From The Outside

  My older brother and I went to see This Is Spinal Tap on its opening weekend back in 1984. We laughed all the way through. Hard. We were in on the joke. Many of the other patrons, some of whom seemed to be there in hopes of catching the true story behind heavy metal legends no one had quite heard of, seemed to be confused by the tone of the film. Was this a documentary? Was there really a band called Spinal Tap? Why were those two guys over there laughing so hard? 

Imagine all of our surprise when, against most all odds, the subjects of this "mockumentary" went on tour in support of their album, Break Like The Wind. They even landed a spot on the bill for the 1992 Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert. 

This experience set off echoes in my head as I recalled Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread, a short film from the director of Un Chien Andalou. Which makes me quite clever, of course, but remembering thahere was once a "mockumentary" made about the intense poverty in central Spain way back in 1933, long before Sacha Baron Cohen ever slapped a brush of a mustache on his lap and began annoying people with his Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

In yet another attempt to impress you with my cleverness, I will point out that any attempt to "document" real life in the presence of outside observers, especially those with a camera and sound crew, is never going to record anything but an imitation of that life. We clever people call this "the Observer Effect." Which brings me to the subject of Nathan Fielder's new, we'll call it a documentary, You Can See Everything. To say that it tells the story of the days leading up to Elizabeth Holmes' imprisonment for defrauding investors. 

And then it does something that Rob Reiner and Luis Buñuel and Borat never did. It peels the onion of what we know until we don't know anything, leaving us with more questions than when we began the journey in the first place. Living as we do in a world where information is as available as it could ever be, Nathan Fielder askes us to take a trip back through the veil of make-believe and into a funhouse version of what we thought we knew.  

Because it turns out that we really don't. And though I can't say that I laughed all the way through, I can say that I found the whole experience to be funny. Not exploding drummer funny, but what did I just see funny.