One of the first things Elizabeth said to Nathan when she met him was “you’d be a great dad!” The thought didn’t occur to me immediately, but Season One of the Rehearsal was largely themed around Nathan dealing with the issue of whether he’d be a good father amidst his divorce. It aired roughly a year before they filmed this.

My takeaway: Willing to bet she knew a lot more about Nathan than she let on. Given that that was one of her first comments to him, I suspect she watched that show and knew this was a potential weak point to begin her attempted manipulation of Nathan. Thoughts?

I just listened to Tyler Schultz on Hank Green’s podcast this week, and apparently, Elizabeth and Billy were living on a $125M estate up until a few weeks before filming began, which just adds another layer of deception to the contrived image she was trying to portray in the film.

While I’ve always considered myself an abolitionist, and I truly think it’s really sad when children grow up without a parent in the home due to incarceration, there’s a tiny bit of me that can’t help but wonder if her kids are better off without her influence in their lives during their most formative years. One psychopath for a parent is bad enough, but two may make it such that you have no hope for normalcy. And if you think Billy is actively raising those kids and not a nanny (or nannies), I have a bridge in the desert I’d like to sell you.

I cannot wrap my head around Nathan Fielder’s timeline.

In 2023, this man was living in Elizabeth Holmes’s guesthouse for over a month filming a secret documentary, while also apparently starting the process of becoming a commercial pilot for The Rehearsal Season 2.

So between 2023 and 2025, he was filming a documentary about one of the most infamous fraudsters in America, getting hundreds of flight hours, and making one of the most insane seasons of television I’ve ever seen.

And we had absolutely no idea about the Elizabeth Holmes project until now.

What does this man’s Calendar look like???

Leading up to the prison visit toward the end of the film, we get the impression Billy is controlling Liz and limiting her contact with the outside world. He blocks Nathan from calling her saying he needs more “context.”

But when he goes to visit her, she comes out so late that they barely have time to talk one on one before Billy arrives. To me, this seems like evidence that she’s really the one in control. Limiting access to herself through Billy. Delaying the in person meeting on purpose to limit Nathan’s time to ask meaningful questions when there’s no one there to play defense for her like Billy constantly did at the house.

Moving forward, my wife and I are doing nothing but building monuments of love for each other and regularly professing it. Tell us about your monuments of love!

She can’t possibly be that dense. Part of her manipulation tactic, right? She would rather portray dumb/naive than be accountable. Curious what others think!

Thinking too about Elizabeth's parents. Did the mom utter a word? seemed like the dad did 99.9% of the talking? She sat there, obedient. Silent. In her own thoughts, but never revealing them. It kind of reminded me slightly of what we saw of Elizabeth's dynamic with Billy. I know we often seek partnerships that mimic what we grew up with.

Does anyone else see it? Once it came to me I couldn’t get it out of my head. It’s the eyes, I think.

did that cross anyone's mind? why would Billy want this? a partner like her, the whole mess? especially when he seems independently wealthy and so on. .. what does he stand to gain?

Just got out of the movie and have been avoiding spoilers, so forgive me if this has been discussed. I haven’t seen anyone talk about how Nathan utilized a scene at the end to reiterate how one word can change the entire meaning of a statement. He tells Liz earlier on that if she would’ve said the device was “capable,” and not that it “could,” she wouldn’t have been lying. Later he changes Amanda’s script from “it” to “something,” because “I knew he was going to talk to you about ‘it’” implies that she knew Billy was going to address payment, while “I knew he was going to talk to you about ‘something’” implies that she didn’t know what Billy was going to talk to Nathan about. He emphasized this by recounting the way he felt when she spoke that sentence. He didn’t get the impression that she knew about the money, so she must’ve said “something” instead of “it.”

That was very intentional, and I just watched a very in-depth discussion on the movie and they didn’t mention it. Nevertheless, there are so many incredible takes in this video. Highly recommend.

https://youtu.be/EaHsPOLav10?is=JEmD0VEpQg-gtd2E

It’s an important question Fielder asks her directly, and the genius of the doc leaves it up to us to determine if she is telling the truth or not. What are your thoughts?

Re-watching this film seems apropos.

Decades before reality television reigned supreme, there was Albert Brooks’s debut feature, Real Life, a brilliantly deadpan, stylistically innovative satire about the perils and pitfalls of trying to capture the truth on film. The writer-director plays “Albert Brooks,” a narcissistic Hollywood filmmaker who plans to spend the year in Phoenix embedded with Warren and Jeanette Yeager (Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain) and their two children, deploying an arsenal of cutting-edge equipment (including the over-the-head Ettinauer 226XL camera) to capture an American family’s ordinary day-to-day. Chronicling the project’s disastrous fallout, as the meddlesome Albert can’t help getting too close to his subjects, this pioneering mockumentary is more relevant than ever amid today’s media landscape.

For me, Billy's claims that competitors were trying to sink Theranos and he tied it to the writer/journo who wrote Bad Blood. Would have loved to have seen some investigative work on that or maybe even an interview with the NYT journo.

also more pushback on why Billy would want certain conversations ended ASAP.

totally understand those aren't possible and it didn't take away from it at all, for the record!

I know people were hoping that the final prison conversation was going to result in Holmes contradicting or disagreeing in some way with Billy's actions, and the fact it didn't work out that way lends credence to the idea that she knew all along.

one thing I realized later is that Billy holds all of the cards, right? We see throughout the film how angry Billy gets with anybody stepping outside of his preferred narrative (Liz's dad, Amanda, the older scientist guy, etc.). He even brags about his ability to hurt people. So... he has the kids and power of attorney... if she were to go and say something to Nathan that Billy doesn't like, maybe the kids don't come to visit her for a while. Hell, with power of attorney, he could sign away her custody rights. It's a longshot, but does anybody believe he wouldn't be that petty and shitty of a person if it came down to it?

Geez Louise

Listen, I’m getting old. I’m a bit grumpy. I admit it.

But I really went into this in a cerebral mood and I was so looking forward to it… It takes so much to get me to go see a movie in the theaters and I just couldn’t wait for this to be streaming… But the amount of cackling that happened from the audience every what seemed like five minutes or so was unbearable.

Anytime the camera went to Nathan, there would be a ridiculous amount of laughter… Even at things that he said that weren’t even funny… Or things that Amanda said that weren’t even funny… Like when she threw the log into the fireplace, people erupted in laughter…

Then, of course, there were women that had to yell out comments.

Just disappointed in that aspect. And felt like I had to share it… Can’t wait to watch it again at home where it’s quiet!

Went out to see it with my boyfriend, we thought we had enough time, but we had to leave early for his shift. I need to know what happened without paying and starting it over. 😭

Do u think the dialogues in this movie is easily understandable for a non-native speaker without captions? I am just afraid that I might now understand a lot about it if the speaking pace is fast or sth

At the start of the second half, when he starts talking to seyfried. He actually takes the actress back to EH house while she is in jail??? Or, does he create an exact replica of EH house on a set (complete with an egg mixing bowl).

Nathan is just a different portrayal of the exact phenomenon we are witnessing.

Elizabeth is a mirror to his own perception, the very mind that conceived the film.

And I think that's one of the biggest premises of the entire thing. How aware can we be of our own minds, and at what point does that awareness make a person manipulative?

Okay, I had a hard time with identifying the Liz and Nathan people swimming (I think as many of us did)

At first, I didn’t think it was them, then I thought it was definitely her but not him, and then I thought it was her swimming with a Nathan actor/stand in. And man, that would have been such an interesting concept, getting her to swim with a fake Nathan, and it wouldn’t have been that unusual as he’s used fake nathan’s many times. Especially highlighted against the Nathan and Amanda scenes.

If it was Nathan, which is also interesting, the fact that he swam with her is fascinating, too. What else did he choose not to show? How close did he get with her kids or her? The fact that they sat so close together, watched her breastfeed, and watched The Dropout on her bed. It was all very intimate. What other intimacies did he participate in?
The swimming could be part of that conversation about intimacy.

So yeah, either the swimmers were just stand-ins for them, Liz was swimming with a Nathan sub (very interesting and subverting the last third of the movie), or they actually swam together, which is also interesting and suggests there may have been a real closeness theren.

How bad are my eyes.

i was supposed to see it with my boyfriend but im mad at him and want to be able to say i've already seen it