I’ve Seen Everything
For weeks, Elizabeth Holmes has been making me think about Patrick Stewart. I arrived here through a series of entirely unreasonable associations.
The title of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s incredible documentary, You Can See Everything, has been following me around New York. Subway posters. Movie trailers. Ads online. Every time I saw it, I heard Patrick Stewart’s voice.
“I’ve seen everything. Yeah. I’ve seen it all.”
If you’ve seen his appearance on Extras, you probably hear it too. If you haven’t, please take a few minutes:
Watch Patrick Stewart in Extras.
Stewart plays a version of himself, talking to Ricky Gervais’s character, Andy, an extra hoping for a little help with his career. Stewart has a screenplay of his own. Inspired by Professor X, he would play a man who can control things in the real world with his mind. He has given considerable thought to using this ability to make women’s clothes fall off.
Andy keeps looking for a plot. Stewart keeps explaining that he’s seen everything.
It is painfully awkward. I love it.
Since hearing that Stewart died, I’ve been thinking about how much of his work I admire. I put Logan, with his devastating performance as an aging Professor X, among the three best superhero films ever made. But this ridiculous conversation might be my favorite thing he ever did.
There’s something magical about an actor of his stature being willing to play such an absurd version of himself. He lets all that authority, that voice, that accumulated respect, serve this deeply stupid idea. And he commits completely. The fictional Patrick Stewart sees nothing embarrassing about his screenplay. He seems to think it’s a great idea.
Gervais and the brilliant Stephen Merchant wrote the episode, but Stewart’s performance is what sends it over the top for me. I love that someone so widely respected was willing to risk looking this ridiculous.
Which brings me, somehow, back to Elizabeth Holmes.
I saw You Can See Everything on opening night, with Patrick Stewart’s voice already firmly lodged in my head. When Holmes said the title aloud, I imagined her attempting to use Professor X’s psychic abilities to control everyone around her.
This is probably not the response the filmmakers were hoping for. It brought me considerable joy.
There’s another connection in there somewhere. Stewart playing a fictional Patrick Stewart. Holmes seeming to perform a version of Elizabeth Holmes. And Fielder, who so often feels like a character Nathan Fielder invented and then committed to inhabiting indefinitely.
He is exceptionally good at making an awkward situation last longer than anyone wants to bear. Stewart would have fit right in.
I’ll remember Patrick Stewart for plenty of things. But I’m especially grateful that he lent his magnificent seriousness to this nonsense, and that, twenty years later, it can still ambush me on a subway platform.
What a wonderful way to remain in someone’s head.