In 1998, President Bill Clinton faced questioning by a grand jury who accused him of lying about the nature of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. When the president was asked whether his lawyer had spoken falsely by declaring “there is no sexual relationship” between the pair, Clinton smiled and, raising an eyebrow, famously replied: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
In Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s sublime A24 documentary, You Can See Everything, the filmmakers spend time with another American figure who appears to have a similarly sharp eye for semantics and a slippery grasp of the truth. In 2022, Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors in her medical start-up Theranos out of billions of dollars and sentenced to over 11 years in prison. She says it’s all one big misunderstanding over the word “can”.
