⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️ PROCEED WITH CAUTION: DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU HAVE ALREADY WATCHED YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING, OR YOU LIKE HAVING MAJOR POP CULTURE MOMENTS SPOILED FOR YOU ⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️
Spreadmates,
Why are we smiling? As regular readers are well aware, the Spread lives for a communal pop-culture moment, and thanks to You Can See Everything’s record-setting theatrical release last weekend, we’re swimming in a monoculture sundae dripping with meme sauce deeper and sweeter than we’ve ever tasted before. (Or at least since the triple-decker insanity of Olivia Nuzzigate.) Since devouring the film on Sunday night—three Spreadbabies celebrated birthdays (6, 12, 16) over the weekend, keeping us from the theater until the sabbath—we’ve whiled away hours consuming reviews, theories, articles, and memes1. We’ve engaged in just as many hours of rip-roaring debates by phone, text, pillow talk, and the bleachers of at least one high-school field-hockey game. But more than anything, we want—we need!—to commune with you, dear Spreaders, over Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s masterpiece.
Because, in a hell of a hat trick, the Elizabeth Holmes “documentary” manages to indict journalism, Hollywood, tech culture. Heck, we’d say it even questions cameras in and of themselves. We’d be tired if we weren’t so invigorated.
We’d also like to offer one caveat before you read further: Our beloved copy editor still hasn’t seen the movie, so we are flying without a net on this special issue-within-an-issue. Wheeee! Please forgive any typos…or worse!
Let’s goooooooo,
Rachel & Maggie
PS: In an act of extreme discipline, Fielder and Oppenheim did not include any archival video of Holmes in the film, instead relying on magazine covers and Amanda Seyfried’s account of watching hours of Holmes’s depositions and other interviews. But after watching the film, we came home and fell down a rabbit hole of footage of Holmes at her baritone-voiced, Steve Jobs-ian peak, and our minds were blown once more. A brief supplemental-watching syllabus: Her appearance on Charlie Rose. In a deposition. Doing a celebratory dance. Saying bonkers stuff on 60 Minutes. And there’s more where that came from….
PPS: Has anyone heard from Spread-beloved Dropout creator Liz Meriwether in all this? Call us, Liz! Also, this video is great.
Playing the Fielder
Jake Silverstein is clearly shaking in his boots, what with Wired threatening the New York Times Mag and all the other usual suspects in its quest to become the best women’s magazine out there. Earlier this year EIC Katie Drummond out New Yorked New York with the mag’s extremely “creative” cover about Silicon Valley’s gay mafia, and now she’s got the YCSE goods straight from the horse’s mouth with an appropriately enigmatic Nathan Fielder cover story Q&A written by Drummond herself, which involved a follow-up chat recorded just before the movie opened nationwide on Friday, and then dropped Monday morning—swish! An extra air clap for Drummond, who straight up says that Fielder was such a pain in the tuckus while the magazine was planning this thing that at times she really started to hate him. Been there, sister!
Read it here.
Fielder’s Other Half
Right on cue, Vulture published an excellent and super-satisfying profile by Alex Barasch of co-director Lance Oppenheim, who is literally 30 years old and also helmed a major narrative film this year with Prime Time, starring Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen—a thrilling companion piece to YCSE as it turns over questions about truth, surveillance, privacy, and performance. Read the profile here.
The Amanda Files
Last winter, your Spreaditors were moved to stop the presses in order to crash in an adulatory conversation about the Spreadiest and—yep, we’re saying it—all-out best movie of 2025. Mona Fastvold’s under-recognized The Testament of Ann Lee made the stunning-in-all-ways Amanda Seyfried something of a patron saint of this newsletter. (Also, FWIW: The Dropout claimed the number 3 spot in our ranking of the Spreadiest limited series of all time, just sayin.) So when she showed up in YCSE wearing all the hats—actor, co-conspirator, audience surrogate, hard-hitting Billy Evans interviewer—our buttons were popping. Still are, in fact!
Now, the questions on all pundit lips: Could Seyfried snag an Oscar nom for Best Supporting Actress for this role? If so, would her work playing Holmes in the reenactments be the only bits she could be considered for?
The question on one Spreaditor’s lips: Do Seyfried and Fielder have great chemistry or what? She’s newly single and according to the movie he too recently went through a breakup. And they have been through something together. Imaging them showing up arm-in-arm on Oscar night!
The question on another Spreaditor’s lips: If Amanda is our patron saint, and just coming out of a breakup, don’t we want better for her than this?
Related: Is Nathan Fielder kind of hot? Angelina Chapin got to the bottom of it in 2022. “While some may like the sweet simplicity of himbos, my kink is a man I can intellectually go to war with,” she wrote. He “has a kind of arrogance that makes for great sexual tension.” To this, we’ll just say that Rachel is dressing her husband up as Fielder for Halloween. (She’ll go as Liz. Do y’all prefer this jumpsuit or this one, which she’d yes absolutely totally definitely no-question wear again?)
We Need to Talk About Billy
Or do we? Liz’s Trump-grubbing, gun-toting, egg-beating, wild-eyed partner definitely looked “healthier” in the first half of the movie. What happened there? One eye-opening bit from Oppenheim in the Barasch profile: “One day, he accompanied Holmes’s partner, Evans, to the gym and asked what else he was planning to do that afternoon. Evans mentioned that he’d have to shower, and before Oppenheim could propose a tasteful, minimally invasive approach, he stripped and hopped in. What follows is the sequence that earned You Can See Everything its R for graphic nudity. ‘It seems like he really had something he wanted to show to us and to the world,’ Oppenheim says.”
Let’s Hear It For the Science Boys
In the New York Times and STAT, respectively, Bad Blood journalist John Carreyou and Theranos whistleblower Tyler Schulz fill in the gaps of what the movie leaves out science-wise and context-wise. Carreyou, for starters, wants us all to know that he could have been involved in a Homes doc with filmmaker Erroll Morris, but that the conditions weren’t up to his editorial standards, so he walked. Shultz, who is portrayed in The Dropout by cutie actor and Wallows frontman Dylan Minnette, lays out lots of contextual dirt, our favorite piles of which have to do with a) the blood-testing machine that she shows Fielder in the doc, which he says isn’t the one Theranos was faking things with and b) the real estate: The $135 million pile she was living in during her trial, which we don’t see in the film, vs the rustic rental beach house we do see, where she talks a lot about her mountains of debt. (Granted, this location turns out to be a $9.2 million Del Mar beach house that Liz and Billy were renting for around $28,000 a month. But to the untrained eye, it looks threadbare.)
Both Carreyou and Schulz are operating in the belief that Holmes is a cold-blooded, crazy-talented manipulator who never stops performing—not in the “Who’s on First” scene, or in the initial Dropout viewing scene, either.
But writer Ryu Spaeth takes the dissenting position—emotionally speaking—at New York with “Go Ahead, Pity Elizabeth Holmes,” a good read that bores into the seemingly likely possibility that there’s more going on with Liz than straight sociopathy (not that it justifies a crime spree that literally no one doubts actually happened).
Don’t Tase Us, Brody
At this point it’s a cliché to groan or shake a fist at ye olde New Yorker critic Richard Brody, but his review of YCSE made us wince. Not for the sexism or abject contrarianism we’ve all come to “love” him for but because the guy…just doesn’t seem to get it? Brody perceives Fielder’s manner with Holmes as snarky and brazen, when—to us, at least—the magic of their strange eyeball-to-eyeball connection is borne of Fielder’s ultra-flat sincerity. When the two engage, it feels like two people with complementary neurodivergences have found each other in a strange, stilted ballet. Thankfully, the New Yorker’s more generationally-in-tune Justin Chang reviewed the movie for his other gig, at NPR, here. Also, a reminder that this bad boy is still riding high on Letterboxes as, no joke, The Highest-Rated Film of All Time.
Phew. What else ya got, Spreaders?
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming, aka this week’s main issue.
H/t to multiple spreaders, including Marysunny L. and Sarah M.
