I am not sure how to say this. Imagine sitting down for a meal, and being served something that just does not look like food. It doesn’t really look like anything else, either, but you are told it is food, that everyone else is eating it and that they love it, and that you should plunge right in. You look at it closer. It is not particularly attractive, to the extent it has a smell, it has a bad smell, and it is so large that you can’t imagine anyone eating that much. But you go ahead, trusting those who tell you how good it will be and how much you like it, you eat the whole thing. But there really isn’t any taste to it.

How should you react? What should you tell all those who have convinced you how good it was? Were they all pulling your leg? Did you just miss some subtlety in it? Is there something wrong with you, that you didn’t appreciate it the way everyone else seems to. Are you simply neurodivergent?

You probably don’t know it, but I am talking about the new film, You Can See Everything, which just ended its run at the Avalon, and which we saw last night. Everything has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and equally strong ratings everywhere else. It is a “documentary” prepared by “comedian” Nate Fielder, and its central character is Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, a company touted as the earth shattering developer of a system and machine that will take a drop of blood, and analyze it in so many ways that if you ever were going to get sick, it would tell you when, how, from what, and how long it would take to recover. And that’s just the start.

Holmes created the company along with Sunny Balwani, a man with whom she had an affair when she was 18 and at Stanford, and when he was almost 40. She dropped out of Stanford, built a company which at its height employed over 800 people, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, except that it turned out that their machine didn’t work and, according to the jurors who listened to her criminal defense, both she and Balwani knew it.

But they were obviously super sales people, not only to raise the money, but to attract the following people to join the Theranos board of directors: former Secretary of State George P. Schultz, Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense Gen. Jim Mattis, Former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former U.S. Senator William Frist, former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, and many more leaders of business and academics.

Both Holmes and Balwani were convicted of assorted crimes and imprisoned. Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison; Balwani to slightly more.

The business and romantic relationship between Holmes and Balwani ended, and she took up with a man named Billy Evans, whom she may or may not have married (I am not sure that even they know for sure), and with whom she had two children.

For reasons unclear (you can speculate, you can even ask Holmes or Evans, but the reasons are still unclear), a little over a month before she was to start her prison sentence, Holmes invited Nathan Fielder and a film crew to make a documentary about her life with her family, with 24/7 access to their home. Was this to change public perception, to influence her ability to curb her sentence (she has apparently asked the estimable Donald Trump if he has any pardons up his sleeve), or to set the stage for Theranos 2.0, which she and Billy might or might not be contemplating.

At any rate, this is the video of 34 days at the Holmes-Evans house, with the addition of Fielder and his film crew, and with Fielder seemingly just another member of this family. And this 34 day stretch takes you about 2 hours to sit through. When she was driven to prison, I was happy that I wouldn’t have to watch her particularly uninteresting pre-prison life any more, and that I could go home.

But no, there was an entire hour of the film left, involving Fielder and a different Elizabeth Holmes. The second Elizabeth Holmes was actress Amanda Seyfried, who played Elizabeth (you can call her “Liz”) in a Hulu miniseries. We don’t have a Hulu subscription and didn’t watch the show. Fielder contacted Seyfried and made her a part of his story – he made her the Dr. Watson to his role as Holmes. (Oops, I can’t call him Holmes – that makes everything too crazy. One is enough.)

So, yes, the film is 3 hours long. And, the boring Liz Holmes is a very different persona than the hard driving, conniving, power figure who ran Theranos. She is a calm, controlled, very competent wife (maybe, wife) and mother, who is misunderstood, never tried to fool anyone, is a paragon of honesty, and – like George Washington – never told a lie. Her husband/best friend Billy Evans is her doppelganger. No, obviously, they don’t look at all alike – but they think as one. Mental Siamese twins born of two separate mothers.

So I have two ultimate questions: First, is Holmes lying throughout the film. If you poll the hundreds who have put something online about the film, the answer is a clear “yes”. Do not trust a word she says. Billy claims that Holmes doesn’t lie, but is “neurodivergent”, that she sees the world differently from other people, that her mind works differently from other people, that her perception of truth (and maybe her perception of reality) is different from other people.

When Billy said this, my reaction was : Wow, this film is really about Donald Trump. He is not a liar; he is just neurodivergent. Trump and Holmes – Stephen Sondheim understood them: “We ain’t no delinquents, we’re misunderstood, deep down inside us we are good.”

Let me end with Nathan Fielder, about whom I really know zip, having not seen any of his previous shows or films. All I can say about Fielder is: if I am ever arrested for fraud, and convicted, and sentenced to prison, and if I decide to invite someone into my house to film my family for the month before I report to jail, one of the last people I would select for that job is Nathan Fielder. How droll, how uninteresting, how seemingly awkward, how deadpan, and, yes, how neurodivergent.

Fielder’s persona reminded me of someone else. In this case, not Donald Trump, but Elon Musk. And how unsurprised (not really, I was surprised) to learn that Musk is a big fan of Nate Fielder’s and has spent time with him, just having conversations. This made me realize something else – Elon Musk is another example of neurodivergence.

And then, I thought – well, maybe Elon Musk, not Billy Evans, is Elizabeth Holmes’ mental and emotional doppelganger. Only she got caught before she was too big to fail, and he got too big to fail before anybody could catch him.

Amanda Seyfried (about whom I also draw a blank) seems like a normal person caught in a world of neurodivergency. Let’s hope that, when she was able to step out of that black hole, she was still in one piece.

They say this film is unlike any other film ever made, I hope that is correct. They also say it may be the best picture of 2026 and may win the Oscar for Best Picture. I myself think the Academy could do better job.