Modern documentaries desperately miss the human touch. The recent surge of true-crime and cheap ripped-from-the-headlines exploitation, filled with talking heads, stock footage, cloying voiceover, and questionable ethics, has turned the predominant form of cinematic nonfiction into an anonymous slurry of info-dumps and theorizing, sold exclusively on the buzziness of their subject. But there’s power in personality, even when that personality is devoted to uncovering truth instead of weaving an elaborate fiction. This approach, the participatory and performative modes of documentary where colorful filmmakers draw us into their real-world obsessions, used to be more common. Michael Moore provoked corrupt executives to their faces, while Werner Herzog’s ecstatic poetry gave all his films an absurd gravitas. This year, a pair of delightful debuts—Nathan Fielder’s You Can See Everything and John Wilson’s The History Of Concrete—return us to that character-driven, personally invested, eccentrically expressed style, and the form is all the better for it.
Fielder and Wilson are not the only people approaching their docs in this way. The comic-minded directors directly share a sensibility and have a working relationship (Fielder, Wilson’s “Fairy Godfather,” was executive producer on How To With John Wilson), but they’re just the most prominent modern purveyors of the mode. Other filmmakers who’ve long embodied this kind of storytelling—like autobiographical director Ross McElwee, whose Remakeaccompanied a 4K restoration of his earlier film Sherman’s March—are still holding on despite the industry’s loudly demonstrated preference for splashy, tabloid-like rubberneckers.
But intimate, first-person nonfiction films have gotten far less oxygen (not to mention money) than the kinds of leering documentaries—or better yet, addictive multipart docuseries—that can be turned around quickly and lure people in their sweatpants to click through on a streaming carousel. This clickbait-adjacent approach to funding and platforming favors certainty. These films purport to tell you everything you don’t know about their subject, or to reveal the true story behind them. It’s a distancing, lecturing experience that tells the audience what to think instead of inviting them along for the ride. But the ravenous curiosity of host-filmmakers like Fielder and Wilson is actually far more convincing, and engaging, than the questionable authority touted by this dominant doc approach. Rather than spending your time wondering if you should buy whatever narrative their films are selling, you’re wondering what the hell is going on right alongside them.
Simply looking at the first trailer for You Can See Everything, and the mouth-frothing response that followed, is enough to explain how contagious it can be when we get to watch someone trying to figure something or someone out. It’s open-ended and skeptical, tense and strange. There’s no tease of a grand reveal, no piece of gotcha evidence that cracks the case. It’s precisely because of how uncertain Fielder is that we’re drawn in—like any good mystery, it sparks our imaginations instead of explicitly steering us along a true-crime template already filled out by podcasts, documentaries, and dramatic miniseries.
It’s not just that this is a film with unprecedented access to Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes and her hotel heir husband Billy Evans, but that it is a film about what Nathan Fielder does with that access. It’s about the couple, yes, and the two do become characters, even if those characters are odd, calculated ciphers. But it’s also about Fielder—his questions, his jokes, his confusion, his passion, and his desire not to get taken in by people he’s deeply suspicious of. It’s also about all of them together, about subjects who truly match the comic filmmaker’s inscrutable poise and amusing uncanniness.
Fielder, filmed by his co-director Lance Oppenheim, operates as an audience surrogate, documentarian, and punchline all at once. His squinting expressions and ghoulish framing (intentionally poking out around corners and looming in the background like a soft-spoken Canadian Babadook) aren’t just funny, but grounding. We’re also peering in, voyeurs to the mess. When Holmes and Evans throw Fielder for a loop, his head spins along with ours. When we in the audience shriek with disbelief, Fielder may raise an eyebrow or uncharacteristically push back. His quiet incredulity may not look exactly like our own, but in its understated way, it validates that, yes, what we’re seeing is not normal.
That has such an intense impact because, even if you don’t know Fielder going into You Can See Everything, you get an immediate sense of the man behind Nathan For You and The Rehearsal. He’s more than a little strange, so if he thinks something’s off…oh boy. When another person, a more relatable and outwardly shocked person, joins the ride for the second half of his film, it only makes this investigation more joyfully communal.We all goggled at Holmes’ disconcertingly threatening cartoon-mouse face during that trailer. You Can See Everything allows that experience to continue for three hours by reinforcing the idea that we, the viewers, are not alone in our morbid fascination.
If that sounds a little like the rubbernecking alluded to earlier, it’s all the more palatable because it’s filtered through a perspective that’s curious rather than crass, warm rather than cold.Similarly, John Wilson’s The History Of Concrete only works because of the guy falling down a rabbit hole of his own making. Wilson’s wry nose-following—which takes him from the Hallmark offices to a dive bar where a band of aging rockers play to no one—could be off-puttingly circuitous.But like a podcast whose familiar discussions and inside jokes become a nightly lullaby, or like a small-time creator whose repeated sign-off becomes a parasocial comfort, his mannerisms make everything more endearing. There’s personality visible in every lingering shot of a business’ silly sign, and audible in every muttered understatement.
Wilson doesn’t engage with as hot a topic as Fielder, but even his lower-key quest for personal and creative clarity still allows his audience to vicariously experience the absurd alongside him. One of the best moments of The History Of Concrete, which often self-deprecatingly ribs Wilson for his own odd level of near-fame (he’s lost an Emmy, appeared as a Jeopardy! answer that nobody knew, been on billboards long enough for his likeness to be stolen by weed companies) involves the filmmaker at a dinner party. Put on by GQ, the affair sees Wilson in his normal mode: filming everything. Only, the dining companion who’s looking straight into his lens is Kim Kardashian. This is already a pretty startling level of cognitive dissonance—a model mogul staring at a niche HBO docu-comedian—but Wilson lets us further into the bizarrely tense experience by panning the camera over to reveal one of his other peers at the event, who is just as flabbergasted by this turn of events as the rest of us: Tim Robinson.
What once was a recognizable “Wow, can you believe this is happening” moment becomes an inside joke between a hip filmmaker and us, his cool audience. We all like I Think You Should Leave, and we’re all shocked that Kardashian is eating at the same table as the guy most famous for making funny faces in a big hot dog suit. That same vibe permeates You Can See Everything, even if we might not be able to fathom the specifics. But to an extent, we’re all in the same boat, taking in the weirdness around us together, without the pressure to have all the answers.
It’s a refreshing pivot from the relentless onslaught of cashgrabs jockeying to be the definitive take on the Fyre Festival, or the late celebrity du jour, or people dressing up as scary clowns. We also happen to be in a perfect media environment for this pivot to stick around. Ironic as it is to write, there are far more people who now watch articles than read them. Getting your news second or thirdhand from the infinite scroll is common. There’s a whole subculture of influencers who’ve made it their brand to simply react to other people’s journalism. Explainers dominate video platforms. Many social media users don’t just want the story, they want someone to tell them about the story—and tell them how they feel about the story. That’s not inherently negative: It can offer connectivity and context, or at least illusions of them, and stand in for the kind of shared social experience once dictated by headlines, lead stories, and watercooler television. We want to know what’s going on, and we don’t want to feel alone in that desire. A side effect of this is that audiences are perhaps more primed than ever to be led through a documentary by a charming, inquisitive oddball—especially one who, when face-to-face with the unblinking object of his fascination, stares directly into that abyss for us.
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