In the title of his 1997 bestselling adventure tale, “Into Thin Air,” mountaineer and writer Jon Krakauer employs a double entendre so clever that its effect is extraordinary. Throughout the book, Krakauer recounts his attempt to summit Mount Everest the year earlier in what would become, at the time, the mountain’s deadliest season. I’ve been momentarily halted by that title each time I’ve picked up my tattered $5 thrift-store copy over the last few weeks. It’s witty, but not grim; accurate but also imaginative. In three words, “Into Thin Air” conveys not only the literal effect of Everest’s high altitude and how quickly the mountain can take a life, but also the ardent, almost fatuous confidence of those who choose to climb it.

The dissonance between reason and ambition is what makes “Into Thin Air” such a compelling read. For someone like myself, who knows next to nothing about climbing, Krakauer powerfully elucidates the pull of a mountain like Everest and the trance-like state in which it ensnares its adversaries. Unlike some climbers, Krakauer can wax poetic while staying honest about the stakes. He writes about mountaineering as a spiritual practice, good for the mind and body alike, while questioning why some find that clarity only by staring death in the face. In that respect, extreme climbing is an incredibly selfish endeavor. Before he begins his push for the summit, Krakauer remembers his wife, Linda, telling him before he left for Nepal: “If you get killed, it’s not just you who will pay the price. I’ll have to pay, too. For the rest of my life.”

That sentiment echoed in my mind throughout “Everest: The Other Side,” the remarkable new documentary from National Geographic, helmed by “Free Solo” and “Nyad” co-directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. The film is brutally honest in its depictions of cold human narcissism and the relentless pursuit of glory in the name of nebulous spiritual fulfillment. Yet it’s just as candid about humanity’s collective desire for all those things in one form or another.

We are an arrogant species, frustrated by our humble place in this ecosystem. And yet, we feel everything intensely. When we love, we want to take that love to the ends of the Earth. We want physical proof of emotions we cannot put into words. Maybe then all of this will mean something.

As “Everest: The Other Side” asserts, nothing in this already mystifying life is ever so simple. The film’s subjects, mountaineer Jim Morrison and his partner Hilaree Nelson, found love at the edge of the world and made a life together, with Morrison becoming co-parent to Nelson’s two young sons. But their shared lust for adventure created a prickly tension within their family unit, a strain between their passion and parentage that sits at the documentary’s emotional center.

Like those pulled by devout religion or extreme acts of faith, Morrison and Nelson are powerless before their distinct higher calling — especially with the literal highest calling of all, Everest, in their sights. They don’t just want to summit the mountain from its treacherous north face; they want to be the first people ever to ski down it. In their quest, personal glory and public vanity are forever at odds. Such a wanton, helpless display of pride makes for a character study as gripping as it is frustrating. From that disharmony, “Everest: The Other Side” forges a uniquely human story of actualization at all costs, revealing the true price of a life spent looking up and not around.

Because this is National Geographic, the film is only partially concerned with relaying that price. This documentary is made for IMAX-loving, secondhand adventure seekers. Those who want sweeping shots of impossible sights won’t be disappointed. 

But while “Everest: The Other Side” includes countless breathtaking sequences of Earth’s tallest mountain and plenty of nail-biting anxiety in the eventual summit push and ski attempt, those moments are merely the film’s selling points. The crux of this story is on Nelson and Morrison’s shoulders, and their sincerity flies in the face of good judgment and self-editing, giving viewers a palpable sense of their egos. This isn’t to say that either of them is a raging narcissist who cares only about themselves, but there’s no doubt that their sport’s seismic, life-altering dangers are on full display, warts and all.

Early in the film, Nelson tries to communicate the draw of climbing, and how fundamentally at odds it is with her role as a mother. “People ask me, ‘How do you find balance?’” she says. “There isn’t. It’s just chaos. You’re just hanging on. You want to be with your family, but you have a passion, and you want to work, and you need to make money. You’re all over the map.”

It would be easy to dismiss Nelson as selfish, or, at the worst and most damning, a bad parent. How can someone have young children and decide to part with them for two months for a climb that is about, at face value, little more than bragging rights? How can a parent let their children spend two months wondering if their mother is dead or alive?

These are easy questions to ask from the comfort of a living room or the cushion of a theater seat, but much harder to answer when you’re living the life. It’s important to remember that, in life, most of us have desires that would yank us in severe directions. It reminds me that cult experts will tell you that any of us could fall into the clutches of a cult, and those of us who argue otherwise are likely among the most vulnerable. Anyone who insists they are too self-aware to be pulled into something that goes against their own interests is admitting that they don’t know themselves or humanity very well. That’s one of life’s great mysteries: Why do we do things that we know are wrong, or bad for us? Death and taxes might be certain, but so are mistakes and regret, no matter how much we’d like to believe that we’re big enough to let go.

Conflict is ever-present in Morrison, who chooses to climb Everest despite its perils. For him, the adventure is about more than pride or titles; it’s about honor and love. The journey is intended both to strengthen his bond with Nelson and honor the memory of his late wife and their two children, who died in a horrific commuter plane crash in 2011, a decade before he and Nelson decide to attempt Everest. Recalling the aftermath, Morrison tells how climbing brought him clarity. Unable to move from the edge of his driveway, consumed by grief, he eventually found the strength to simply walk up the slight incline and into his home — a microscopic example of the human spirit’s extraordinary tenacity he hopes to commemorate in the Everest climb. 

But more tests lie ahead. The route to Everest proves demanding in heart and health. And while training together for the big summit push by climbing a lower peak in Nepal in 2022, Nelson loses her footing in an avalanche the size of a small snow drift. On a ski slope, the drift would be minor. But on a mountain, every movement is measured. Nelson is swept away and under the snow, toward a cliff. We see it happen in real time, captured on a helmet GoPro. The moment is almost unassuming in its speed, but it permanently shapes everything that follows. Nelson is lost amid a series of avalanches, and the clock starts ticking.

Counting the seconds seems futile. But climbing is futile, too. For Morrison, left to search for his partner amid the snow, hazardous ridges and cliffs, it all seems like a waste. More pain, more trauma, more memories that are left for only one person to hold onto. I was immediately reminded of what Krakauer’s wife told him by satellite phone before he began his push from Everest’s base camp. “Saying goodbye to you was one of the saddest things I’ve ever done,” he remembers her saying. “I guess I knew on some level that you might not be coming back, and it seemed like such a waste. It seemed so f**king stupid and pointless.”

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It’s hard not to dwell on that sentiment, already knowing what and who Nelson would leave behind if disaster struck. On some level, and to some people, it is all stupid and pointless. But that split second fortifies Morrison, confirming that his quest to Everest is for everyone that he’s lost, and every heartstopping moment along the way. It’s a spiritual pursuit, the kind that we make when we travel to a family member or friend’s favorite place to scatter their ashes; the kind that we make when we give eulogies, or just sit in the grass, staring into space, thinking about everything and nothing, everyone and no one. 

Some may be driven to climb Everest just to say that they did it, while others are looking for something else, something with no name. They want to pierce the heavens and reach through the atmosphere to grasp the indescribable truth that unites us all. And if they don’t make it back down to share that peace with the rest of us, it might be enough to experience it just once.

The post Are Mount Everest climbers dreamers, or just cultists? appeared first on Salon.com.

“You Can See Everything” is not your standard documentary. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s film isn’t the first nonfictional chronicle of Elizabeth Holmes’ enigmatic psyche, but it is the most revealing. Any director pointing their camera at Holmes — before or after she was convicted of fraud for her bogus Theranos blood-testing device — won’t capture the whole truth. That’s what happens when a subject is obscured by layers of semi-permeable barriers of their own making: Eventually, the image distorts. Fielder, the film’s ringmaster, has no choice but to forgo conventional documentary tactics and seek detours. Perhaps if he takes his own unorthodox approach, the two will cancel each other out, leaving something substantial behind.

But, then again, what is a “standard” documentary? In recent years, streaming’s popularity has significantly impacted the genre and how audiences perceive it. Once executives realized there was an endless cash cow to milk in true crime and tawdry scandal, a deluge of rushed, ineffective documentaries and docuseries hit the top platforms like a string of hydrogen bombs, leveling their audience’s standards and turning their taste to ash. 

Everything was and is fair game. Murder victims, abuse survivors, pyramid and multilevel marketing schemes, unsavory business practices, music festival scams, campus life, cult leaders; you name it, you can probably find a documentary on it. The sad thing is, this boom produced legitimately compelling offerings and important stories, told well, too. But that doesn’t matter when the market’s not only crowded, but recycling its wares every week. In this era, powerful, complex stories of the intrepid human spirit sit next to ephemeral tales of cheaply made, mildew-ridden leggings. And guess which option the algorithm favors?

In just shy of three weeks, “You Can See Everything” has taken a sledgehammer to this era of cobbled-together documentaries. The film is on track to become the most successful theatrically released documentary ever, staring down two Michaels (Jackson and Moore) and two nature docs (“March of the Penguins” and “Earth”) as it climbs the ranks before its international release. 

More importantly, the film has ignited endless conversation thanks to its capricious subject and equally unpredictable experimentation with form, garnering chatter about whether it may be the first documentary nominated for best picture at next year’s Oscars. As another taxing year nears its end, the popularity of “You Can See Everything” reflects audiences’ desire to go deeper than the surface level most streaming documentaries are content to skim. But the film is also testing those who see the genre as one specific thing, made one specific way. 

Fielder’s film is one of many from this year reconfiguring the wider idea of what documentaries can and should look like, away from the style monopolizing the genre of late and toward something more varied and essential. Considered alongside an excellent lineup of contemporaries, “You Can See Everything” stresses that the genre isn’t about uncovering truths, but playing with our subjective relationship to them.

That notion isn’t always easy to remember when, to many, “documentary” remains somewhat of a cinematic pejorative. Whether by a diet of snoozy docs shown in history class on a wheeled-in television from the AV room, or the genre’s reputation for being innately less thrilling than narrative filmmaking because it contends with reality over fiction, documentaries simply don’t have the best rap. Their audience generally skews older, and for some, an older crowd’s curiosities skew boring. This is partly why those ripped-from-the-headlines streaming documentaries are so popular: They reflect stories that are buzzy but fleeting, perfect for those whose attention spans are already shot.

But the idea that a documentary that isn’t detailing some recent or mysterious event is inherently tedious is a gross misconception. Documentaries are about life, and as such, their relevance is evergreen. The past informs both the present and the future. And dismissing the past as unimportant in the face of, let’s say, some hot new documentary about a man who stole $10,000 worth of orange juice from a local supermarket last Tuesday means we won’t have a present worth loving or a future worth living. The hypothetical orange juice documentary sounds interesting, but it has no value unless it can do more than regurgitate a Wikipedia article or a news story with a few worthless talking heads thrown in. Documentaries can take many forms; being an arm of journalism is just one, and often it’s not very compelling.

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Occasionally, I’ve come across friends, family and acquaintances who don’t have a strong relationship to the genre, but are curious about how to forge one. In response, I like to give two pieces of advice. The first comes from Carolyn Strachan, a filmmaker and professor who taught an ethnographic films course I took in college, and changed my relationship to the genre with one simple sentence: “The only rule of a documentary is to press record.” The second comes from me, many years later: every best-of-the-year film list should include one documentary, if not more. Once someone remembers to consider docs alongside their narrative companions, that attention reshapes their connection to the genre.

Institutions also play a role in fostering that love, too. That a documentary has never been nominated for the best picture Oscar is cuckoo bananas, pure and simple. How can such a premier establishment as the Academy claim to revere filmmaking if they’re unwilling to prop up all forms of the art? There are dozens off the top of my head, released this decade alone, that should’ve been in contention — documentaries as important and memorable, if not more, than the narrative movies nominated in the category. The double standard is why “You Can See Everything” having legitimate chances at multiple top awards next year is so exciting. This could be a watershed moment. We might witness history being made in real time, like we did when “Parasite” became the first non-English film to win the top Oscar in 2020. While such an accolade might not reroute the dire timeline we’ve lived in since then, it could open countless doors and even more minds, and deservingly so, for a film as mercurial and labyrinthine as Fielder and Oppenheim’s.

But “You Can See Everything” is far from the only doc that should be in contention, either for best picture or your own best-of list. This year has been decent for film as a whole, but fantastic for documentaries, which have surpassed 2026’s mainstream narrative films in many ways. Right now, “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” a new-old film from the great American icon William Greaves, is expanding into more theaters. It’s both an account of the past, peering into an intimate gathering of Black luminaries during the Harlem Renaissance, and a tale for right now — funny, moving and pertinent, even if it was originally filmed in 1972. Just as applicable to the present is “NAZA,” the harrowing film uncovering the extent of Israeli surveillance and war crimes, which stands to dictate which way the world will spin.

 

Historical events a little reminiscent of stereotypical docs? Want something guaranteed to cheer you up? First, don’t be so quick to dismiss. But also, try John Wilson’s “The History of Concrete” or “Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story,” two very different films helmed by two very funny people, that have as much to do with how we operate as people as they do with zany subject matter. Or, let’s say “You Can See Everything” has opened your eyes to all of the different, strange and unwieldy forms a documentary can take. 

Maybe you’re craving another doc that will turn itself inside-out, revealing an underbelly of broken mirrors. Brace yourself for “Remake,” Ross McElwee’s magnificent story of fatherhood and filmmaking forced askew. It’s my personal favorite of the year, sitting just above “You Can See Everything.” Make it a double feature if you so wish, but you might need to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling after.

But if you want facts, plain and simple, you won’t find them in any of those films. You will, however, find truths, and many of them. That’s the wonderful thing about documentaries: They might deal in reality, but the genre uses nonfictional perspective to highlight the difference between fact and truth. Reality exists in the middle, somewhere in the opaque. The thrill comes from the squint — the desperate, reflexive need to make out something in the haze. What’s laid before the viewer will never be the whole picture. Any documentary that tells you otherwise has more in common with narrative filmmaking. As it turns out, truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

The post “You Can See Everything” leads 2026’s documentary revolution appeared first on Salon.com.

Somewhere in the last two decades, the spoiler became a cottage industry. While some journalists twisted their movie and television coverage around major plot events, others tackled them head-on, writing “ending explained” and “twist revealed” articles for readers who wanted to skip to the point. But like every staple in modern life, spoiler anxiety didn’t turn ubiquitous overnight, even if it might seem that way. Capitalism’s slowly tightening grip bound us to spoiler culture. As the economy became increasingly unstable and demanded that moviegoers and television aficionados devote more time to their jobs, the average viewer naturally had less bandwidth for their cultural hobbies. Combine that bleak outcome with the advent of DVR and social media — where any event can be discussed in depth, immediately — and boom: Bye bye, watercooler.

Anyone vigilant about spoilers has adapted their own methods of avoiding them. But occasionally, there’s just no way to keep something a secret once it’s out in the world. Case in point: The second-act surprise in Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary, “You Can See Everything.” Given the film’s unprecedented access to notorious Theranos scammer Elizabeth Holmes before her 11-year prison sentence, it was already going to be a talker. But it’s a credit to the directors’ ingenuity that Holmes is simply the film’s introductory selling point. In reality — something that is already under constant speculation in the movie — it’s everything that happens after Holmes surrenders, slightly less than halfway through the three-hour runtime, that reveals “You Can See Everything” as the contemplative, shape-shifting chimera it is. 

When the documentary premiered in semi-secret at this fall’s Telluride Film Festival, viewers were asked not to reveal certain aspects in their reviews and reactions. This was, of course, unfeasible. In 2026, one can’t bring Amanda Seyfried, star of “The Dropout,” into the process of a Fielder-led documentary, show it to the public and expect that Seyfried’s presence will stay under wraps.

But this is simply another way for Fielder to toy with the viewer’s perception, lifting questions about secrecy, deception and the nature of truth from the heart of the film and dispersing them into the ether, like a kid blowing on a dandelion to make a wish. For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s any such thing as a spoiler for “You Can See Everything.” The movie’s narrative turns are so self-contained that you could know every beat of the film and still be flabbergasted by how it all unfolds. Knowing this documentary exists — that a slippery figure like Fielder is going toe-to-toe with the equally shifty Holmes — is its own “spoiler.” Assuming that would be the case, I sought out the film’s “twist” in an early review, wanting to confirm if my suspicions about Seyfried’s involvement were true.

It turns out that sitting on that knowledge for a month only aided in my experience with the movie. Knowing Seyfried will eventually show up lets the viewer watch without shock, processing every moment she’s on screen without the last-minute textual analysis that would otherwise accompany a surprise like this. This spoiler isn’t a spoiler at all. Seyfried’s presence sets fire to all the ideas the film juggles up until her introduction. Gazing into that fantastic blaze, every viewer will see something different, something new with each watch. Holmes might be the person on the poster, but “You Can See Everything” isn’t anything without Seyfried.

While the film would’ve been compelling if it were composed entirely of the 30-some days Fielder and Oppenheim spent with Holmes and her egomaniac partner, Billy Evans, in their San Diego beach rental, it would’ve only scraped the surface of Holmes’ psyche. In that relatively short time, we come to understand many things about Holmes and Evans. She is specious (perhaps unintentionally so) and charming, sitting atop a transparent partition that separates her from reality, trying unsuccessfully to reach the atmosphere below. He is governing and loathsome, with a knack for manipulation that merely foreshadows what audiences witness in the film’s second half. 

This dual character study alone would give viewers plenty to contemplate in light of what they already know or assume about Holmes — most importantly that her fraud is unquestionably a product of being a woman in a violent, dehumanizing world. But as soon as she surrenders into custody, the rumination would halt. It would be much easier for someone to project their version of the truth onto Holmes. At the end of the day, that hypothetical version of the film would make for a very special, feature-length episode of Fielder’s “The Rehearsal”; little more than a cultural curiosity, as opposed to the pool of lucid, viscous quicksand it is. But Fielder and Oppenheim wisely chose to wait it out, to see what they could uncover in time, even if it was nothing at all.

Two years later, enter Seyfried, who watches Fielder’s footage of Holmes watching Seyfried in “The Dropout” for the first time. Years removed from the project, her curiosity is clearly piqued. But what more is there to do besides lend additional color to the documentary? Fielder answers that question with his own questions, held over from the initial shoot. He wants to use Seyfried’s experience in playing a character to further investigate motive, reason, identity and truth. He wants to know more about why Holmes has chosen Evans, and what they both get from their relationship. But more than anything, he wants to understand Holmes as much as one person can possibly understand another — a patently impossible yet all-too-enticing undertaking.

As one of the finest, most challenging and surprising actors of her (or any) generation, Seyfried is game. An actor’s Faustian pact is that, by becoming someone else, they become more deeply acquainted with their true self and the nature of authenticity, a pursuit that can easily descend into rampant narcissism or crippling mental health crises. For Seyfried, who normally takes care to draw clear boundaries between her life and work — living on a farm and avoiding the usual trappings of celebrity — the task is ambitious and hazardous. And that risk is part of what makes “You Can See Everything” so gripping. By agreeing to whatever Fielder has in store, Seyfried willingly blurs the lines between art and reality. She’s engaging in a piece of phantasmagoric performance art with two raging megalomaniacs, suspecting humanity buried beneath their easygoing subterfuge. It’s both the opportunity of a lifetime and a descent into a pitch-black basement with nothing but the glow of her soul to light the way.

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Seyfried’s first order of business is to step back into the role of Holmes, recreating scenarios Fielder experienced with Holmes during production to explore the various, mercurial states of mind Holmes might’ve been in — or at least that’s what Fielder leads us to believe. Like “The Rehearsal,” the question of fact haunts these recreations. The lines he provides for Seyfried are not transcripts; they’re scripts. Seyfried and the audience must trust Fielder, while questioning that trust at every moment. Both are essential to scraping past the layers of artifice Holmes and Evans have built around themselves. Once faith hangs in the balance, Fielder can navigate the viewer and Seyfried through its opaque boundaries, taking all of us to Evans’ house for an uncomfortably intimate dinner. Here, Seyfried makes her first-ever contact with Holmes over a phone call from prison. After some time spent with Evans, her fear is as visible as her empathy for Holmes. She’s not quite sure what this means for any of them, much less herself.

Seyfried’s willingness not only to go to those uncomfortable places but to stay there is one of her great strengths as an actor. Plenty of performers will wax poetic about their methods, saying what they hope to achieve in their work — how hard they worked to identify with their character. But few convey those efforts as Seyfried can. Refusing to stop at investigating her characters alone, she’s interested in humanity as a whole, and where those roles fit into how our species operates. 

In the film’s final act, Fielder stages one last recreation, another scenario that may or may not have actually happened between him and Holmes during visiting hours at a Texas prison. Fielder shrewdly pairs the recreation with footage of Seyfried reading the script for the first time, intercutting between the two. There are no major revelations, yet the sequence is an edge-of-the-seat climax thanks entirely to Seyfried, wrestling with her work, her complicated feelings toward Holmes and her family, this project, womanhood, selfhood and identity’s fragility — all in real time.

 

Here, Seyfried’s participation poses new and obscenely complex questions about the intersection of fame and infamy. She wonders whether her performance as Holmes is instructive, destructive, or some form of both. What responsibility does she have for how Holmes is treated in prison, by the press, or by the public? None, she argues for a moment, until she peels away another layer. 

It’s critical to remember that Seyfried and Holmes are the only two women at the heart of this film. They are its entire feminine perspective. Both are mothers. Both are, to differing degrees, actors. And Seyfried — having seen the first half of the film before agreeing to participate in its latter portion; having spent time with Holmes’ repugnant partner — knows patriarchy is a key component of Holmes’ story, a tie that binds them. She might not have a responsibility to Holmes, but that doesn’t mean she can’t practice empathy toward her. 

Perhaps that’s a line other actors might not want to cross. But it’s another risk Seyfried is willing to take. A greater good is at stake beyond her own edification. What we learn is that it doesn’t particularly matter whether the interaction between Holmes and Fielder in the prison actually happened. After all this time spent pondering what’s real, Seyfried’s portrayal of Holmes emphasizes something imagined: a world that is kinder and more considerate — a universe where we can get closer to one another by leading with compassion, regardless of whether that compassion is reciprocated. Neither you nor I, nor Fielder or Oppenheim or Evans, can see everything. It’s all obscured by layers upon layers of fact, fiction, perception and question. Only Seyfried can get close enough to make out the reality underneath it all, and truth concerns her little. What matters most to her is the only thing that allows any of us to see each other: trust.

The post Amanda Seyfried is the “You Can See Everything” wild card appeared first on Salon.com.

Life is a circle that we begin drawing at birth and complete at death. Surely, you’ve heard this analogy before. It’s just one of the many poeticisms used to make sense of this amorphous existence. But less talked about are all the full circles that exist inside life’s larger ring: the mini revolutions we collect throughout the years — things that not only make up a life, but make that life worth living. Comedian Maria Bamford’s new Netflix documentary, “Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story,” is a shining ode to both the big picture and its small details, arguing that a life without detours and surprises is no life at all.

While it deals in cycles, Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley’s documentary is linear, tracing Bamford’s life from her early years growing up gifted and strange in Minnesota to her time performing idiosyncratic, character-filled stand-up, to a midlife informed by it all. And though its structure is conventional, its subject is anything but. Most comedians are — how do I put this gently — known to be some level of unwell. (Whether they understand that is another matter.) Bamford, on the other hand, has made a career out of being so deeply in touch with her mind and self that it would frighten the average neurotypical viewer if it weren’t so damn funny.

That fear is partially what “Paralyzed by Hope” seeks to scrutinize and change. Here, Bamford is as honest and casually hysterical as she’s always been, discussing mental illness with the candor such a stigmatized and distorted topic deserves. She’s unafraid to go deep and dark, naming feelings and investigating mistakes. It’s disarming and occasionally exhausting, but that’s the point: If such repetitive heaviness is difficult for the viewer, imagine how it is for the person experiencing it.

But at the risk of becoming trite, “Paralyzed by Hope” embraces the light that comes with radical honesty. For Bamford, comedy is a chance to close those mini-revolutions and understand the otherwise inconceivable by connecting with the audience. Her family and experiences are integral to her act and essential to strengthening those ties. Accepting that she’ll always be looking toward the end of life’s circle, she’s delighted to fill its contents in the meantime. As Bamford’s friend, comedian Gary Gulman, says toward the film’s end: “Those interactions are antidepressants, and she’s created so many of these little antidepressants.”

The post In her achingly honest documentary, Maria Bamford comes full-circle appeared first on Salon.com.

Of all the ludicrous things written about Sofia Coppola’s beguiling “Marie Antoinette” upon its theatrical release 20 years ago (and after being booed at its Cannes premiere, there were so frighteningly many), the most absurd is the hand-wringing over its anachronistic soundtrack. Coppola filled the film tip-to-couture-heeled-toe with songs from ’80s punk and new wave groups, creating a throughline between her own teenage preoccupations and the adolescent Queen of France’s frivolities. 

Looking back now, the decision is even more inspired than it was then: a bold, personal choice that helped Coppola’s film stand out from the otherwise stuffy welcome it was bound to receive. This was not, after all, your conventional period piece. Coppola was granted unprecedented access to film in and around the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. But beyond the exclusive entrée, Coppola — only on her third feature, but already known for her affinity for youth culture — would bring Marie Antoinette a jouissance the history books had never afforded her.

Critics, of course, didn’t see it that way. Writing about the soundtrack, The Denver Post’s Michael Booth said the music was “not interesting enough to save this bauble,” and that Coppola “doesn’t even have the conviction to remain new wave throughout.” Time Out’s Dave Calhoun professed: “The soundtrack — like the distracting cakes, costumes and production design — does everything to stress youthful decadence and nothing to throw any light on the woman who gives the film its name.” Most curtly, The San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle wrote that Coppola’s “reductive approach illuminates nothing about the queen except to suggest that she was an idiot, and portentous shots of her rushing down opulent corridors to a rock soundtrack can’t lend her stature.”

What’s funny, especially in retrospect, is how widely these men whiffed the point. Historical stature and new discoveries are irrelevant. (So, too, is mature conviction — though I’d argue Coppola displayed exactly that when she didn’t make the entire soundtrack new wave.) Coppola conveys that the answers about who Marie Antoinette was have been written into history, but overlooked by the men who most often dictate it. She was a teenage girl suddenly saddled with the fate of a country, tasked with making decisions well beyond her purview or experience. Marie Antoinette was out of her depth from the moment she set foot in France from Austria, entrusted with overseeing war and peace, money and poverty. She tried her best, did what she felt was right, and they had her head for it. What better analogy for Coppola and the bitter response to her brilliant, evergreen third film?

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Twenty years on, “Making Marie Antoinette” — which screened at this year’s New York Film Festival and premieres in theaters October 23 before streaming on MUBI November 6 — sheds ravishing new light on Coppola’s masterpiece. Co-directed by Coppola alongside her late mother, Eleanor, and drawn from over 90 hours of behind-the-scenes footage Eleanor shot during production, the documentary is an instant essential for anyone ravished by the original film or the filmmaking process. 

Up-close and personal, Eleanor’s camera reveals the massive undertaking of producing a movie at this scale, honing in on small, intricate details to convey her daughter’s meticulousness. Her footage is teeming with maternal pride, observant and heartwarming. One gets the sense that, for a filmmaking dynasty like the Coppolas, filming the production of “Marie Antoinette” is Eleanor’s version of a parent at their child’s Christmas pageant, ducking down in the aisles and contorting themselves to ensure they don’t miss a single moment. If “Marie Antoinette” says as much about its director as it does about its subject, “Making Marie Antoinette” is the perfect companion piece: A film about letting art and life stay in constant conversation, and how that dialogue makes for a rich existence. It’s the perfect example of how movies can make something as intangible as love go on forever.

Sofia and Eleanor Coppola began work on “Making Marie Antoinette” together during the pandemic. Locked away in their quarantine pod, the isolation proved the perfect opportunity to comb through hours of archival footage, stitching a story from B-roll and memories, both of which Eleanor had plenty of. A dedicated archivist of her own life via journals and film, Eleanor spent much of her time trailing her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, and children between their movie sets to document the arduous filmmaking process. She eventually broke into her own work beyond documentaries and videography, directing two narrative feature films before the pandemic began. At her daughter’s side, “Making Marie Antoinette” made progress but remained unfinished when Eleanor died in 2024. Sofia decided to finish the film as a tribute to her mother, and both women’s touch can be felt throughout — two hands held together, always.

Even those critics who panned “Marie Antoinette” 20 years ago could find something to adore here. For all the derision heaped upon Sofia’s keen directorial eye and scrupulous vision, a behind-the-scenes look only makes the details all the more impressive. It’s a production with a capital “P”: hundreds of extras, an immense principal cast, throngs of below-the-line team — costumers, production designers, historical advisors, translators — and one giant, very expensive castle that must be handled with the utmost care. One doesn’t have to hear Sofia say “this is a lot” to understand that it’s far more than just a lot. It’s visible in every shot. For a director whose previous two films were microscopic in comparison, shooting “Marie Antoinette” may as well have been going to the moon.

But that’s also what makes it such a feast. It’s a film unlike any other period piece, as sumptuous as decadent as a French pastry. One can practically taste the butter on their lips as Kirsten Dunst glides through ornate halls and indulges in raspberry-topped sweets. This surplus of opulence is what gives the film its edge, too. Think about who you were at 14. If you were thrust into a world where everything you could ever want is at your fingertips, where love blossomed as freely as the gardens adorning your magnificent estate, wouldn’t you, too, lose yourself inside the pomp and circumstance? Is that not the very feeling of being a teenager, so certain that everything and anything is possible, that when one gets a taste of the world, it’s nothing short of intoxicating?

For Sofia, the fantasy is the film. It’s integral to Marie Antoinette’s tragedy, to making the viewer empathize with a girl who had no choice but to get in over her head. In Eleanor’s camera, Sofia has that same impish desire, taking on a film so gargantuan that she can’t possibly understand that her eyes are bigger than her stomach. Eleanor watches dutifully, admiring her daughter as she leads rooms full of men, asserting that her decision is not only the best one, but the right one, because she is the person in charge.

 

It’s frightening to watch someone you care for so deeply balance all that power. But through journal entries from that time, narrated in the film by Diane Lane, the audience can piece together where the fear and the pride meet. After all, Eleanor understood from decades of experience that filmmaking is, most often, a boy’s club — even when a woman is at the helm. And as the long, 50-some-day production schedule rolls on, the viewer can feel Eleanor’s anxiety ease, allowing pride to take full control. Sofia has this, and Eleanor’s job might be the best one on set: watching the daughter she raised come into her own.

“Maybe making movies is a way of moving back and forth, in and out, of linear time,” Eleanor says in one of her journal entries. It’s a reference not only to the period production, but to her daughter’s thoughtful directorial anachronisms, the very decisions that would make “Marie Antoinette” last for 20 years and beyond. What a glorious, warm and strangely pertinent observation — something Eleanor couldn’t have understood the relevance of at the time. Here we are, two decades on, watching her documentary further cement Sofia’s film as the modern classic it is. More than a meta perspective or conventional behind-the-scenes doc, “Making Marie Antoinette” is a tender portrait of familial love from mother and daughter alike. Now, the pride moves in both directions — with Sofia as reverent of her mother’s work as Eleanor was of hers — meeting in the middle to stretch into the future.

The post “Making Marie Antoinette” is a tale of two Coppolas appeared first on Salon.com.

Amid a social media era where people often feel more unheard and misunderstood than ever, so much about director David Greaves’ documentary, “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” feels like a relic: a snapshot of a time when intellectuals gathered in person for lively, productive debate. 

The film, newly restored from Greaves’ father William’s original offering, captures a staggering array of luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance reflecting on the period during a four-hour cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s townhouse in 1972. That salon included pianist Eubie Blake, artist Romare Bearden, activist Louise Thompson Patterson, playwright Irvin C. Miller, journalist Gerri Major, and librarian Jean Blackwell Hutson grappling with the legacy of the era and the issues it raised that persisted even then. 

It’s an intimate, engaging discussion among people with different approaches, styles, and even points of view while, as Brienne Adams, assistant professor of Black Studies at Georgetown University, put it, “still having the goal of Black humanity and liberation at the forefront.”

Among those sources of conflict expressed in “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” are the years that comprised the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement as it was often referred to at the time. To hear one person tell it, it was the 1920s. Another suggests that it really found its footing in the ‘30s, while someone else considers its genesis around the 1910s, punctuated by the Silent Protest Parade of 1917.

There are also ponderings on the Black journalist agenda; thoughts about the intentions and tactics of political activist Marcus Garvey; concerns that writer and anthropologist Zora Neale, sculptor Augusta Savage, poet and novelist Countee Cullen and others were minimized. There’s a rich conversation about the efficacy of influential figures such as gangster Casper Holstein and writer Carl Van Vechten, who helped finance and support, respectively, members of the Harlem Renaissance and their work. With Van Vechten, author of the controversial 1926 novel, “Ni**er Heaven,” comes the question of how white patronage impacted the cultural output of the era.

Relatedly, writer and journalist George Schuyler cogitates on his prominent 1926 essay in The Nation, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” and poet and activist Langston Hughes’ follow-up, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” as urgent critiques of the white relationship to Black art.

It doesn’t take long in “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” for the many voices in Ellington’s home to get louder and start to overlap as boozy drinks are poured and the elder Greaves flits from one side of the room to another to catch each rebuttal and vivid recollection. Decades after the Harlem Renaissance, it had to be remarkable to witness such insight and impassioned thoughts about the era from those who lived it — and in the same year that the National Black Political Convention raised the alarm on some of those same concerns once again. 

In 2026, though, at a time when social media too often mangles critical thinking and disagreement, it is downright extraordinary. It’s also nostalgic in a way that finally seems imperative in today’s Hollywood that reeks of hollow, monetized sentimentality about its past.  

What is seen in “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” is, to borrow Schuyler’s words in the film, “a mark of a civilized community,” people challenging each other on everything from their art to their politics. He recalls that every ethnic group in Harlem had “intellectual centers” for such discussions.  

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It’s not that Black critical engagement doesn’t still happen every day, even online. It’s that it’s much more difficult to parse through an algorithmic funnel of opinions and perspectives that can often appear half-formed or entirely outside their context. 

“Social media allows for more voices to be heard, but algorithmically situated based upon someone’s interests where they’re entering into the conversation,” Adams said. 

Just as Harlem Renaissance figures broached subjects such as the white influence on Black art and questions about what defines Black art or a Black artist, particularly inside a white business establishment, there are still concerns about the representation of Black art and stories. The conversations about Issa Rae’s trajectory from YouTube to HBO and Tyler Perry keeping many Black actors employed, though consistently coming up against criticism over the quality of his work, both come to mind. 

But recent pushback and critiques of offerings such as the new “A Different World” series and the “Michael” movie once again raise valid concerns about the state of critical debate on Black art. What it too often comes up against are parasocial responses, antagonism, doxing, or a preciousness around the critique, particularly at a time when Hollywood has rolled back on Black storytelling. 

Adams, whose background in digital studies examines interiority in Black cultural productions and fandom expression as an example of Black digital knowledge production and public intimacy, said that the rise of content creators is one component of those responses. 

“If they are content creators that are having these conversations because getting eyes on their content can be tied to monetary gain, that can sometimes lead to salaciousness in the approach to the ‘civilized’ society, right?” she explained. 

That motivation, Adams added, can lead to a need to demonstrate “the most,” “whether that is the most right, the most devoted (in the case of fandom), the most knowledgeable, the most (insert marginalized identity here). People resort to antagonisms to demonstrate their hierarchy of ‘most.’” That, in turn, results in a collapse of intellectual curiosity and humility that “undergirds critical thinking,” Adams concluded.

 

There’s also the distinction that, unlike some of the most notable figures of the Harlem Renaissance, social media assembles people from across various classes, education and media literacy levels, professions with sundry access to information and art itself. Additionally, motivation, even beyond the content creation monetization that Adams pointed out, can sometimes be connected exclusively to the idea of supporting and amplifying Black art and artists while deprioritizing inquiries of their merit. 

Contrarily, Harlem Renaissance figures such as writer Zora Neale Hurston, Hughes and others were able to gather in more intimate spaces among people they often already knew from the neighborhood with similar interests and scholarship, regardless of whether they agreed. In fact, they often didn’t. 

Where writing critiques in news media like The Nation, Fire!, and The Crisis, which ran a Black symposium with questions about how “The Negro” should be portrayed in Black art in 1926, was a way to engage with other intellectuals; social media broadens that audience and more quickly. Plus, like today when many outlets require that their readers pay for subscriptions to access essential journalism, essays from the Harlem Renaissance and even the 1972 gathering in “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” restrict engagement based on intellect or economics. 

“The artists and scholars of the Harlem Renaissance are still this small, kind of enclaved people that maybe most of them went to Howard who are having very similar types of training and conversation,” Adams said. 

Add to that, most patrons across the racial spectrum who engaged with the work and workers of the Harlem Renaissance didn’t have as much access to their personal lives to form parasocial relationships with them as fans have today. Back then, it was also often about critiquing Black art for Black art’s sake and its possibilities, when today critical discussions seem to urgently hinge on Black art for the sake of its preservation. Those distinctions impact the response to critical discussion — from the in-fighting on BookTok to the arguments on Threads. 

Still, concern about the increased dearth of Black artists and Black art is legitimate. Filmmaker Nina Lee said that Hollywood gatekeepers preclude greenlighting certain Black films until they determine that others of their ilk make a splash at the box office. But that reality is too often used to establish a tenderness around criticism of the Black art that does manage to come down the pipeline. 

However, that delicacy around discussing the flaws of Black art can, as Adams considered, illustrate a propriety to the white for the sake of white acceptance. “The preciousness around critiquing it still centers white gazes to say that we have to be presentable and respectable in ways,” she said.  

None of that is conducive to the type of “civilized community” Schuyler reflects upon in “Once Upon a Time in Harlem.” While some have managed to successfully carve out their own niche spaces online for critical debate, from podcasts to more curated social media discussions and personal Substacks, the recognition that it serves to help push the art forward is too often lost. 

That contemporary disconnect is what makes Greaves’ documentary that more profound. It deepens audiences’ understanding of healthy, effective debate through a reflection of our not-so-distant past at a time when too many are consumed by self-aggrandizement rather than the roadmap those who came before them already laid out. As Major says in the film, “They’re going to lose if they cannot profit from the struggles that we went through.” 

The post What “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” can teach us about arguing over Black art appeared first on Salon.com.

In the first episode of his hit HBO series, “The Rehearsal” — a show about evaluating the outcomes of hypothetical real-life situations — comedian Nathan Fielder admits, “I’ve been told my personality can make some people uncomfortable, so I have to work to offset that.” For Fielder, who is equal parts lovably strange and dryly hilarious, offsetting other people’s discomfort can be a sizable task. It’s not easy to go through life in a double consciousness, hyperaware that one’s behavior might offend or unease. “Humor is my go-to instinct,” Fielder says about trying to reassure others. “But every joke is a gamble.”

Consider, then, the overlap between Fielder and someone like Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the bogus blood-testing company Theranos, who was convicted of swindling hundreds of millions of dollars from investors with her purportedly revolutionary blood-analysis device. Even before her downfall, Holmes drew the media’s attention with her wide, unblinking eyes, bold red lip, deep voice and stilted speech — all of which became parody-ready upon her indictment. But all the more perplexing was Holmes’ reticence to admit guilt when caught with hands as red as her lipstick, talking herself in circles in pursuit of her truth. Her statements always seemed misaligned with the evidence, as if she were so convinced of her company’s virtue that she didn’t care about the eerie dissonance between her reality and the world’s. If Holmes was indeed playing a character she made up, as many people speculated, she was a skilled method actor. 

Sitting just inches apart around a San Diego beach rental’s dinner table in Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim’s magnificent new documentary, “You Can See Everything,” Fielder and Holmes look decidedly comfortable with one another. They share an ease and rapport neither has readily exhibited on camera before — certainly not around virtual strangers. But while they may not share many overt similarities, the strange duo align in their mutual slipperiness. 

Before them lie components of Theranos’ blood-analyzer, which Holmes hopes to turn into a new product after her 11-year prison sentence, set to start 34 days after filming begins. Trying to explain the device, and how her claims of its efficacy were misread by investors and the public, Holmes once again can’t translate her thoughts into words that make sense to Fielder. Instinctually, Fielder makes a joke. “Isn’t it funny that I hosted a show about business scams, and now you’re in trouble for a business scam?” Holmes remarks that she hadn’t thought about it until now, and the tension lifts as her frustration dissipates. Despite his well-intentioned wisecrack — or perhaps because of it — Holmes can relate to her new associate. Somehow, Fielder can see her.

But which version of her Fielder — and, by extension, the audience — sees, and which version is the truest, remains up for debate. The title “You Can See Everything,” taken from a text Holmes sent to Fielder during production, is an obvious red herring. This documentary is about a woman notorious for her deception. We, of course, can’t really see anything. 

And yet, it’s all on display. Fielder, Oppenheim, and the viewer share the task of putting those pieces together legibly, to tell Holmes’ story in a way that hasn’t already been done for her by the media, Hulu’s limited series “The Dropout,” and Holmes’ muddled observations. As the film plays out, its three-hour runtime gliding by in a flash, it becomes painfully clear that this is what Elizabeth Holmes has wanted all along: for someone to tell her story in a way she can’t — not because she doesn’t want to, but because she herself is unclear about what that story is. Breaking through Holmes’ tight circle of dubious companions, Fielder pulls at every thread he can, attempting to unravel a greater truth from life’s gnarled yarn. As he gains steady footing on the margin dividing observation and manipulation, aiming the camera at either side, Fielder uncovers something deeply, cosmically sad: Holmes can’t seem to tell the difference between the two.

That does not, however, mean she doesn’t want to try. Holmes is intent on letting the cameras see as much of her life as possible, not only to prove the innocence she’s maintained all along, but to show that she has nothing to hide. She understands that the world sees her a certain way, a way she doesn’t understand — or, in the case of the infamous photo of her holding a vial of blood between two fingers, outright refutes — but that people’s perception is entirely out of her control. Maybe emerging from hiding for the first time in seven years with a full-scale documentary team isn’t such a bad idea. Five weeks out from a decade in prison, what’s the worst they could uncover?

“You Can See Everything” isn’t so much about big, jaw-dropping revelations as it is about the people behind them, and the assortment of personality and/or neurodevelopmental disorders fueling their actions. Holmes raves about her husband, San Diego hotel-chain heir William Evans, whose ego takes up most of the space in their beachside rental. When Fielder asks how he and Holmes met, Evans relays murky details of a 2017 party where the two spoke for an hour before he realized who Holmes was, even though he’d toured the former Theranos building the day before. 

Later, during a visit from Holmes’ parents, Fielder asks Holmes’ father, Christian, about her former lover and Theranos business partner, Sunny Balwani. Evans immediately interjects, trying to halt and redirect the conversation. Persisting, Fielder asks Christian to pinpoint a turning point in his daughter’s life. “That’s an easy one,” Christian says, confessing that the turning point came when Holmes was sexually assaulted at 19, a crossroads that Holmes admits had a hand in her dropping out of Stanford and starting Theranos.

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When Evans derails the conversation again, a new question pops up — an occurrence in this film as natural and frequent as breathing. Is Holmes’ husband trying to maneuver the situation because he cares for his wife, or because his behavioral patterns mirror those of Balwani and Holmes’ assailant? All three men directly impacted Holmes at vulnerable points in her life, and from the film’s outset, it’s clear Evans savors controlling the narrative, whether through Holmes’ life’s work or simply the way she whisks eggs for scrambling. What’s constantly baffling is how much affection Holmes has for her repugnant husband, no matter how much he twists stories or alienates the film crew. One could say the two share a talent for deception, but it always feels more complex and tricky than that, as if it would be too easy to say that Holmes and Evans get along because they’re both hucksters, skilled in fabrication. They both get something out of this relationship. Whether it’s love is anyone’s guess. 

What’s brutally, painfully clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that Holmes has not yet learned how to use her own voice. She knows how to speak, dictate orders and ideas. (And, obviously, how to fool powerful people.) But Holmes doesn’t grasp where her ideas end, and someone else’s influence begins. She personifies a complete lack of identity, so irrevocably tied to her inventions, physical or otherwise, that, compared to Fielder — whose work is marked by his own keen self-awareness — she looks like the diametrical opposite. Holmes is the tragedy to his comedy. Naturally, the two are intrinsically connected.

All of the questions about who’s running Holmes’ show take new, thorny form as the film blossoms in its latter half — the portion that, thanks to a surprise guest, makes the movie one of the most startling and memorable exercises in metafiction ever concocted. But the film’s most heartbreaking and pivotal scene comes in its first third, before Holmes surrenders for her prison sentence, when Fielder gathers her and Evans on the couch to show them Abbott and Costello’s famous “Who’s on First?” act. 

Fielder tells Holmes that he was reminded of the bit the day before, when Holmes tried to describe the science and intention of Theranos in front of its deconstructed prototype. Holmes has never seen the routine, and gives it a few chuckles. But when Fielder asks her to explain the joke — that “Who” is the name of the baseball player on first base, yet sounds like a question, confusing the two men — and why it’s funny, she can’t. As Fielder clarifies the punchline, Holmes breaks down in tears across from him, frustrated that she can’t understand.

In this moment, Fielder conjures a world of empathy for his subject, again posing questions about what gets lost between two people who believe they’re being perfectly clear, yet aren’t making sense to one another. Many things about Elizabeth Holmes aren’t certain. But what’s irrefutable is that she knows how lonely it is not to be able to communicate the world inside her head, and how painful it is not to understand others the same way. It’s no wonder that, when she meets someone who can bridge that gap, she wants to make a monument of it — be it a business, a marriage, a film or a profession of love.

Though the questions persist: Is this all part of Holmes’ master plan? Is she letting the cameras in to dupe us, to make us feel sorry for someone whose actions caused real harm? Maybe. Those seeking clear answers will leave with nothing more than new questions, but that’s the glorious part of “You Can See Everything.” In an era when documentaries are made for everything and nothing, it’s critical to remember that searching for reason in something as immense as the human condition is a fool’s errand. 

Fielder might be fascinated by motive and rationale, but he’s primarily interested in circumstance, and he understands Holmes’ circumstances perfectly. His film is a self-reflexive study of the inability to act as people expect — of masking and deception. How much of life is a performance? Can anyone truly be themselves when society’s bylaws not only dictate proper human behavior but also how successful anyone can be in something as complicated and unknowable as life itself? In seeking the truth, all one finds is more differences, more judgment. Sure, we can see everything. But whether we really should is another question entirely.

The post “You Can See Everything” and the tragedy of Elizabeth Holmes appeared first on Salon.com.

From the moment Alex Gibney announced he was working on “Musk” in 2023, it became one of the most anticipated documentaries around – and a source of trepidation for its titular subject, tech mogul Elon Musk. But we may have underestimated how far the world’s wealthiest man and his ilk would go to prevent audiences from seeing it.

Weeks before “Musk” hit theaters, its distributor, Bleecker Street, couldn’t buy ads on TikTok, YouTube, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram or, here’s a shocker, Musk’s own X. A Hollywood Reporter story published on Sept. 25 made YouTube and Meta reverse course – a rare case of two media giants shamed into living up to their free-speech claims.

But this attempted media suppression shows “Musk” has struck a nerve, despite its namesake dismissing it as a “hit piece that misses.”

It was not lost on Gibney that at the same time that was happening, Zuckerberg, Musk and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos were dining with Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping at the White House. He’s confronted gravely perilous corruption and dangerous figures in previous, fearless documentaries such as  2019’s “Citizen K,” about a Russian oligarch who was crushed by Vladimir Putin, and 2015’s “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.”

What happened to Bleecker Street, then, is both familiar to Gibney and extraordinarily alarming. “You can see how a few platforms coalescing around the endorsement of what these tech viziers are doing decide that a criticism of tech power is somehow political and can’t be allowed in terms of open discourse on their platforms,” Gibney told Salon. “So that was really disconcerting.”

It’s shaping up to be a dark autumn for Silicon Valley’s villains. In early December, Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” turns our attention to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, played by Andrew Garfield.  

Meanwhile, “Musk” was recently joined in theaters by Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” in which Jeremy Strong portrays Zuckerberg as a soulless ghoul prioritizing clicks over user safety. In “You Can See Everything,” notorious prankster Nathan Fielder shadows notorious (for different reasons) Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she went to prison. 

Gibney also profiled Holmes in his 2019 work “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” which adds another layer of coincidental symmetry: Fielder’s film hits theaters on Oct. 16, the same day “Musk” opens nationwide.

But “Musk” is unquestionably a tougher watch, and given its subject’s extensive integration into the second Trump administration, it can’t help but be political.

Of course, “Musk” isn’t campaigning for anything except our need to confront the existential threat posed by one man exercising significant control over our media and our military.

A chorus of testimony from people who were once closest to Musk builds a profile of a megalomaniacal con artist. Two of Musk’s most incisive critics, his ex-wife Justine Musk and former right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair, describe him as a gaslighter and a nuke, respectively. 

But perhaps the most damning testimonial comes from Musk himself – or rather, existing audio recordings of Musk delivered by a CGI version of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, since he refused to participate.

All of it boils down to simple questions Gibney poses at the film’s outset: How could Musk assume so much power, and why have we given it to him? I discussed those questions with Gibney, and what they taught him about Musk and our penchant for enabling men like him, in a wide-ranging conversation transcribed below.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Salon: You’ve done a documentary on Putin. You did one on Scientology, a famously litigious organization. You have a vast filmography featuring subjects who might have taken issue, or have taken issue, with what was said in your documentaries. Where does this rank in terms of threat level, legal or otherwise?

Gibney: Well, high. I mean, when just before “Going Clear” was released, the Church of Scientology took out full-page ads in the New York Times and the L.A. Times with a big picture of me, sort of denouncing me. And there were people, you know, who would pop up in dark parking lots, you know, sort of accosting me, trying to kind of destabilize me psychologically. But I think in this case, he’s the richest man in the world. He has a lot of resources… And he has this platform, Twitter, which has become a kind of Thunderdome of hate and vitriol, and that activates, you know, unpredictable characters who sometimes act on their own…

That said, I don’t want to exaggerate what’s happened to me so far. Other people put themselves at greater risk than I, in the sense that they came forward and appeared on camera.

One of the things that you said in other interviews, and I think you actually said this in the documentary as well, is that you used to be a fan of Elon Musk’s products.

I mean, I looked at him from afar. I have some history on this whole electric car thing because I was brought in long ago to help with the editing of a doc called “Who Killed the Electric Car,” which is about GM’s first foray into the world of electric cars. A woman I met on that film, Jessie Deeter, later produced a film called “Revenge of the Electric Car,” and Elon Musk is in that.  And Jessie, when she worked with him on that, was a big fan. [Deeter is also a producer on “Musk.”]

(Courtesy Bleecker Street Film / Gregg Segal)

So, you know, I had a certain connection to him. And I’m a big electric car guy. I own one — not a Tesla— but I own one, and I had a Tesla Powerwall in my house. I also sort of liked the kind of mumbling charisma that he had for a while, because he seemed like very much a regular guy. He was joking with people around on Twitter and stuff like that.

That said, he could also do unpredictable, chaotic and sometimes offensive things. But largely speaking, my view of him was positive. But I was interested in the fact that he accumulated so much power, and so that was the basis on which I dug in back in 2022.

Do you think that his ability to amass this much power is related to the fact that he is doing it in the American capitalist system, or do you think he could have done it in any other place in the world?

Well, I mean, there are a lot of intersections of opportunities for Elon Musk, and I also think he discovered, to use a phrase of his, the anomaly in the matrix for the American system. And that is money. He discovered that not only can you get a lot of money from the federal government, but if you have a lot of money, you can use it to influence sometimes how much money you get from the federal government or state governments. So I think there was that.

The other big thing is that in America we also have a kind of grudging admiration for the P.T. Barnum-like qualities of certain larger-than-life entrepreneurs, you know, and you see that a lot in Silicon Valley . . . That is a kind of cultural trope in this society for which I think we have a weakness. We sort of like to see them trick us all, though we also do like to see them go down after they’ve tricked us. So I think for all those reasons that maybe Elon was able to succeed here in a way that really exploited some of the flaws in our system and our psyche.

There’s also a propensity in our culture to believe in some superhuman aspect of genius, which I think your documentary gets at very well.

Yeah, it’s also that our weakness for money, or the power of money, in this culture also causes us somehow to think that if you’re wealthy, you’re also wise rather than just ruthless, right?

I often think of that famous line from “Citizen Kane,” where Orson Welles is joking with somebody, you know, having been very successful playing this William Randolph Hearst character, who said, “It’s no trick making a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money.” Meaning,  if you’re ruthless and determined, you can make a lot of money. Doesn’t mean you’re a genius, and it doesn’t mean that you’re a tech genius either. 

I also think Elon Musk, having seen the ascent of Steve Jobs, was sort of defining himself in that way too – or going back to Thomas Edison, who had his own P.T. Barnum-like qualities in terms of inventing a character for himself to play. It’s not just the investor; it’s the inventor.

“Musk” runs for almost four hours. Did you always know it would be that long?

No. In fact, I had a cut of the film in the spring of 2024 that was under two hours. We were moving to release that and put it into the fall festivals. Then, in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump is nearly assassinated, and Musk hitches his wagon to the Trump train. And my friends at HBO said, “You’re not done. You have to follow this story because it could go to places that you don’t expect, and having spent as much time as you have, you have to follow it to at least a moment of greater conclusion.”

So I did, and that ended up being the reason that it’s at such a length. You see patterns from the first film that then repeat themselves, but on a much larger scale, in the second film. Suddenly economic power meets political power, economic and technological power meets political power, and that is the making of an epic story.

In addition, it just so happened that as he embarked on his political project, a lot of people that I was talking to in the background, trying to persuade them to come forward, did come forward because they saw some of the more problematic aspects of Musk wielding power as part of MAGA world. That gave the story a kind of human dimension as well.

Weirdly, you know, I was having trouble kind of putting it all together, and I didn’t really get a sense of how to shape it until I watched Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” which in itself was a kind of take on the tech bros. That helped me kind of find a way forward in terms of what became a kind of epic narrative.

How so?

Well, you know, you start with a scientist who wants to do something big and important. And there’s even a sense of idealism about his ambition. But then he literally creates a monster, and the whole enterprise becomes utterly reckless and irresponsible and all about his own sort of grandiosity. Rather than a mission that might help people, it becomes about him.

What are you hoping this documentary will do in terms of making people a little bit more aware of who Elon Musk is and getting at the man behind the curtain, so to speak?

Well, I mean, it is an agent provocateur. I don’t provide a solution, but I do provide, I think, a pretty compelling story, which asks the kind of fundamental question I posed at the beginning, which is, how did this guy get so much power, and why did we give it to him? Because it’s both about him and it’s about us, and it asks some discomforting questions about how literally existential power rests in the hands of one man who is increasingly chaotic, unhinged, and seemingly pursuing power without reason. There’s a chilling moment at the end of the film where somebody asks him, “Why have you accreted so much power?” And he literally can’t answer the question…

He’s a very peculiar character who’s a chaos agent. But we’ve allowed him to become normalized in a way.

I remember writing about him being on “Saturday Night Live” and people shrugging it off, like, “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal.” But it was a very big deal. Those kinds of things make him into a character when the reality is he has massive access to power.

And he’s saying things, even on “Saturday Night Live,” that were patently untrue… Even when he says, “Did you think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?” Well, there’s a funny hidden message there, which is kind of discomforting if you really think about it. Like, if you want to drive a Tesla, be prepared to endure a lot of performative cruelty from me, including cruelty that may end up killing people. . .  That’s a pretty brutal message, honestly, for “Saturday Night Live.” But it was a joke, right? And that’s the genius, in a way, of Elon Musk: he’s constantly saying stuff that is deadly serious and a joke at the same time.

Speaking of that, the images and the joke, let’s talk about using the [CGI] avatar. I remember when the news first broke about that, someone said, “Well, I wonder if that’s Alex kind of trolling Musk back.”

I mean, it’s kind of a troll-back, yeah. In a way, it’s kind of investing in him, playing in his sandbox, because he didn’t agree to appear.

And I should make it clear, as I tried to do in the film, that what we hear from him are actual audio recordings of him. In other words, they’re not AI-confected answers. We didn’t ask AI what Elon would say. We’re taking real audio recordings, but how to couch that visually? And we took our cue, having done all this research into stuff that Elon said, from something he kept going over again: This idea that we’re likely living in a simulation. So I thought, OK, how about a simulated interview?

And yes, he’s famous for trolling people. He’s famous for creating memes. What was it he said in 2020 on Twitter? He said, you know, parodying “Dune,” he said, “He who controls the memes, controls the universe,” right? OK, well, here’s a meme for you, Elon, of you.

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What, if anything, about this documentary may help illuminate a few things for people, regardless of their political leanings, as we approach the midterms?

I mean, this should be our concern, whether you’re from the left or the right, is giving people unaccountable power. Also, this whole idea that our politics and, indeed, our Department of Justice and our Department of Defense can be utterly transactional.

We’re not getting the best that money can buy. We’re getting what money can buy. Period. In other words, the military stuff that you’re seeing is a third-rate frontier AI technology being fully integrated into our Department of Defense. And why is the worst technology being integrated? Because Elon Musk is literally paying for political advantage. So it’s a payback system, and we should all be outraged about that, left, right, or otherwise.

And now you’re seeing him trying to buy the midterms. He’s spending way more now than he did for the presidential campaign in 2024, and in part that’s to get more money for himself in the form of military contracts. But also, he knows that a reckoning is coming for him if the Democrats take over the House and the Senate, and there’s going to be a lot of investigations into him for corruption and abuse of power, taking our information, particularly possibly relating to DOGE, and doing God knows what with it.

Our whole system is built on a system of checks and balances, and the idea that the government is our instrument for making a better world, rather than, you know, making a few people rich…

But I think that what’s changed now with Trump is that the Department of Justice has become a protection racket for those who flatter and ally themselves with the president, and an instrument of revenge for those who oppose the president. You can’t depend on it as a kind of law-enforcing mechanism, and that may be the scariest thing of all. . . What we’re talking about is Putin’s Russia here, right? And if people want to avoid that, then I would strongly urge them to go out to the polls. Because this is a rogue administration that goes beyond any kind of sense of party affiliation. It’s a rogue administration that’s literally destroying our democracy.

“Musk” is playing in theaters nationwide.

 

The post Alex Gibney’s “Musk” asks why we gave Elon Musk so much power appeared first on Salon.com.

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