A24 documentary about Elizabeth Holmes: The perfect trailer

I have an appointment to rewatch “Synecdoche, New York” by Charlie Kaufman. A theater director who is in an existential-hypochondriac-depressive crisis wants to stage a realistic play and builds a life-size replica of New York in a gigantic warehouse.

Every everyday scene, no matter how small, finds space, every person appears as a character, the director is also played - at some point this actor casts another actor to embody him.

A synecdoche is a rhetorical figure in which one word is replaced by another similar one that is intended to mean the same thing. Often this word is just a smaller part of the original word, for example drop for wine, the roof for the house, or per nose for per person. A small excerpt should point to something big.

Out of curiosity, I'm looking for the trailer for the film - also a small excerpt of a whole that is supposed to describe the whole thing. And like the synecdoches in the film, it is also deeply imperfect. The trailer doesn't exactly make it easy to capture the surreal plot, and yet I realize once again: I detest trailers. They anticipate the best moments to the worst music and want to tell me beforehand how I should understand the film. Every scene is a spoiler.

But there are also good trailers. That's what they are when they don't follow the formula "quick cuts + dramatic music + give away the entire plot + WOOOOOM WOOOOOM", but rather when they dare to present just one strong scene.

A woman who looks like a doll, an eerie smile, wide blue eyes, says the sentence: "Of course I'm not deceiving you. Why would I do that?" She doesn't blink once, staring at her counterpart, the comedian and director Nathan Fielder, who is visibly unsettled.

The scene from “You Can See Everything” has been viewed millions of times and could have come from a psychological film. In fact, it is a documentary. It's about the world's first self-made billionaire, Elizabeth Holmes, now 42, whose biotech company Theranos was exposed as a fraud and dissolved in 2018. She has been in prison in Texas since 2023.

The fact that the scene isn't about two actors but rather real people in a brief, oppressive interaction, that it's not clear what it's about, that Holmes claims to be telling the truth and looks crazy while doing it, makes this preview work. A new, detailed trailer that has now been released follows the trailer formula a little more (especially quick cuts and wooooom wooooom), but at least remains mysterious.

Recently, when I was trying to pick out a movie with a friend, he suggested watching the trailer. I'm horrified. Watching a film with another person is tricky anyway: Is she looking at her cell phone? (Me too, but legit since I'm looking up where the director directed before.) Does she talk too much? (It's fine with me if I say to every new character: "Ah, that's the one from this and that movie.")

Any behavior that deviates from the naturally harmless to cute quirks in my case could become a problem. Just like typing the absurd word “trailer” into the YouTube search bar.