You Can See Everything

Rarely would I take to the pages of the Salamanca Press Pressing Issue to promote something with genuine seriousness, but this might be the only exception. Experiencing this movie is something that is impossible to replicate.

At one point, the film references the famous “magician” David Blaine. It’s a metaphor, and it works entirely for Elizabeth Holmes, famed youngest self-made female billionaire and imprisoned fraudster. In truth, it applies just as centrally for key film figure Nathan Fielder.

Blaine famously performs a trick where he seems to thread an ice pick directly through the center of his hand, leaving the audience to wonder if an impossibility has happened, or if it’s an optical illusion.

Fielder posits that Blaine uses a third, unconsidered method — he has surgically altered his hand to the point where the trick is not a trick at all. Holmes, perhaps the world’s greatest manipulator, doesn’t have to attempt to deceive others if she can construct for herself an alternate reality.

Past media portrayals of Holmes have oversold the stupidity of believers and investors in a fraudulent and extremely dangerous product. They have undersold the criminal brilliance of Holmes. And there is no man greater to portray that than Fielder, ever staring ominously in the background.