Every so often, somebody makes something so good that it becomes everyone else’s problem.
I saw a post on Threads suggesting that Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything has done to documentaries what Walk Hard did to musical biopics. And that it’ll take the genre fifteen to twenty years to recover.
I’m including Lance Oppenheim there because the last time I called it Nathan Fielder’s movie, somebody on Threads corrected me. Oppenheim co-directed it. Everyone knew what I meant. I was shitposting, not writing a Letterboxd review. I don’t even have a Letterboxd account.
I think the post might be right. At the very least, documentary filmmakers should probably consider taking the rest of the year off. Spend some time with their families. Maybe get into woodworking.
Walk Hard took every convention of the musical biopic and played each one completely straight. The childhood tragedy is young Dewey Cox accidentally cutting his brother in half with a machete. His father spends the rest of the movie reminding him the wrong kid died. The drugs, the marriages, the backup singer who’s obviously the one, the run-in with the Beatles: it’s all in there. Before one show, somebody backstage explains, very seriously, that Dewey has to think about his entire life before he plays.
Walk Hard bombed at the box office. Hell, at the time I even worked at a movie theater, and I didn’t see it. Unless I was screening a print I’d built, I really wasn’t watching a lot of the movies. Part of it was lack of interest. Part of it was doing dumb townie things.
I first saw Walk Hard on DVD. We didn’t pay for cable TV in my twenty-something slacker apartment, just my PS2 slim for entertainment. Dudes would bring over DVDs and they’d become part of the collection, either from roommates or even random visitors. I never bought it. I don’t know whose copy it was. It was just there. Often DVDs would just be on loop for like 2 weeks straight. Walk Hard ended up being one of them.
John C. Reilly later told The Ringer (opens in a new tab), “we tried to kill the musical biopic with this movie.” It didn’t work.
Bohemian Rhapsody came out eleven years later and made something like $900 million. Then came Rocketman, Elvis, Bob Marley: One Love and Back to Black. The reviews for nearly all of them brought up Dewey Cox at some point. You can hardly watch a musician struggle with addiction without expecting John C. Reilly to wander into the scene.
I saw Rocketman, largely because I like the song “Rocket Man,” as well as “I’m Still Standing.” I didn’t see the others, and legit had no interest in Bohemian Rhapsody.
Fifteen to twenty years is weirdly specific. Walk Hard came out nineteen years ago, so by that math musical biopics should be just about recovered. They spent the whole time winning Oscars.
So Walk Hard made its genre look stupid. You Can See Everything does something more inconsiderate. It makes the rest of its genre look like it hasn’t been trying particularly hard.
Other people have careers. They’ve got mortgages. They’re trying to make perfectly respectable documentaries about unsolved murders, and here come Fielder and Oppenheim making everybody reconsider what it even means to know something. They could have just made a normal Elizabeth Holmes documentary. Alex Gibney already made one for HBO in 2019. Do you remember it? I don’t. Seven years went by before anybody made Gibney’s look like a rough draft.
It’s worse when the timing is tight. Planet of the Apes came out in 1968. It was a hit and got four sequels. People who’ve never seen it know how it ends. It also premiered about two months before 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nobody says Planet of the Apes is bad. But 2001 went on to be the greatest sci-fi film of all time. Planet of the Apes became one of the most parodied movies for the next thirty years or so.
The story goes that 2001’s ape-men were convincing enough that some people assumed Kubrick had just used apes. Planet of the Apes got an honorary Oscar for its makeup. I’ve seen the original with Chuck Heston and the Tim Burton remake with Mark Wahlberg and honestly I dig both for what they are.
Science fiction already had a long history with men in ape suits. Fifteen years earlier, the alien invader in Robot Monster was a man in a gorilla suit wearing a diving helmet. I would watch that tonight, frankly. I’d watch an astronaut fight a rubber monster any night of the week. But after 2001, it got a lot harder to make one with a straight face.
Kubrick wanted everything in that movie to look real, the apes and the spaceships both. He spent nearly three years on it. The film won the Oscar for special effects and the statue went to Kubrick alone. It’s the only one he ever won. The man’s entire Academy Award career is a group project he didn’t share credit on.
Then he had the models and blueprints destroyed, so when somebody made a sequel sixteen years later, they had to build the spaceships again from scratch. I like that sequel, for the record. 2010 is a completely different movie and very much a product of 1984, but it’s good. The Arthur C. Clarke novel it’s based on is even better.
2001 is the harder sell. People still watch it for the first time, usually because they’ve decided it’s time to get serious about movies. I first watched 2001 sometime in high school, can’t remember exactly the year. I know it was a VHS copy, not a DVD, and I remember being a dork about it. It was late and I fell asleep twice watching it. I really wanted to love it, and in a lot of ways I do, but it can be a chore to watch.
I recently saw someone on Threads give it “10/10. I kinda hated it.” Yeah, me too I guess. It’s a movie about space travel, evolution, artificial intelligence, and whatever the hell was happening in that hotel room. It takes all of it extremely seriously, including the long stretches where nothing happens.
A lot of what seemed strange about 2001 in 1968 is just how space movies work now. Space travel involves waiting rooms. The computer talks in a soothing voice while it’s trying to kill you. Nobody calls that Kubrick anymore. It’s just what space looks like.
Ridley Scott, who made Alien and Blade Runner, said in 2007 that science fiction was as dead as the western and nothing would ever beat 2001. Then he went and made Prometheus, The Martian and Alien: Covenant. For a dead genre, he sure kept showing up for work. Those three movies together made $1.3 billion worldwide, fyi. Remarkably productive zombie genre.
George Miller was seventy when Mad Max: Fury Road came out, which seems unnecessarily hostile to the career prospects of younger directors. It took him about fifteen years to get it made. At one point the production had to move to Namibia because it rained so much in the Australian desert that the desert bloomed into wildflowers. His cinematographer, John Seale, was even older. He was retired until Miller talked him back into it.
What they came back with is a movie where a group of people drive across a desert, find out they don’t like what’s on the other side, and drive back. There’s barely any dialogue. And it’s fantastic.
I saw some guys arguing in a comment section somewhere and one guy said the action’s so easy to follow because the movie has less cuts. That comment had a lot of likes, so I figured that made some sense but then fact-checked it like a dork and found out that’s garbage and that it has about 2,700 shots. I looked up The Road Warrior for shits and giggles to find out Fury Road has over twice as many.
Apparently nearly everything important sits right in the middle of the frame (opens in a new tab), so you never have to go looking for it. There’s a name for this, “crosshair framing,” and I’m going to act like I already knew that. Most people probably never notice it. I can’t say I particularly noticed that either. Most times when I’m watching it I’m just appreciating the spectacle.
Hard to imitate something people don’t even notice. The Matrix was the opposite. Everybody noticed bullet time. It turned up in so many movies and commercials that Shrek was making fun of it two years later.
Shrek opens with a storybook fairy tale. Then Shrek tears out a page and takes it to the outhouse. It was made by a studio run by a guy who’d left Disney on very bad terms. A good chunk of it is making fun of Disney, down to a castle town with turnstiles at the entrance.
Unlike Walk Hard, it actually worked. Before Shrek, animated fairy tales were mostly told with a straight face. After it, for about a decade, a lot of animated movies came with pop songs, celebrity voices, and a main character who knew exactly how stupid fairy tales were. Some of that was the wrong lesson. Other studios saw how much money Shrek made and decided the secret was the smirk.
I caught scenes and was familiar with a lot of these movies because I was a manager and projectionist from like 2003 into 2010. I built the print for Shark Tale when it came in, so I had to watch it. Bobby De Niro plays a shark who learns to accept his gay son. I liked the movie and got so tickled at the idea of it being a spiritual follow-up to Goodfellas that I wrote a piece about it for a freshman writing class. I never turned it in. Madagascar and Over the Hedge brought lots of kids in. The only thing I recall about Hoodwinked is smoking cigarettes outside the theater, looking at that poster and thinking, oh, another one.
Eventually even Disney came around. In Enchanted, they made fun of their own princesses. In Frozen, a big part of the point is that you shouldn’t marry a guy you met that afternoon, which would have been news to about half the Disney catalog.
Disney used to make documentaries. In 1959 it won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature with White Wilderness, a 1958 nature film best remembered for a scene of lemmings hurling themselves off a cliff into the sea.
Lemmings don’t do that. The crew brought them in and pushed them off. It was also filmed in Alberta, which is landlocked. Nobody really found out until a Canadian TV investigation in 1982. And I didn’t know it was a myth until researching this essay.
Documentaries have been staging things for about as long as they’ve been winning awards. They’re still around. Thirty years after White Wilderness, Errol Morris staged reenactments in The Thin Blue Line on purpose and in the open. He got criticized for it. He also helped get an innocent man out of prison. I’ve not seen that one, but the shot everybody brings up is a milkshake hitting the pavement in slow motion. And evidently every true-crime series has felt entitled to one since.
Elizabeth Holmes, who founded the blood-testing company Theranos, is about as true-crime as a subject gets without anybody getting murdered. There’s a whole Hulu miniseries with Amanda Seyfried, which people have actually heard of. You could make one more with a slow-motion shot of a vial of blood hitting the floor. It would do fine. It’s pronounced “SY-fred,” by the way. I learned that from the movie.
Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, invited the two directors into a rented beach house thirty-four days before she went to prison. Then Fielder and Oppenheim just kept filming. For three years. A24 told them there was no deadline. If nothing came of it they could scrap the whole thing.
I mean A24 has this reputation of being THE it studio, the cool kids. So it’s not a surprise and honestly just annoyingly cool. Like, nobody is that cool with me.
Fielder was supposed to stay behind the camera. That didn’t last. It’s funny, except when it’s upsetting. I’m not going to try to describe what happens.
So what is it about the movie? I guess it’s more about what it doesn’t do? The doc really doesn’t attempt to argue for or against Holmes’s innocence or guilt directly. If anything, it documents Fielder desperately wanting to believe his subject is being genuine, but he can’t, because the evidence he knows contradicts all of it. Her shit with Theranos is barely even discussed, outside of a part about the meaning of a word and “how she communicated it.” If your only knowledge of Theranos and Holmes is from that doc, you might wonder, “Well, was that even so bad?” The other things she did, such as falsifying endorsements and misleading people about where the tests were actually coming from, aren’t even discussed. But Fielder knows, and I know, and I suspect most of the people going on opening night know too.
A critic at the CBC (opens in a new tab), which is also the outfit that caught Disney with the lemmings, suggested it’s so original it might undermine the whole idea of documentaries. That’s basically the Threads joke, but from Canada’s public broadcaster.
Stephanie Zacharek at Time (opens in a new tab) was less impressed. She argued that what the movie’s asking, about how a documentary maker relates to the person he’s filming, is only news to people who haven’t been watching documentaries very closely. Yeah I kinda think she’s right, even from just the handful I’ve seen: Grey Gardens, which she mentions directly, and Exit Through the Gift Shop. Plus I was an angsty teenager during the second Bush presidency, so yeah, I’ve got Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine on the DVD shelf. I think this trend is more obvious the more aware of it you are.
I do think it changes things for documentaries. The part everybody can see is the director on camera, looking uncomfortable. That’s the easy part. Nathan Fielder has been doing it for over a decade. One potential outcome of this is seeing a lot more documentaries where the documentarian awkwardly inserts himself, or where absurdity, deception, and drama exist in levels that typically exist in, well, fiction. Super Size Me seemed to inspire imitators, why not this? Alternatively, maybe the right lessons will get learned, and some of the stuff that other lady gripes about will fall out of fashion.
It’s worth seeing. And yeah, it matters, at least for the next fifteen years or so. Maybe.
Before this, my favorite documentary was The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. It follows one family in Boone County through a year of drug deals, court dates, and mountain dancing.
Jesco, the dancer in the family, got his own documentary back in 1991, Dancing Outlaw. In that one he’s extremely particular about his eggs. You Can See Everything has a man like that too.
Somebody will make an excellent doc about murder next year, or one about some commonly used substance that your girlfriend is gonna be annoying about and now you got to buy all new shit, or another one that will get people talking about some niche conspiracy for a week. They just won’t be quite as comfortable to make, because once somebody demonstrates what’s possible, everybody else is stuck knowing about it.
Pictures: stills and publicity art from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Columbia), 2001: A Space Odyssey (MGM), Prometheus (20th Century Fox), Mad Max: Fury Road, The Matrix and Goodfellas (Warner Bros.), Shrek (DreamWorks), White Wilderness (Disney) and The Dropout (Hulu; photo by Beth Dubber) and You Can See Everything (A24), plus a frame from the 91st Academy Awards (A.M.P.A.S.) and one from Dancing Outlaw (1991, Jacob Young, West Virginia public television), used here for commentary. The Robot Monster trailer (1953) is in the public domain. Photos of Nathan Fielder (opens in a new tab) by Wikimedia Commons user Northwest and Lance Oppenheim (opens in a new tab) by Colleen Sturtevant, both CC BY-SA 4.0 (opens in a new tab), cropped, resized and put side by side here (that combined picture is CC BY-SA 4.0 too).