You Can See Everything: a Psychoanalytic Interpretation One of Nathan Fielder’s gifts is the ability to curate a conversational space so inviting that a speaker reveals more of themselves than they initially intended. In You Can See Everything (Oppenheim, 2026), Elizabeth Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, experience this firsthand, and the stillness lasts long enough that you can observe their personality structures attempt to retain their shape on camera, with moments of breaking frame. Holmes smiles with wide eyes and smile for extended (one might say uncanny) stretches while Billy’s eyes stay intense. Theirs is a story about lying, intense love, and a woman who insists she has never done the one thing the world convicted her of: lying at a massive scale. I watched the film as a clinician first and a moviegoer second (okay, and a serious Nathan Fielder fan a CLOSE third). What follows is my read through Nancy McWilliams’s personality theory and through Fonagy’s work on mentalization. It is interpretation, not courtroom psychology, and it rests on Holmes’s own words as reported from the theatrical cut. Holmes does not stop at simply disputing a charge. She denies the category of the act itself. “I’ve never tried to deceive anyone,” she tells Fielder. Asked whether she has ever lied in her adult life, replies: “I don’t think so.” Fielder, for once stripped of the blank slate questioning style, asks: “Liz, what?” Billy, almost fondly: “She’s weird.” Liz is famous for that thing she’s allegedly “never done”: lying. McWilliams (2011) places shame at the center of narcissistic organization. Grandiosity, in her account, is not swagger for its own sake. It is a structure built to keep annihilating shame out of awareness. After all: admit a lie and you admit a crack in the self-image that was supposed to make you invulnerable. Rewrite history instead, and the self stays intact for one more day. Holmes’s insistence that she has always “tried to say what I believe” fits that defense with almost textbook neatness. Belief becomes the solvent in which other people’s experience of deception is supposed to dissolve. Film is a great medium for this interview, as we can see Holmes’s expression remain warm throughout the interview: the smile ready, the presentation of approachability intact even during serious, upcoming incarceration. Nancy McWilliams describes how narcissistic personalities often rely on charm and a carefully tended surface to pull admiration, the supply that keeps the grandiose self afloat. The warm eyes function as a mirror held up to the room: "see how sincere I am, and reflect that back. I'm here as a positive force." Fonagy and Target (1997; see also Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002) describe mentalization as the capacity to hold another person’s mind in mind: to recognize that other people have beliefs, feelings, and intentions that may not match your own, and that those mental states are what organize their behavior. Theory of mind is the everyday language for the same skill. Without it, other people collapse into props in your story. Holmes keeps treating other minds that way, insisting she has never tried to deceive anyone, as if her own sincerity cancels what investors, patients, and jurors experienced. She misses Fielder’s joke about hosting a show (“Nathan for You,” which I recommend you watch) on business scams while Liz is actually convicted of an actual scam. Holmes remarks that she had not thought about that coincidence until he said it. Later, Fielder explains that he perceives Liz to use language in a technically honest way, regarding her intent, but in a manner which would obscure and confuse others. To illustrate this, he loads up and plays the seriously old school “Who’s on First” Abbott and Costello comedy skit, a famous exercise in linguistic miscommunication. She says, plainly, “I didn’t pick it up.” Humor requires a brief exit from your own perspective. You must see how the other person is experiencing a situation, from their vantage point, which at least in this instance, she’s unable to do. Billy’s interruptions of Christian Holmes (Elizabeth’s father) show an unwillingness to entertain other perspectives, rather than a failure to perceive them. When Fielder asks about Sunny Balwani, (Liz’s business partner in her Theranos days) Billy jumps in. When the father names a turning point (”That’s an easy one,” her sexual assault at nineteen) and identifies Balwani as the mastermind who manipulated her, Billy derails and enters the conversation again, never allowing Nathan and Liz’s father to examine the traumatic background. The conversation stops being about what Christian thinks. It becomes about what can be admitted into the shared mythos that Billy is building. McWilliams already assumes that narcissistic structure forecloses true empathy; add impaired mentalization and you get someone who can “invent from a cage,” as Liz says she will do from prison, who can “build monuments of love” (as both Liz and Billy say that Liz will do for Billy), and fail to register that the people outside the shared culture of the couple do not wish to play along inside the “bubble.” Prison might be expected to puncture the bubble of grandiosity, but for Holmes it becomes merely a new stage. “From wherever I am,” she says, “I’m going to continue to work inventing, even if it’s inventing from a cage.” McWilliams writes that grandiosity and depletion are two faces of the same personality organization: the depleted self feels empty and small. The grandiose self swells to cover that emptiness. When the covering story is threatened, the person often doubles down rather than mourning. Holmes still speaks with sweeping ambition and almost no qualifications, so the cage doesn’t revise the script, it’s just a new stage design. I find the missing sense of humor clinically useful here. A joke asks you to tolerate some shame, a little being-seen-as-ridiculous. Narcissistic defenses treat that request as an attack. So the room goes flat. Fielder offers play. She offers sincerity. Those are different currencies, and they do not convert. Christian Holmes’s interview is one of the film’s most revealing sequences precisely because Billy will not allow it to unfold, uninterrupted. He meddles and sabotages it at every turn. McWilliams notes that narcissistic defenses often crystallize around unbearable injury, with a grandiose self constructed over shame too great to feel. The “Invincible inventor” identity looks like a fortress raised after negative experiences. Sunny was once Elizabeth’s right hand man, with Billy now fulfilling that role, deciding who gets to access to Liz. Caution is necessary here, because the presence of a trauma, such as an assault, does not excuse fraud, and it does not make Billy (or Sunny) into cartoonish villains. Billy reports that Liz claims “every action she takes for as long as she lives will be building monuments of love” to Billy. In Fielder’s reconstruction of a prison visit (Amanda Seyfried standing in for Holmes, staged from Fielder’s memory of the conversation), she describes the two of them building monuments of love for each other and says, “I have conversations with him in my head.” Billy, from the outside of prison says: “I know what she’d want.” Relatedly, McWilliams describes the narcissistic cycle of idealization, in which the other person is prized as a reflecting surface more than as a separate subject. Here the reflecting works in both directions. Each carries a working model of the other so complete that speech becomes optional. They have built a digital machine of each other, enmeshed in idealisms, rehearsing what the beloved would say until the beloved becomes a program running in the head. That arrangement can feel like profound intimacy from the inside. From outside, it looks like two monuments facing each other across visiting glass, neither quite able to see a living person who might surprise them. McWilliams distinguishes narcissistic from psychopathic (or antisocial) personality organizations with unusual clarity. The narcissist is organized around shame and the hunger to be admired. The psychopath is organized around omnipotent control and often takes satisfaction from putting one over on others. Visibility is optional for the second type, while results are not. The narcissist is a convenient monkey’s paw for the psychopath, because the narcissist must be SEEN winning to be fulfilled, while the psychopath only needs the win itself. I should double down in my disclaimer that this is simply for entertainment purposes, not medical therapeutic diagnosis; simply commentary one a nearly 3-hour film's character depictions. There’s a fascinating subplot in which Fielder tries to identify whether Liz is aware that Billy Evans asked for substantial monetary compensation as a condition of his and Liz’s participation in the documentary (which is extremely unorthodox, as far as documentaries are concerned). Nathan verbally recounts the timing of Billy’s request, and notices that Liz leaves the room right before Billy makes his proposition. Does this indicate she’s aware of what’s coming, and she wishes to maintain plausible deniability? Her response when Nathan asks her at prison indicates that perhaps she was aware, as she maintains she allows Billy to handle financial matters. This is not a shocked reaction, but one of deflection. By the end of the film (SPOILER) we learn that Billy has relinquished his request for royalties, indicating at the very least, he and/or Liz thought better of the inevitable optics nightmare. However, I think it’s a bit too late, as it’s almost the worst of both worlds to have asked for the money, revealing the willingness to override typical documentary policy, while not even receiving the literal compensation in exchange for the bad press. Liz and Billy both walk away looking worse for wear, in this documentary. The form a culture of two; both frenetic, entrepreneurial forces, with Billy willing to embody the independent, disagreeable businessman persona and Liz appearing as the “good cop.” It’s difficult to know just how much this pattern may have represented the dynamic between Liz and Sunny Balwani at Theranos. It’s a coupling of masculine/feminine approaches to winning at business, like a marriage of “Lean In” and “The Art of the Deal.” The audience can see the 1-2 punch dynamics at play. You Can See Everything is a strange title for a story about people who cannot see each other. Fielder sees a great deal. Holmes sees a continuous invention project. Billy sees a monument under construction. Christian sees a daughter damaged by assault and by Sunny Balwani. The audience sees a woman who will not grant that she has ever lied, and a marriage that has turned mutual idealization into a closed loop, a “culture of two.” Mentalization would have interrupted the loop with new data. So would a joke she could laugh at, or a sentence that begins, I deceived people, and here is how. There is no sense of authenticity, just a veneer of sincerity performed at cinematic scale, warm eyes aimed at the lens, and the promise that invention continues even from a cage. The clinical moral of the tale is that if someone cannot hold your mind as separate from theirs, your experience will be missed, or at the very least, misrepresented. What does a friend or close connection do, when presented with evidence that hurts? How do they respond when they’ve hurt you? Is there an apology, or this there an alternate account of reality?

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