim make her watching it, with their camera; on camera, Fielder makes her watch it in the causal sense, by bringing her a laptop.) Before she went to prison, Holmes had her face and body scanned to make an AI likeness of her. The film shows Evans considering releasing it to the public, and he has said that he would “let people do whatever they want with it”—let them make her doing whatever they want. Evans holds Holmes’s power of attorney while she is in prison.

Holmes, finally, makes herself a woman controlled by her partner. She does so in both senses of the verb. In the representational sense, she makes herself in the story she tells the courts and then the cameras. She makes herself being dominated not only in the legal sense, but also personally: in a now-infamous scene, after Evans takes the bowl from her hands, Holmes says he does not like the way she beats eggs. In the causal sense, she makes herself so by actually living in such a relationship, bringing about the domination that it displays.³ The bowl, the account, the avatar, and the power of attorney are things she makes happen, and she makes herself being this way. The Greek sentence ἑαυτὴν τοιαύτην ποιεῖ, “she makes herself such a woman”, is true of Holmes in both senses at once. But the two senses are not on a par. As the film makes it, Holmes lives under Evans’s control so that there is such a woman to put before the courts and the cameras. Her causal making is for the sake of the representational making.

What happens when one’s whole life becomes ποίησις, as seems to have happened for Elizabeth Holmes? At the very start of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between internal and external ends: some ends are the activities themselves, while others are products beyond (παρʼ αὐτὰς) the activities. When there are products beyond, they are better than the activities. In Book VI Aristotle draws the same line between making, poiesis (usually translated ‘production’ here), and action, πρᾶξις (praxis). Making has an end other than itself; acting well, by contrast, is itself its end. In the first book of the Politics, Aristotle says that life is action, not making (ὁ δὲ βίος πρᾶξις, οὐ ποίησις, ἐστιν). A life whose end lay outside it, a life that is the making of an Elizabeth Holmes, would therefore be worth less than what it makes. By the lights of the Politics, it would be no life at all.