Your bag is empty.
When Elizabeth Holmes first met Billy Evans at a house party in San Francisco on Oct. 7, 2017, the embattled Theranos founder knew it was love at first sight. The feeling was mutual.
“I fell in love in that first conversation,” Evans says to comic Nathan Fielder in “You Can See Everything.”
While filming in 2022, in the 34 days before she reported to prison for an 11-year sentence on charges of defrauding investors of the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, Fielder asked Holmes how she flirted with the man who would become her future partner and father of her two children.
Her answer: Holding deep eye contact for long periods of time.
She does so with Evans throughout the film. And she does the same with Fielder, with a much more awkward result.
In her well-documented rise and fall, Holmes’ gaze, and how she rarely blinks, has been a point of public fascination. Henry Kissinger once called her “ethereal,” while John Carreyrou, the New York Times journalist who wrote Bad Blood, the award-winning book on Theranos, noted how Holmes’ “hypnotic” eye contact “made you feel like the center of the world.” Everything about Holmes is on full display in “You Can See Everything,” the new A24 documentary directed by Fielder and filmmaker Lance Oppenheim now playing in theaters nationwide.
Holmes and her eyes have been at the heart of the film’s marketing. The official poster for the documentary is an unsettling portrait of one side of Holmes’ smiling face, featuring her big, bright blue eye. The teaser trailer takes it a step further.
“I don’t have anything to deceive you on,” she says to Fielder, eyes locked on his. “Of course I’m not deceiving you.”
Aware of her flirting technique, Fielder stares back at one of the world’s most famous fraudsters with confusion. The two never break eye contact.
“I’m engaging with you as a human being,” she claims from the couch of a rented beach house in Del Mar, Calif.
“Why would I deceive you?” she asks, offering, you guessed it, more deep eye contact. “There’s no reason for me to do that.”
At this point, Fielder, who is visibly uncomfortable with his smiling subject’s sustained eye contact, lets about 20 seconds go by before he asks if Holmes is being real.
“I’m always being real,” she says. Nothing else is said between the two, and they never look away.
As interest surrounding the documentary has increased in recent weeks, and made Holmes and her disconcerting exchange with Fielder into a meme, the film has also brought about renewed questions for what unnaturally long eye contact can do for intimacy and dating.
A 2024 study published in Springer Nature found that a five-minute conversation, and lots of mutual eye contact, is all that’s needed for some people to figure out whether they want to date someone. While “evidence is still lacking on the role of eye-contact as a potent signal in human social interaction in the context of dating,” researchers found that subjects in the study were “more likely to choose those dating partners with whom they shared more eye-contact with.”
“Eye contact thus acts as an important signal of romantic attraction when encountering a dating partner,” the study says. In the film, Evans claims that he was into Holmes before she revealed in that first hours-long conversation that she was the founder of Theranos.
But whether Holmes’ eye contact with Fielder was consensual is another story, says Allie Hoffman, the host and founder of the Feels, which puts on dating events that fast-track intimacy by fusing mindfulness practices such as sustained eye contact. Hoffman, who has not seen the documentary, says the trailer between Holmes and Fielder shows a potential lack of consent, with Holmes appearing to engage the comedian “in such a way to meet her agenda or strategy of what she wanted from that interaction or what the cameras to capture.”
“How much is her agenda part of it versus how much is she asking this person across from her to ‘be present with me, connect with me?'” says Hoffman, who is based in New York. “When it’s nonconsensual and utilized as a tool rather than an invitation, it starts to get murky.”
At the Feels, Hoffman emphasizes how there is something special about prolonged eye contact involving two people who are soft, quiet and vulnerable with each other. What the public has seen in the teaser trailer, however, is anything but that.
“In the Nathan Fielder example, it almost sounds as if she read an article – ‘This is what you can do’ – and she is clumsily applying what she read,” Hoffman says, stressing that she hopes people don’t shy away from appropriately deep eye contact as a flirting technique because of how Holmes has used it. “Be honest with each other.”
The same goes for Holmes, who, in her own view, is always being real.
