The very Jewish thinking behind ‘You Can see Everything’

The second night that I took ayahuasca in Mt. Shasta in 2022, there was a long pregnant silence, and then, a sudden bellowing scream. It came out of me. According to the others in the room it felt like a kickoff siren for the ceremony. 

 This is how I felt the moment that Nathan Fielder confronted Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything about the humor of Abbot and Costello. He asks if she knows who they are. No. He shows her a YouTube clip of “Who’s on First.” Her face flushes red. She giggles. And he asks her, What is funny? It is not what you would expect. She doesn’t compute “Who” as a name. 

Suddenly we see their consciousness coordinates staring face to face. See? This joke? Who’s on first? Get it? She was giggling, but she did not get the wordplay. Fielder, confounded, probes deeper, tries to teach her the mechanisms of the humour, but it simply does not translate. I saw in her eyes how I felt attempting to learn 7^th-century Talmudic mathematical mind logic – meeting a comprehension wall. 

In that scene I felt this sudden rush of awareness of Fielder’s Jewishness. If I was confused, if not a little bored, watching him lurk in a strangely undecorated beachside shrouded home up until now, I was suddenly deep inside this film.  

Fielder, in this scene, becomes a Jew. Holmes, she represents Nazism, or the modern systemic privilege version. And now, we as viewers are invited into an exploration of the confrontation of said Nazi. It is a poignant encounter with the age-old inquiry: How could you do this and believe you are innocent? How does your blonde-haired blue-eyed mind work that allows for this horrifying immoral reality you have constructed to appear as if normal?