// WIRED US/UK — MODA & SOCIETÀ
The New Fan’s Guide to the Unreal World of Nathan Fielder
There has been no shortage of coverage on Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley fraudster whose biotech startup Theranos reached a peak valuation of $9 billion in 2014 before its supposedly groundbreaking blood test machine was revealed to be vaporware. Books, magazine articles, documentaries, TV dramatizations—the exposés have piled up high.
So, you might ask yourself, why the hype for the forthcoming You Can See Everything, yet another documentary about Holmes, and one that spans three hours?
The excitement is thanks to Nathan Fielder, one of the film’s directors. (Fielder codirected the documentary with Lance Oppenheim). Fielder is a cult-favorite television auteur whose devotees have awaited his showdown with Holmes ever since rumors about him visiting her in prison surfaced last year.
Now that Fielder appears poised to break the containment of an obsessed fan base and conquer the cineplex, it behooves you to get caught up. This will not be a typical documentary: Fielder has made a career of heightened unreality, sowing confusion wherever he goes. To give you some notion of what to expect from his analysis of Holmes, here’s a rundown of his unusual and captivating style.
One reason Fielder makes sense as an interlocutor for big tech’s most notorious con woman is his own history of corporate chicanery. In his breakout TV series Nathan for You (2013–2017), he contrived and implemented bizarre publicity stunts for struggling small businesses. (While he jokes that he “graduated from one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades,” the fact remains he did graduate, unlike Holmes, a Stanford University dropout.)
Andrew Bricker, an associate professor of English at the University of Ghent and academic coordinator for the research project Democratic Literacy and Humour, writes in an email that it’s important to recognize that, throughout his career, Fielder has always played the same altered version of himself, leaving us unsure just who he really is.
Fielder “has made the borderlands of persona and person so ambiguous, so indeterminable, so indefinable, that none of us is entirely in on the joke,” Bricker says.
Nathan for You and Fielder’s subsequent HBO series The Rehearsal, Bricker explains, cast him as “a kind of outlandish problem-solver, someone possessed of what I sometimes call the engineer’s brain, which sees the world strictly through the radically simplified framework of problems and solutions, even if the solutions themselves, ouroboros-style, always lead to new problems.”
Indeed, in his fixer role on Nathan for You, Fielder seeks out overcomplicated loopholes and goes to great lengths to carry out any particular scheme once he sets his mind to it. To help an international exporter avoid high shipping costs on smoke alarms, for example, he comes up with a plan to market them as musical instruments. Then he creates an instructional DVD on how to play one, forms a band that records an original track that includes the device’s shrill beeping, and gets the song featured on the local news, all to legitimize the tariff dodge.
Fielder’s Nathan for You promotions involved careful readings of pertinent laws in order to skirt liability—he went viral by opening a coffee shop called Dumb Starbucks—as well as clever hoaxes and media manipulation. He staged a video of a pig saving a goat from drowning in a pond at a petting zoo, successfully tricking social media users and news stations into thinking it was real, and founded Summit Ice, a nonprofit winter apparel brand that stands against Holocaust denial, which earned it mainstream exposure.