On January 6, 2021, the transfer of power of the President of the United States was almost upended by a violent mob who believed that the election was stolen in a vast conspiracy. I say this not to garner sympathy for them, but to understand what they think. They were and still are living on a different plane of reality, and it’s largely their own fault.
I’ve been trying for the better part of a month to write an essay about James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds’ comic series The Department of Truth. I’ve written thousands of words about it, but it’s such a gargantuan opus that I can’t find a firm angle in. When I watched the Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder documentary You Can See Everything the other night, I finally got it. As a result, this essay is going to be more about that documentary than the comic.
The main question of The Department of Truth is “does the truth matter in American politics or does the perception of the truth matter?” Maybe the question could be more aptly described as “what matters more” as a less binary option. People often vote and act not because of facts but because they believe in white lies and vast antisemitic conspiracies. Now, according to a June YouGov/Economist poll, an estimated 50% of Republicans believe the 2020 presidential election was rigged. For them, it might as well be true. In 2023, a Gallup poll found that 65% of Americans believe that some sort of conspiracy was behind the JFK assassination. A 2016 NBC poll found that 72% of registered Republicans they polled didn’t agree with the statement “Barack Obama was born in the United States”.
Similarly, in You Can See Everything, the whole documentary is centered around the question “is Elizabeth Holmes lying to me (the me being Nathan Fielder) or does she actually believe all of the things she’s saying to me?”. This invokes the question of “is lying when you say something you don’t believe or just when what you say isn’t true,” a debate in no way unique to this project. Later, some revelations bring out a somewhat different question of “is she being completely manipulated and taken advantage of by her husband?” This isn’t the documentarians being sexist or out of left field or anything, not seeing women as full capable beings. Holmes admitted to not being involved in the finances with her family and her husband, Billy Evans, got her to give him goddamn power of attorney over her. Billy also created an AI deepfake of her to parade around, and pretends to speak for her to the extent of even writing tweets in her name.
Me and my friend I watched it with left the movie unsure of what Elizabeth Holmes believes. Even after talking about it for an hour and a half, we weren’t sure. We kept changing our minds throughout the movie and as we sat with it more afterwards. Where I land is what is in line with a sort of tenuous “theory of everything” I have about ultra-rich people, that they’ve spent so long around “yes men” and people who validate every delusion that their brains break and they live on a sort of different plane of existence.
There’s a scene in the documentary where Holmes tells Nathan Fielder that she doesn’t think that she’s ever lied before in her life, maybe not any white lies when she was a child. There’s another scene in which they bring out the model of Theranos, (although a former Theranos employee and whistleblower said that this was not the real product), but Holmes insisted over and over again that the model worked and that her statements about it were accurate. I got the sense that she fully believed that, a belief that can only exist when someone is living on a completely different plane of reality.
You Can See Everything, as a film, is much more invested in Holmes and her world than it is about Theranos, and that’s okay. It’s a human interest story, as there is a wealth of investigative reporting and science reporters breaking that down. There’s a bunch of reporting on her legal trials, how she defrauded investors and was convicted of wire fraud. That is not what this is about. This is about whether Elizabeth Holmes believes she is lying, and if that makes
In a more real sense, it does extremely matter that Theranos was a lie. People experienced real, physical harm because of Theranos. It does extremely matter that far-right conspiracies exist but aren’t real. There was almost a coup because of them, and the acceptance of those same conspiracy theories have enabled another Trump administration carrying out an autogolpe and sliding us from a liberal democracy into competitive authoritarianism. School shootings have created, as Jay Caspian Kang put it, a Museum of Unbearable Sorrow. More importantly, 544 children, college students, and teachers have died in school shootings in this country since 2013. The far-right conspiracies around Sandy Hook and all the other shootings have made it significantly harder to pass gun control in this country. There should have been three more kids at my graduation, but they didn’t make it because they were shot and killed in their homes and at a gas station. We can never forget that.
Edited by Tiffany Winter
The The Extra:
Thank you to my friends Girija and Basil for talking the movie over with me. It’s a real mindfuck and they are very smart.
I know this one got heavy, but that’s just where my brain went. Feel free to check out Everytown’s solutions page. They are a good organization. We don’t have to accept this.
Song I’m thinking about: Grifters by Charming Disaster
Please feel free to leave comments on this post, I love talking about this stuff. If you can’t let me know on Bluesky or email and I’ll figure it out.
There was more I wanted to add about the techniques Department of Truth and You Can See Everything Use, but that’s not as important and probably not as interesting.
I’m not getting into the whole prison politics of the piece, something that has been around a lot of the discourse I’ve seen about the documentary but just not what I’m writing about.
Regardless, the conditions in our prisons need to be improved for everyone, not just the white and wealthy. If you want to read more about the harsh reality of the prison system in the United States, I would recommend checking out Prison Policy Initiative, they do a lot of great work.
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