You Can See Everything

I keep coming back to the “who’s on first” scene. Nathan walks Elizabeth Holmes through the routine, she watches it, he laughs, and he asks her why it was funny. She can’t explain it. She still says she thinks it’s funny. I watched her decide that thinking it was funny was the right move. It felt so weird!A big part of Nathan’s thing is the pause. He sets one up and lets the other person get uncomfortable until they fill it, and that keeps things moving. She just sat there unblinking. She was so good at waiting out his pauses.I left the movie with sympathy for her, because that’s what it is to be human 🙇‍♂️. You’re meant to want someone to be good and right. When she explains the “invention” and how much she has riding on having invented something, I felt bad for her. It’s really all that she had, even when she didn’t seem to understand it or “the cloud”. She spent as much time as she could explaining that the technology just wasn’t ready. She also seemed actually very sad to be going to prison. I don’t understand her manipulation, and I’m not sure she does either.I hate Billy. Her dad brings up her rape as the reason she is how she is, and Billy shuffles him away right then. There’s a whole scene of her getting a digital avatar made, and after the rest of the movie it feels gross. I don’t like that Billy owns her image. Later you find out he’s been posting as her on Twitter because he doesn’t have the juice himself. He is so lame.What got me most is that you can try to understand how she sees the world, or you can try to keep hold of what’s actually true, and with someone like her you can’t do both. If I leaned into her version, I lost my footing on mine. To stay steady I had to stop treating her as someone to understand and start treating her as something to see through. I did that for the whole thing, and it’s lonely.