How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving

I saw the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, last night, and I genuinely can’t type fast enough to express how mind-bending it was.

昨晚我看了关于伊丽莎白·霍姆斯（Elizabeth Holmes）的新纪录片《你能看到一切》（You Can See Everything），我真的迫不及待地想写下它有多么令人震撼。

I’ve seen a lot of chatter online about whether Elizabeth Holmes is a liar, whether she deserves to be in prison for her failed startup Theranos, and whether the documentary is too sympathetic to her.

我在网上看到很多讨论，内容关于伊丽莎白·霍姆斯是否是个骗子，她是否应该因为失败的初创公司 Theranos 而入狱，以及这部纪录片是否对她过于同情。

But that’s not even remotely close to what I took away from it. As we walked out, my husband asked me, “So what did you think?” And I just responded with, “Forget Elizabeth Holmes. That was a masterpiece in storytelling.”

但这根本不是我的观后感。当我们走出影院时，我丈夫问我：“你觉得怎么样？”我只是回答说：“忘了伊丽莎白·霍姆斯吧。那是一部叙事杰作。”

I walked in expecting that the filmmakers were going to tell us a story about deception. What I did not expect is that they were deceiving us — the viewers — in real time.

我走进影院时，以为制片人会给我们讲述一个关于欺骗的故事。但我没料到的是，他们正在实时欺骗我们——观众。

An entire theater full of grown adults was falling for it. At one point, people were shouting so loudly at the screen that I couldn’t hear the dialogue. I heard a woman yell, “Criminal!” — and it wasn’t directed at Elizabeth Holmes. I’ve never experienced anything like that in a movie theater. It was emotion, and it was visceral.

整个影院的成年人都上当了。有一次，人们对着屏幕大喊大叫，声音大到我听不见对白。我听到一个女人大喊：“罪犯！”——那并不是针对伊丽莎白·霍姆斯的。我从未在电影院经历过这样的事情。那是情感，而且是发自肺腑的。

What makes the documentary so brilliant is that it forces you to confront how much of what you believe about another person comes how their story has been told to you. And we are so so susceptible to this that it’s scary.

这部纪录片之所以精彩，是因为它迫使你面对这样一个事实：你对另一个人的看法，在多大程度上取决于他们的故事是如何被讲述给你的。我们对此极其容易受到影响，这很可怕。

Think about Elizabeth Holmes. How much of your opinion of her comes from the facts of her criminal case & how much comes from the images and/or videos and/or TV dramas you’ve seen over the years? I remember one Halloween when the Theranos scandal was at its peak, it seemed like everyone was dressed in a black turtleneck carrying tiny vials of fake blood. Holmes was everywhere.

想想伊丽莎白·霍姆斯。你对她的看法有多少来自她刑事案件的事实，又有多少来自你多年来看到的图片、视频或电视剧？我记得在 Theranos 丑闻最严重的一个万圣节，似乎每个人都穿着黑色高领毛衣，拿着装有假血的小瓶子。霍姆斯无处不在。

But the thing that often gets lost in the retelling of her story is that Holmes was actually acquitted of all four charges related to defrauding patients. She’s in prison because a jury found that she knowingly misled investors who poured more than $700 million into the startup. That’s a significant distinction, but as a society, we don’t love nuance. Just tell us — is she good or is she bad? Is she a liar or is she not?

但在重述她的故事时，人们往往忽略了一点：霍姆斯实际上被判无罪，涉及欺诈病人的四项指控均不成立。她入狱是因为陪审团认定她蓄意误导了向该初创公司投入超过 7 亿美元的投资者。这是一个重要的区别，但作为一个社会，我们不喜欢细微差别。只要告诉我们——她是好人还是坏人？她是骗子还是不是？

I recently wrote about a fascinating experiment Canon conducted in 2015. Six photographers were asked to photograph the same man in the same location. The twist was that each photographer was given a different description of him: a millionaire, a convict, a fisherman, an alcoholic, a psychic, and a lifesaver.

我最近写过佳能（Canon）在 2015 年进行的一项引人入胜的实验。六名摄影师被要求在同一地点拍摄同一个男人。转折点在于，每位摄影师都被赋予了关于他不同的描述：百万富翁、罪犯、渔夫、酒鬼、通灵者和救生员。

The resulting portraits were wildly different.

最终拍摄出的肖像截然不同。

A Canon rep said, “A photograph is shaped more by the person behind the camera than by what’s in front of it.”

佳能的一位代表说：“一张照片更多地是由镜头后面的人塑造的，而不是由镜头前的东西塑造的。”

Now imagine that principle applied to an entire three-hour documentary.

现在想象一下，将这一原则应用于整部三小时的纪录片。

Over the course of the film, directors Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder managed to make a theater full of people with fully developed pre-frontal cortexes repeatedly reconsider what they believed about the people on screen. They did it through camera angles, close-ups, editing, and the order in which information was revealed.

在电影过程中，导演兰斯·奥本海姆（Lance Oppenheim）和内森·菲尔德（Nathan Fielder）成功地让满场拥有完全发育的前额叶皮层的成年观众，反复重新审视他们对银幕上人物的看法。他们通过摄像角度、特写、剪辑以及信息披露的顺序做到了这一点。

The framing of Elizabeth and those around her changed little by little until it became obvious, and as soon as our brains detected a narrative shift, our feelings about it followed. It was like watching a magic show … or one continuous reality TV show in which someone gets the villain edit, the victim edit, the manipulator edit, and all of us just falling for it again and again.

对伊丽莎白及其周围人的刻画一点点改变，直到变得显而易见。一旦我们的大脑察觉到叙事转变，我们的感受也会随之改变。这就像在看一场魔术表演……或者一场连续不断的真人秀，有人被剪辑成反派，有人被剪辑成受害者，有人被剪辑成操纵者，而我们所有人都在一次又一次地上当。

We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not. Here’s how it actually goes: We form an emotional impression first, then we build a belief around it, and then we go looking for facts that support it. This is my theory as to why we’re so divided in this country. Beliefs built on emotion are nearly impossible to reason with.

我们喜欢相信自己是通过收集证据、权衡事实并得出合理结论来形成观点的。别自欺欺人了。我们根本不是这样。实际情况是这样的：我们先形成一种情感印象，然后围绕它建立一种信念，接着再去寻找支持它的事实。这就是为什么我认为我们国家如此分裂的原因。建立在情感之上的信念几乎无法通过理性来沟通。

The psychology behind the film’s manipulation should be studied. First, a close-up shot of an unblinking Elizabeth Holmes: She’s sinister. Then, a wider shot of her bouncing her baby: Wait a second, she’s a mom, she’s human! Then, her husband’s painstakingly long pause: Wait, is he the puppeteer? Then, a smile! “No, no, that can’t be genuine.”

这部电影操纵背后的心理学值得研究。首先，伊丽莎白·霍姆斯不眨眼的特写镜头：她很阴险。然后，她抱着婴儿的广角镜头：等一下，她是个母亲，她是个人！然后，她丈夫极其漫长的停顿：等等，他是幕后操纵者吗？然后，一个微笑！“不，不，那不可能是真的。”

And then there’s Fielder himself, who moved in with the couple for a whole month before Holmes headed to prison. How reliable of a narrator is he? Does he care a bit too much for Elizabeth that he’s willing to lie to the viewer? How much can we trust his perception of events?

还有菲尔德本人，他在霍姆斯入狱前与这对夫妇住了一个月。他是一个可靠的叙述者吗？他是否因为太关心伊丽莎白而愿意对观众撒谎？我们能在多大程度上相信他对事件的感知？

I’m telling you, it’ll break your brain.

我告诉你，这会让你大脑宕机。

You Can See Everything does a good job explaining the phenomenon of psychological manipulation, but it also makes you participate in it. It evokes emotion, and all of the greatest pieces of art evoke emotion.

《你能看到一切》很好地解释了心理操纵现象，但它也让你参与其中。它唤起了情感，而所有最伟大的艺术作品都能唤起情感。

You sit there believing you’re watching a documentary about a woman who deceived the world, only to discover that you’re also watching a demonstration of how easy it is to deceive you.

你坐在那里，以为自己正在看一部关于一个欺骗了世界的女人的纪录片，结果却发现你同时也在观看一场关于欺骗你是多么容易的演示。

(This was really hard to write without giving away any spoilers, but watch the film, and let me know what you think!)

（在不剧透的情况下写这篇文章真的很难，但请去看这部电影，并告诉我你的想法！）

Spot on and I have so many thoughts swirling. Were they complicit in the narrative direction that the ‘documentary’ took? At one point I had to readjust my brain and consciously consider that maybe I was watching a feature film about a documentary about a feature film. My head is spinning. It was so clever.

说得太对了，我脑子里有很多想法在盘旋。他们是否参与了这部“纪录片”的叙事方向？有那么一刻，我不得不调整我的大脑，有意识地思考我可能正在看一部关于纪录片的剧情片，而那部纪录片又是关于另一部剧情片的。我的头晕目眩。这太聪明了。

It makes me think of the final lines of the film The Prestige:

这让我想起了电影《致命魔术》（The Prestige）的最后几句台词：

“Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.”

“现在你在寻找秘密。但你找不到，因为当然，你并没有真正去寻找。你并不真的想弄明白。你只是想被愚弄。”