What can you say about the new documentary You Can See Everything? Well, judging from the reviews, you can say just about anything. And you can’t say anything at all! But that’s the conceit. As the documentary’s own website reads: “Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss.” The movie promises that you can see everything. But the harder you look, the less you see. C’est la vie. And therein lies our first clue! You can’t say anything about You Can See Everything unless you have something to say about real life.
As long as you view the characters in You Can See Everything through the “high anthropology” perspective of guilty/innocent and good/evil, you won’t see anything. And that seems to be what everyone fails to notice!
The movie hooks you in with the promise that you, dear viewer, can discern Elizabeth’s motives, but by the time you leave the theater, all you will have seen is an abyss. And that is revealing in itself! As the prophet Jeremiah said, “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse — who can understand it?” If you are anything like me, you will leave the film seeing an abyss that is all too familiar. And if nothing else, You Can See Everything is as accurate a snapshot of the abyss of Sin as anything out there. That might sound obvious, but that’s the trick: it is obvious! So obvious, it’s difficult to actually see.
Maybe an analogy will, ahem, clarify things. Genesis 2:25 tells us that in Eden, Adam and Eve have nothing to hide. Curiously, though, they don’t seem to notice. Until, that is, they do. In point of fact, that’s the first thing they notice.
I am referring, of course, to the moment after Adam and Eve eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Genesis 3:7 tells us that after Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, their eyes were opened. But what did they see? They saw they were naked. And at that point, something interesting happens. Adam and Eve’s nakedness is a simple fact. It is neither good nor evil. Furthermore, given that they are in Eden with no natural predators, Adam and Eve’s nakedness is just a fact. But that’s not how they interpret this fact. From Adam and Eve’s perspective, their nakedness is a problem. So, they make clothes to hide their nakedness. But it backfires. Their homespun duds are as good as a confession. Their very attempt to hide demonstrates their guilt.
Adam and Eve used the raw material of hiding to clothe themselves. They sewed figs to hide behind. Elizabeth, Billy, and yes, the directors, Nathan and Lance, concoct a garment of a more modern way to hide: oversharing. And it may be entertaining, but it is just as ambiguous. As Byung-Chul Han points out, “Information by itself does not illuminate the world. It can even have the opposite effect. From a certain point onwards, information does not inform — it deforms.” And that’s what You Can See Everything makes crystal clear.
Elizabeth and Billy let Nathan and crew see everything. It doesn’t clear anything up, and that’s probably the point. So long as you try to discern Elizabeth’s motives, you are doomed. But that’s how it is for all of us. Motives are slippery things. The more you try to pin them down, the more elusive they become.
C’est la vie. But is it?
The documentary seems to say yes, but the Bible doesn’t. Genesis is not a series of facts. It is a narrative. The Bible is the story of God undoing our tragedy by his triumph. No sooner do Adam and Eve begin to clothe themselves in the rags of their lie than God comes searching. And God refuses to let Adam and Eve live such a shabby existence. God doesn’t indulge the charade. God curses the whole rotten affair. Yes, Adam and Eve are banished from Eden. But the final curse hides a promise. They will die. And in their death, their lying will come to an end once and for all. And in the meantime, before Adam and Eve leave Eden, God makes real clothes for them.
This is the most revealing aspect of the human story: We are covered with God’s unfathomable love. And I don’t just mean the garb God gives Adam and Eve. I mean Jesus Christ. As St. Paul said, “As many of you were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” Jesus’ life is the undoing of the lies we wear.
Jesus is born like all of us, which is to say, naked. And he begins his ministry as such too. In his baptism, Jesus undoes Adam and Eve’s lie. Jesus doesn’t make clothes for himself; in his baptism, he willingly strips them off. And Jesus dies naked too. Totally naked.
When Christ died, he made his last earthly words a question. In so doing, he obliterated the false narratives we construct. Jesus’ cry of dereliction is the work of God that broke the deafening silence of the abyss. Now even the abyss echoes God’s love in Christ. And that includes the abyss of your sin, too, dear reader.
Jesus’ history is the narrative that makes sense of life, but it does so in a backward way. Jesus makes sense of our lie in his broken body. But it is only in him that all things cohere. I don’t mean this generally. I mean, in Christ, your life is actually coherent! The only way to truly see everything isn’t to look closer. It’s to look to Christ.
I wish I could say where Christ makes a cameo in You Can See Everything. I’m just not sure, however, that you really can see everything by watching such a well-crafted documentary. That’s the real revelation, but you can’t see it. Christian theology speaks of the Deus absconditus, the “hidden God.” This is a God who is so close he is hard to see. This is the God who is present even in absence. This is the God Jesus reveals when he, to all appearances, dies forsaken on the cross.
And that’s the trick: if you try to see this God by looking harder, you won’t see a thing. Instead, you must close your eyes. True perspective doesn’t come by sight. It comes by hearing! Faith comes from what is heard. And in this audible vision, everything is transformed. You don’t even have to look that hard. “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” Turns out, you really can see everything.
