I was at a dinner party in Pacific Heights last weekend when the conversation inevitably turned to the most pressing journalistic dispute of our time: who, exactly, is responsible for the sequence in 'You Can See Everything' where Elizabeth Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, is filmed staring pensively into a stream of hot water?
The room was divided. Half my friends, still clinging to an outdated notion of documentary ethics, insisted the director must have staged it to manufacture vulnerability. The other half believed Evans, a hotel heir who bravely stood by his partner while she was convicted of massive wire fraud, organically decided to invite a camera crew into his bathroom to capture his truth.
I find the entire debate exhausting. We are so obsessed with the mechanics of authorship that we are failing to appreciate the bravery of the act itself.
For those who have not been following this pivotal cultural moment, Evans recently rebutted the documentary director’s claim that the shower scene was Evans's own idea. Evans insists it was the director's contrivance. The director insists Evans pitched it. It is a classic he-said, he-said, played out over the porcelain tiles of a luxury rental.
There is something deeply ungrateful about the public’s reaction to this gift. We spent years demanding transparency from Elizabeth Holmes, a woman who notoriously wore black turtlenecks to shield herself from our gaze. Now, her partner gives us the ultimate transparency—a full, sudsy view of the collateral damage of Silicon Valley hubris—and all we can do is argue over the storyboard credits?
I know what it is like to have your artistic vision misunderstood. Last month, over an incredibly fraught lunch with a streaming executive at Zuni Café, I pitched a docuseries about the emotional toll of carrying a canvas tote bag in a high-inflation economy. He told me it lacked stakes. He simply did not understand that sometimes the stakes are entirely internal.
That is exactly what Evans and the directors achieved in that bathroom. It was a soft launch of the post-fraud tech husband.
Investigative journalism has always given me the ick. It is so relentless, so concerned with facts and timelines and who defrauded who out of seven hundred million dollars. It completely misses the emotional truth of the moment. And the emotional truth of 'You Can See Everything' is that Billy Evans has fantastic water pressure.
He just kept asking if the lighting made his deltoids look appropriately burdened by the weight of a federal indictment.
Exactly. Marcus gets it. The deltoids were burdened. To look at Evans under that water is to see a man attempting to wash away the sins of a blood-testing startup he was not even employed by. It is practically Shakespearean.
Think of the spouses of tech visionaries who came before him. They were relegated to the background, forced to quietly manage philanthropic foundations or pretend to enjoy Burning Man. Evans refused this erasure. He demanded to be seen, literally, in his most foundational state. Or the director demanded to see him in his foundational state. Again, the 'who' is a distraction from the 'what.'
When I bring this up with my peers, I am often met with the same tiresome counterarguments. They bring up the patients who received false medical diagnoses from Theranos. They mention the billions of dollars evaporated from investors' portfolios. They cite the sheer, unadulterated scale of the deception.
But surely, we have room in our hearts for more than one kind of victim. Are we really going to pretend that being forced to clarify the creative origins of your own shower scene in a premium-cable documentary isn't its own unique kind of trauma?
We literally just needed three seconds of transition footage because the audio from the courthouse was unusable, and suddenly the guy is asking for waterproof mics.
Sarah’s words only prove my point. The media establishment is so eager to downplay the emotional labor of the subjects they exploit. They asked for a transition; Evans gave them a core memory.
We need to stop litigating the origins of art and start appreciating the bravery of a man who looked at a camera crew, looked at his loofah, and said, let's make history.
The next time you find yourself doing a Sunday reset, scrubbing your own grout and reflecting on the week's failures, ask yourself if you could be as raw, as unfiltered, and as thoroughly rinsed as Billy Evans.
I suspect the answer is no. And that, frankly, is the real crime here.