You Can See Everything challenges what's real, and Carrie confronts a new era of bullying

In 2002, Ryan Wedding was an Olympic snowboarder at the top of his game. Ryan's style is really gun it and go. And in less than a minute, it slipped away. But he continued to chase the high. Ryan James Wedding. He controls one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in this world. I'm Michelle Shepard and from CBC Podcasts and the Toronto Star, The Most Wanted Olympian. Available now. This is a CBC Podcast. If you've seen You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder's documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, well, you probably can't stop thinking about it. And if you haven't, well, you must be wondering, what is all the fuss about? The film seems to challenge our very idea of what is real and what is performance. I'm Emile Niazi sitting in for Elamin Abdel-Mahmoud. This is Commotion. Rad Simon-Pillay is here. Alyssa Wilkinson is here. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Okay, so just to be fair for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, don't worry. We are not going to spoil some of the big moments in the doc. And if you're not familiar at all with the concept, Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes invites Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim to move in with her, her partner, Billy, and their two kids to document her last days before she goes to prison. Alyssa, there was a ton of buzz even before the movie came out, and it just seems to be building even more since the release. So now that you've had some time to sit with it, really think about it, do you think it lives up to the hype? Well, I try not to get too caught up in hype, especially with movies like this at this time of the year. But I really did think this one lived up to my expectations and possibly beyond. It feels like a bit of a game changer for documentary. Yeah, it's, I mean, just, Rad, like, the whole thing felt like such an event. And I haven't done an event movie in a really long time. I missed the Odyssey, I have to admit. But, like, this was one of those movies that me and my friends were like, we have to see it, and we have to see it, like, opening weekend. And it made a big impression at the box office, having the second largest opening weekend for a non-musical documentary in domestic box office history. Why do you think people are rushing to see it in this way? Well, I mean, I think you have, like, a confluence of factors. And, I mean, first off, Elizabeth Holmes, who is, like, such a fascinating figure that she's got this whole cottage industry built around her, right? Because we've had podcasts, we've had the Alex Gibney documentary. We've had the Hulu series. And certainly anyone who was into those, there is that, you know, that curiosity about this moment where you get kind of direct access to Elizabeth Holmes. And then, of course, the Nathan Fielder of it all, because he has his own fan base. And, you know, I think it's interesting that when you point out that this is the second highest grossing, or it had the second highest opening for a non-musical documentary, because number one is Fahrenheit 9-11 by Michael Moore, and Michael Moore being a director who becomes a character and has a whole cult of. A cult of personality that commanded people to the box office. So I think those are all factors. And then on top of that, this also goes back to something Adam Naiman was talking about last week on this show during our spoiler culture conversation, which is that there is a rush to see this before the movie is spoiled for you. There is this sort of, like, Marvel-like hype that you've got to see it opening weekend because, like, if you wait around for streaming, you might already know all the cards at play. So I think all of that is what's creating that rush. Yeah. I want to play this very. This very famous moment from the trailer. Why would I deceive you? There's no. There's no reason for me to do that. You're being real right now. I'm always being real. Well, I think, you know, back to what you were saying, Rad, part of the appeal of going to was to try and answer that question of, like, what is. What is real with this person and what is not? Alyssa, I think people are also just very used to sort of Netflix documentaries where you have that question answered for you, like, who's the bad guy, who's the good guy? And here, reality, deception, it's all sort of mixed together. Curious how this movie sort of plays with that and disrupts that concept of, like, that you should know whodunit at the end. Yeah, it's, you know, a little hard to describe without spoiling the movie, which I won't do, but I think that we're dealing with here a person who, you know, has been convicted of lying, who is trying to call that into question just by participating in the documentary. It was her idea. But we're also combining that with Nathan Fielder, who, you know, if we watch his television shows, he's playing a character. We don't always know if what we're looking at is, quote, unquote, real or if it's been set up. And then the question of, you know, just because something's set up, does that mean it isn't real? And that gets layered on throughout the three hours of this movie, where at some point you're watching things that you know aren't real, but they're supposed to be. And so you really find yourself questioning those things. And of course, it's true that many other documentaries use those same techniques, but they don't tell you that they're doing it or they don't spotlight it, right? And we tend to watch them somewhat uncritically. And assume that the story that was presented to us is actually true, when in fact, we may be just getting a version of the story, right? So all of those things really are swirling around inside this film. And it's in a long tradition of documentary filmmaking that tries to make the viewer think about truth, reality, performance, all of those things. But this one does it in such an entertaining and kind of like exciting way, I think, that it really has captured a lot of people's imaginations. Mm-hmm, definitely. Rad, I want to quickly get into the Nathan of it all, because, you know, a lot of Canadians especially kind of know Nathan Fielder from his start in reality TV, you know, Canadian Idol. He played a reporter, I'm putting that in quotes, on This Hour Has 22 Minutes. How do you think that that background maybe affected his approach here? I do love the idea that Canadian Idol is the original sin that got us to this point, right? Yes, of course. Of course, worked as a producer on that show. Those shows have done a lot of bad, I think. Ever since then, he's like, I am going to turn reality TV inside out and tear the genre apart. And that's definitely a through line throughout his career. But even before that, I mean, yeah, you talk about 22 Minutes. I mean, he's basically satirizing the role of a CBC journalist, where you see him conduct these field interviews, and he's coaching his subjects into performances, right? He's coaching them to like, oh, I need you to play this character for the sake of my story, and he's exposing that artifice in what he's doing there. That is one of the through lines throughout, because then you get to Nathan on Your Side, the Comedy Central series, where he's like, you know, a graduate of Canada's business school with good grades, and he's giving businesses advice, but he's giving them the most ridiculous advice, but he's coaching them to play along, and they're playing along, and he's trying to see how far these people will go in this performance that he's coaxing out of them before they reach a breaking point. And so that, all of that, this idea of like, coaching real people into a performance, getting real people to play a version of themselves, a character, that that's where things get slippery, right? Because he's booby-trapped reality with so much artifice, right? That you get to the point that like, you know, reality blends into fiction, and the fiction blends back into reality, and you know, all of that is in play when you get to this movie. You can see everything. Yeah, yeah. Anytime I have friends who don't get him, I say, don't think of him as a comedian, think of him as a magician, and then he makes a lot more sense. You know, Alyssa, speaking of this great history of documentaries that sort of play with our concept of reality and fiction, of course, I saw your viral thread about having to explain to people what is a documentary, which I, you know, my eyeballs popped out of my head, of course. But, you know, we do have movies like F is for Fake, the great Orson Welles documentary where, you know, after I saw it, I was like, oh my God, I don't know anything. I don't know what is real and what is not. And even, you know, Les Blank's. Burden of Dreams, where he follows Werner Herzog's making of Fitzcarraldo. And, you know, there's just, there is this great lineage, but a lot of people may not be familiar with it. And I think it's so interesting that you said this film is also just about the process of documentary filmmaking. Yeah. I mean, one question that's kind of floating around in the middle of it as well is what the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject is. I was, you know, reading. I was reading something that a friend of mine who's also a prominent documentary filmmaker said, and she was saying, is this movie actually about how you kind of fall in love with all of your subjects a little bit, and then you backpedal so that you are fair to them? So, you know, it uses, it's examining that. It's also examining how we watch documentaries. You know, if you think about it, a fiction film, when you watch it, you never really say to yourself, well, is what I'm watching even real? Because you know it's not real. Only a documentary. can really make you feel that. That's sort of my definition of a documentary, honestly, is something that actually could provoke that reaction in you. And I think that's really important, if only because we watch so many things that purport to be real, you know, on our feeds or on the news or anything like that. And we don't always watch them very critically. Documentary really has the opportunity to make us think about that in a new way. Well, Brad, let's take a listen to Lance Oppenheim, the filmmaker who co-directed You Can See Everything. He's on stage with Nathan Fielder at the Canadian premiere of the movie last week. I do think you guys have the best documentarians and some of the best filmmakers in the planet. So you heard Lance say you guys in that clip. That's Lance Oppenheim giving a shout out to Canadian documentary filmmakers. So, Rad, can you quickly talk about that Canadian tradition of documentary and especially that? That approach of blending reality and fiction that maybe this movie may have come out of? Yeah, I mean, in one sense, you take this all the way back to a movie like Nanook of the North, which is not a Canadian film, but it was shot up here in Canada, like up in the Inuk territory. And, you know, in that movie, you got Robert Flaherty coaching performances out of these real subjects, out of these Inuk people, coaching them to stage their rituals of daily life. But these are staging. They're staging like walrus hunting in a way that they don't do it like that anymore. Right. And so so there was an actual harmful element of like, you know, kind of putting this out there as reality and making it out like Inuk people still live this way. And so that kind of staging was there from the get go before we even had a term documentary. Right. And of course, I should say, like documentary, the term was coined by John Grierson, who became the head of the National Film Board of Canada. Right. And in terms of the Canadian lineage, I mean, I think Lance Oppenheim would have shouted out Alan King's film, A Married Couple. A Married Couple, which is, you know, taking you into kind of like this movie, taking you into the home of a married couple. But in that instance, instance, they were it was a couple whose relationship was falling apart. And, you know, there was a rawness to that film, but also there's a performative nature to them being, you know, living with these cameras in play. And that was actually kind of like that was the thing that kind of predated reality television. So, yeah, the history goes long. And we've got to mention Sarah Pauly as well in terms of her twisty documentary about her own life, who I think was in the audience when he said that. But Alyssa, what kind of impact do you think you can see everything is going to have on the genre long term? I don't know that the impact will be on filmmakers exactly, because, again, so many of them make films that do these same things. I see dozens of them every year. But what it does prove is that there is an audience for this and that there are people who are capable of watching films that are this provocative. And really understanding them. I've seen more of that than I expected. Honestly, people saying, I don't know what that movie was about. And I really like that. So I think that's really good. And also documentary filmmaking is honestly in a rough spot. You know, here we don't even have funding that we can get at all from, you know, from public funding. And so it's really helpful to have a film like this prove that there is a market and that if you fund a film like this, it may actually get seen and talked about by people. And I think that could have an impact on documentary documentary filmmakers, or at least that's everyone's hope. Yes, that is everyone's hope. Rad, very quickly. What about the conversation around documentaries? Because I, you know, people are just talking about this endlessly and debating it. And I think that that's really interesting and something we haven't seen in a long time. It is. I mean, I'm getting like my mentions are being blown up right now because we're still debating what a documentary is. What is predatory when it comes to a documentary? Which is, I think, is absolutely in play here. And what's interesting is just getting so many different people who engage with documentaries in different ways having these debates. And ultimately, I'm going to take it back to something Alyssa said, is that, like, you know, we live in a world where people take too much information at face value. Right. And I think this is it's interesting to get all these people into this conversation about a movie with a movie where you can't trust what you're seeing. You can't trust what's being posed as reality. We are living in that moment. I think this movie absolutely is getting people into that conversation. I love that. And yes. I mean, what is real? I think we're all having that conversation and not just about this documentary. Really appreciate you both being here today. Thank you. Alyssa Wilkinson is a movie critic with The New York Times. She also writes a column about documentary films for them. And Rad Simon-Pillay is a freelance film critic and a regular here on Commotion. As a kid in the early 2000s, I joined a scrappy new video site called YouTube. We were girls creating content for other girls. But with our growing success came new rules from the man in charge. There was no reason to believe that anything dangerous was going on. No reason until he was taken away in handcuffs. I'm Lauren White. And from CBC's split screen, this is There Goes My Childhood. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amil Niazi, sitting in for Elamin Abdel-Mahmoud. This is Commotion. So, Carrie is a new series that's been getting a lot of attention lately. It's a TV adaptation of Stephen King's classic debut horror novel that was later adapted into a very classic horror film. Directed by Brian De Palma. This is the first time Carrie has been turned into a TV series. And it's already been renewed for a second season. Cyrus Marcus Ware has watched the entire first season. Cyrus, hello. Hello. Okay, so this new Carrie TV series is set in the present day. It centers on a teenaged Carrie White just starting high school after spending her entire life with almost no internet. Her interaction with the outside world, certainly with no other kids her own age. Here's a taste of how the series opens. 200 deaths. The destruction of the entire town. It's so easy to forget. We were kids. We were kids. We were kids. Just trying to do our best. So, hints there of the mayhem to come. Cyrus, you were a fan of the original Stephen King book and the film directed by Brian De Palma and starring Sissy Spacek, who is just so, so fantastic as Carrie. What else should people know about the version of Carrie that we are meeting in this new version of the show? Well, it's important to say Carrie inexplicably has. She's able to move things. I mean, that's not a diversion from the original plot, but in this television series, we get to see a little bit more about why the things are unfolding around her life. We get to find out a bit more about the motivations and we get to see how she gets to practice and actually hone some of her skills at telekinesis. Yeah, I mean, right away you kind of get a sense that this is living in conversation with, you know, some of the more. Serious shows about teenagehood that we've seen lately. But before we get into that, I'm curious what you really liked about this new adaptation. I cannot say enough about this show. I loved it. I was riveted and watched every episode. I was just so excited that there was another one to come. What I loved about it was that we get a bit more time. I mean, I love the 1976 film, but it's, you know, it's the length of a feature film. This series is much longer. And so we get to have these 50 minute episodes. Where we get to dive into what else is happening in the town. Why the bullies are making the decisions that they're making. We get to see a bit more of the relationship with her family. And we get to see her trying out, realizing her powers and then trying them out and getting to perfect them in a beautiful way that leads to the culminating climax at the end of the series. So the Carrie we meet in the adaptation is actually played by a Canadian actor, Summer H. Howell. How did you feel about her performance? I thought. I thought she did a terrific job. I mean, look, the character Carrie has to have this balance of being, there's a naivety, there is an innocence because she's been locked away from the social world for most of her life. And now she's entering high school for the first time. So she's, you know, I think that Summer really plays this tentative Carrie who's innocent and trying to figure out the ways of the world while also being incredibly dangerous. I mean, this character is an incredibly dangerous character. And I mean, you know, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Abuse of Power comes as no surprise. You know, when you are ultimately powerful like this, it's a very dangerous line that you're walking. And Summer plays this really well. You know, Carrie is both a danger to herself and others and also this innocent, meek character who doesn't really know what's going on. And I think she does a terrific job. Yeah, she really is so good in this. This is a horror story, of course. You know, it's part of a lineage of, you know, adaptations of Stephen King. King's book. And it's grappling with a lot of themes. But one of the main ones is high school bullying. And as I mentioned, it's, to me, it's sort of like a living in conversation with a show like Adolescence. How did you feel about the way the series explored that issue and modern teenagehood? I mean, it sets the bullying around this idea of sort of social media and cyberbullying, which I think is really relevant to today. In 2026, we're seeing a lot of cyberbullying. You know, my daughter's in high school, and you certainly see how, you know, the TikTok trends and the social media posts could make or break your entire week or your day. And we see this with Carrie. You know, Carrie's bully creates a fictitious social media profile in her name, with the name Carrie Redd, even though her name is Carrie White, and starts posting these sort of horrific things, not only about Carrie, but about other people in the school, about teachers, about people in the town. And the bullying really grows. And, and expands and mushrooms until it starts to affect everybody in the community. And what I think is really beautiful about this is that we get to see the impact of cyberbullying, not only on one person, but how it affects an entire system, a family system, a school system, a community. And then, you know, we also get to see a little bit about the motivations. When the bully makes the post, it's often when she herself is hurting. Her people hurt people, right? Her people hurt people. So she's in a moment where she's kind of struggling. And this is her outlet. This is her way of self-soothing. It's that she posts these, horrific things about Carrie Redd. Well, speaking of seeing the motivations behind some of the bullying, let's check out another moment from the series. This is an exchange between Carrie, played by Summer H. Howell, and her bully, Christine, played by another Canadian, Alison Thornton. I want to know why. Why me? I never did anything to you. All I ever wanted was to go to school. And the worst part is that I really could have been your friend. And you, you put in all this effort to make it look like you were mine. So why? Why not just do that? For real? I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry if that's not good enough for you. Okay, I want to talk a bit. About that bully, Christine, as I mentioned, played by Alison Thornton. Cyrus, you're a parent, as you mentioned. How do you feel about the way that that character's motivations were presented and kind of fleshed out? They develop a whole backstory to Christine. We get to find out a bit why her parents are going through a divorce. She's, you know, she's struggling because she might not be able to afford college. But to be very honest, it didn't justify her behavior. I thought they did a good job at sort of fleshing out some of her motivations. But fundamentally, I think her mother says during one of the scenes later in the in the series, she should have been in therapy. And quite frankly, she should have been in therapy. I mean, this, this is a this is a child who's quite troubled. And, you know, I'll just be blunt, this poor little rich kid who doesn't get everything handed on her on a plate to her, she gets frustrated because everything isn't just coming her way. And then she decides to attack Carrie White. And I, poor, poor kid, you know, you're not getting everything that you're always had. And as a result, she ends up taking her vengeance. There's a lot of vengeance in this series. A lot of revenge is built into this series. And so I am empathetic to bullying. And it is true that hurt people hurt people. But I felt very little sympathy for Christine. In fact, I yelled at the at the screen many times, many times. Well, let's quickly talk about that idea of vengeance. And maybe, you know, this, this sense of like violence and counter violence and whether or not some of that stuff is justified. What was your, you know, sort of takeaway from how they treated that? They really, you know, you get to see a lot of action reaction throughout the entire series. Not only what happens with Carrie, where she, you know, she's bullied mercilessly. And then she responds that, oh, it's so satisfying. Wouldn't you love to be able to just go like this and close your bully's mouth and make it that they actually can't speak or shove someone into the prayer closet who's been sort of brutalizing you for much of your life. It's very satisfying to see her enact this vengeance. Well, at the same time, we know that that's not how you get to repair. That's not how things get better. You know, hurting other people because you've been hurt is not how we get to a better solution. We see the act of sort of vengeance playing out through a lot of the bullies. The bullies have their feelings hurt and they want to be prom queen or they want to, you know, be asked to the prom and they want and then when those things don't happen, they act out in these sort of nefarious ways. And I think it, you know, it's tempting in a series like this to sort of root and celebrate when people get, you know, have bad things happen to them as a sort of a vengeful response. But in the social world, in the real world, we have to know that's not how we solve our problems. That's not how we resolve things. And even though I would love, I was bullied in high school as well, you know, and I would love to have been able to just, you know, there's a scene where Carrie does this and her mother's mouth just kind of zips closed and she can't say anything. I would love to have had that power at that time, but that's not really how you resolve conflict. No, exactly. I mean, I think watching even the old version, I, I remember thinking, God, if only I could. Well, we got to leave the conversation there. Cyrus, really appreciate you having this chat with us today. Thank you so much. Cyrus Marcus Ware is a visual artist, activist and assistant professor at McMaster University. You can catch the entire first season of Carrie right now on Amazon Prime Video. And that's it for the show today. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Emile Niazi sitting in for Elamin Abdelhamid. Thanks for listening.