This is the second installment in a series of essays discussing the documentary “You Can See Everything” Part one can be found here:
Nathan Fielder is the “You” who Can See Everything
Entrepreneurship is inherently risky, and risk is inherently unpredictable. The only stable correlation between risk and reward is that success tends to follow persistence. My very first blog on this platform, A Resume of Failure alludes to this fact. Past failures offer no guarantee of success; no one is “due”, but to abandon risk is to accept defeat.
The Toy Company
There is an exchange between Nathan and Elizabeth, just past the first hour of You Can See Everything, in which the filmmaker compares her situation to the schemes of his former show, Nathan For You:
Nathan: “Isn’t it weird that I like, ah, did a tv show about, kind of business scams, and you’re sort of like, in trouble because of a business scam?”
Elizabeth: “I never actually made that connection. But, I think it’s a pretty different situation.”
Nathan: “If you just said that, you know, Theranos was a comedy bit, maybe you could get off scott-free.”
Elizabeth: “It was real.”
Nathan: “Yeah. It was a joke.”
Elizabeth: “As you know, I am literal.”
Nathan: “No, no, I know, I was just kinda making a joke, maybe it was bad taste,”
But taste aside, the comparison is far more apt than the joke lets on, as Fielder’s interactions with the owner of Marky Sparky Toys serves as a perfect prelude to the events of You Can See Everything.
The key distinction comes in the first exchange between Mark and Nathan:
Nathan: When you’re a kid, what’s the one thing you want more than anything?
Mark: Power.
Nathan: No, to not be seen as a baby.
Mark’s answer is actually quite perceptive. The Netflix documentary series The Toys That Made Us reveals that the inspiration for He-Man actually developed from the recognition that power was the precise desire of the average five-year-old boy; a reflection of the grandiosity of the ego that is innate amongst humans. That spirit, visible in the first grasping of an infant, drives the development of children forward, as they imitate their parents and attempt new and difficult things. It also spurns them to question authority, test boundaries, and strive for greatness.
But Nathan’s answer reflects a different kind of impulse, one that is not wholly absent from the average child, but which reveals the basis of his unique perception as an outsider. The desire for power reflects a longing for distinction, implying that belonging is assumed, while being average is a baseline for proving oneself worthy of being elevated above their peers.
Nathan’s suggestion resonates with those who never quite achieve that sense of belonging, and a familiarity with being excluded. This is of course a reflection of his entire persona, a broken mirror whose crafted image always seems to highlight the wrong aspects of the successful and competent he seeks to imitate. The conscious effort employed to craft a persona for the perception of others is revealed in Nathan’s next remarks:
“It’s very easy to market kids because their brains are so small. So rather than selling a ball, Mark should be selling an identity for children. That identity: That owning a doink-it is the only way to prove you’re not a baby.”
The Volatile Power of Exclusion
Success and belonging do not invite such questions. Fielder’s self-identification as a business expert, reflects a common strategy of overcompensation employed by those who repeatedly fail to fit in. The posture reminds me of a friend from “highschool” [homeschool co-op], one of many strange individuals who gravitated towards me as someone occupying a position of relative acceptance, afforded by the plausible deniability of lacking any formal diagnosis.
I used to record his terrible free-style rap songs, performed under the moniker “Spare Change”, a riff on 50 cent, meant as an insult by whoever coined it. After laying down his tracks, we would watch selected episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, (RIP Patrick Stewart) - a show he watched obsessively in an attempt to absorb the masculine ethos of his television role-model, Jonathan Frake’s Commander Riker. He was smart enough to recognize that wearing a starfleet jumpsuit was really only appropriate on Halloween, but to make sure he stood out every other day of the year, he wore a suit and tie.
Much like Fielder, The Report of the Week perfectly demonstrates a successful leap from outcast to influencer, while displaying the aesthetics of an outsider. His suits are virtually identical to the ones worn by my aspiring rapper friend.
This impulse to leap past normalcy reveals the basic hierarchical structure of all human cultures and communities, a broad majority of normal people, with two minority groups; the outcasts and the elites. Nathan’s marketing strategy follows the normal pattern, but as an outcast attempting to bypass the limitations of normalcy and make the leap to become an elite influencer, he devises a plan based on exploiting the structure that everyone else is trying to work within. Instead of trying to entice customers by affirming the quality of the product, Nathans suggests highlighting their insecurities and fear of exclusion, relying on elite authorities to support his message, including the president and Santa Claus.
Of course, failing to make this leap is quite disastrous, as it can lead to the kind of ostracization currently enjoyed by Elizabeth Holmes, which is why the broad majority of normal people don’t take the risk. There is more similarity between outcasts and elites than normal people realize, and the fear of exclusion that Nathan highlights is far more compelling than normal people understand.
Indeed, that consummate outsider and unquestioned elite, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was far more motivated by fear of exclusion than dreams of success. Rousseau was grief-stricken by the words of his dear friend Denis Diderot, whose play Le Fils naturel suggested that “Only the wicked are alone.” After being further wounded by an indifferent response to “the tenderest letter he ever penned”, Rousseau published what is perhaps the most influential work of an outsider ever written, The Social Contract—a work that would set off the French Revolution, and ultimately lead to the upheaval of monarchies across Europe.
In a much less destructive fashion, Nathan’s scheme reveals two inconsistencies in how we communicate that are not meant to be questioned. The first comes from the abstraction of his ad campaign. Nathan’s advertisement is denied airtime because it is considered “lying”, but do we actually expect or enforce honesty in advertising? If an advertisement says that owning a given piece of plastic will confer status and identity on the consumer, then what is the difference between telling children that not owning a doink-it makes them a baby, versus telling them that playing with a He-Man action figure gives them power?
The second inconsistency is Mark’s own attempt to make a leap from an outcast to elite status. Nathan For You aired at a time when internet virality was just coming to the fore, and reality TV still had greater cache. As a niche late at night show on comedy central, it occupied a position about as far from network primetime as possible while still being considered mainstream entertainment—a near perfect metaphor for its host character.
The show’s success relied heavily on the hubris of self-important but unsuccessful business owners like Mark. The allure of entrepreneurship rests in its potential to elevate individuals from obscurity to elite status, by delivering wealth through unglamorous success, the freedom of self-employment, or notoriety. The producers of the show would advertise the opportunity to be featured via the parent company name Viacom, and would highlight their ownership of MTV, which produced several legitimate reality shows at that time.
Sparky Marky Toys is not a household name, but Mark considered himself worthy of being featured on a cable TV show. The clear assumption is that if only more people knew about his business, greater success would follow. The official premise that Mark needed to increase sales of the doink-it was somewhat of a farce, as he had already discontinued production of the toy. But while he was “using” Nathan to garner greater publicity for a business that he already believed was sufficient, his willingness to allow Nathan to offload his standing inventory affirmed the same assumption that he publicly criticized. In essence, his participation reflects a belief that a sufficiently authoritative influencer could convince the public that his useless toy had value.
His initial revulsion towards Nathan’s plan is rooted in a convoluted belief in his superior expertise, but he offers Nathan a metric by which he can be convinced—cash. However, when Nathan produces the desired sales in a way that exposes Mark’s fragile ego, the businessman insists that Nathan “never proved that it worked.”
The greatest irony occurs earlier in the episode, when Nathan presents the packaging for the Doink-it that Mark does not like, he tells Nathan “You are not good at what you do.” revealing that Mark does not understand what Nathan does, because he doesn’t understand Nathan’s true occupation. Like most comedians, Nathan is a prophet who shines light on the darkness and speaks the truth.
Nathan’s final revelation is truly biblical in nature, as he produces an image of the false god that speaks truth about what is hidden in Mark’s heart, in the form of a bobblehead that says “Hi, I’m Mark, I’m an idiot business man with a small dick. I have no idea how much I hurt other people’s feelings and I’m the laughingstock of my industry.”
But ultimately, the scheme fails. In the eyes of the majority, Nathan is a villain. Rather than owning his embarrassment, the businessman who told the prophetic filmmaker “you are not good at what you do” has repeatedly distanced himself from the notoriety of the show. The parents of the children who learned the pain of exclusion, no doubt told them that they were merely the victims of a bad man. The rules of exclusion continue to operate, and the cruel games go on.
The Allegory of Theranos
When all the status games and motives are abstracted, we can see the parallels begin to emerge. Both schemes treat the product as secondary to the status panic they can induce. Theranos was the company that thought it could succeed through strength of vision, and The Edison was its Doink-it. The role of Mark was played by its board; a group of business men who only cared about their status and wealth. “Viacom” represents the silicon valley investors, a means to an end. Balwani and Holmes are played by Fielder and his Santa Claus; the expert and the spokesperson, turned into scapegoats, punished for failing to win, but whose true crime was exposing the rules of the game.
Like Fielder, the guilt of Holmes and Balwani does not need to be contested to reveal a deeper truth. But there are several parties with a vested interest in keeping the focus on the scapegoat. John Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood, and the producers of The Dropout have both profited from the narrative of villainy. But perhaps the folly of keeping the focus on the mastermind deceiver can be illuminated by comparing them to another famously guilty couple—Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Epstein is dead, and Maxwell is incarcerated; but is anyone satisfied that justice has been served? Of course not. The real story is about their clients, the victims, and the ongoing silence of the system they protected. There are already a few Theranos investors and board members whose names overlap with Epstein’s contacts and flight logs, and it is well worth considering who else might be named on the infamous and as-yet unreleased list. Regardless of anything else, they are all players of similarly structured games. But the comparison raises another question about our three-tiered society: who derives the greatest benefit from the identification of a scapegoat, and the presence of the outcasts? The majority, or the elites?