Note: this article contains spoilers for the Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim film You Can See Everything.
Once in a blue moon, a cult of personality crystallizes around a public thinker. Millennial and Gen-Z readers have sainted authors like Joan Didion or Susan Sontag for their writing and ideas, yes, but also for a certain lifestyle and intellectual freedom that seems lacking in our underfunded, de-skilled media landscape. Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021, was never going to become such a personality. Not because she wasn’t a singular voice—she was a writer’s writer who penned dozens of profiles and books during her long tenure at The New Yorker—but because, unlike some of her contemporaries, she lacks a certain packageability. Malcolm often deflected public attention. She didn’t take to talk shows like Truman Capote or Fran Lebowitz, and in her writing, she has little comforting wisdom to offer for dealing with grief or galvanizing feminism.
Instead, across her many years writing longform, Malcolm’s byline became synonymous with a withering sort of insight into the futility and ruses at the heart of truth-seeking enterprises. Psychoanalysis was a typical target. There was a “hollowness” nestled within the criminal justice system. The biggest offender of all might have been her own craft of journalism. Her most famous rhetorical bomb? “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
While that opening line won’t likely make Malcolm’s 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer the next candidate for Dua Lipa’s book club, it did announce Malcolm’s place as an essential resource for understanding our post-truth era. Look no further than Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s much-discussed documentary-plus, You Can See Everything. Oppenheim, the trained documentarian in the director duo, has cited Malcolm as one of his favorite authors, and it’s clear from his oeuvre that they share a predilection for insular communities and explorations of the juicy, extractive relationship between interviewer and subject.
Like You Can See Everything, The Journalist and the Murderer is a battle of wills. The book, which began as a two-part New Yorker series in 1989, followed a soured relationship between Jeffrey R. MacDonald, the titular murderer, and Joe McGinniss, the journalist who gained access to him under the auspices of friendship, before ultimately portraying MacDonald as a cold-blooded killer. To complicate matters, at the time of writing Malcolm was embroiled in her own scandal, which she neglected to mention: a legal trial with the former subject of her 1984 book In the Freud Archives who claimed she had tampered with his quotes.
The ethics of massaged quotes and profit sharing will be familiar to anyone who’s watched You Can See Everything. In the first half of the film, Nathan Fielder, acting as a journalist, scrutinizes disgraced former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes in semantically charged interviews as she blithely maintains her innocence. But after Holmes surrenders herself to prison at the halfway mark, the film takes on a new patina. Slippages, absences, and failures of representation become the film’s main subject through reenactments starring The Dropout actor Amanda Seyfried, spectral X profiles, AI doppelgangers, and on-camera alterations. In butting up against their own limitations—to perceive and to communicate—Fielder and Oppenheim imbue their three-hour film with a Malcolmian flourish.
Below, Eve Sneider, author of The Absent Woman, a critical biography of Malcolm out Nov. 10, is joined by Sarah Nicole Prickett, who has also written extensively on Malcolm, most recently in a 2019 review of a collection of the journalist’s late-career profiles, Nobody’s Looking at You, to discuss Malcolm’s emergent cult of personality and her influence on Fielder and Oppenheim’s film.
We’ve seen these cults of personality crop up around different intellectual women who have been subsumed into pop culture: Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and Eve Babitz. They become metonymous with a certain kind of outlook or affect. I’m curious if you think Janet Malcolm has ascended to that sort of shorthand and, if so, what she’s come to encapsulate.
Sarah Nicole Prickett: When I came to New York, I moved into and through circles where suddenly everyone had read Janet Malcolm. I married somebody who had gone to Harvard and knew a lot of people suddenly who had gone to Harvard and Yale. That was boom times in the attention economy. So if you were a woman with a face and a voice, that was how you were going to have a career, more so than if you had read, in the proper order, all the Russian novelists. So I avoided Malcolm a bit. I did love “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” [a pair of profiles of Artforum editor Ingrid Sischy that Malcolm published in 1986] because I loved the subjects and the way they were described and so on. But people loved her books a bit too much for my taste.
I remember in “A Girl In the Zeitgeist,” she describes Sischy as being like a night nurse going and sitting with writers, like with Rene Ricard, coaxing out lines. In the descriptions of the apartments, like you said, she fixates on the details, and she draws such fine distinctions. If we’re thinking about why she continues to appeal, there is something very traditionally beautiful and fine about the way that she points things out and about the quality of her attention. At the same time, she’s drawing these fine distinctions, these gradations of class and manner and appearance in a very narrow milieu.
The amazing thing about that piece is you’re in a SoHo loft. So when I say that she is not attuned to what’s going on in the world outside, I mean literally outside the door of the loft where she is in people are walking around dying of AIDS. And that’s not a “gotcha.” Everything that we do is in contradiction with something somewhere, but she’s writing about the art world—the gay art world—and she has no idea, or she doesn’t see herself as the person best suited to write about certain subjects, which obviously is true.
Eve Sneider: One thing that I was interested in at various points in the research for my book was trying to figure out whether she identified herself as a feminist or not. There are some of her letters where she does self-identify as a feminist, which is interesting to me, but also there’s a piece in The New Yorker archive that was killed the week before it came out, where Janet was assigned to write about the Women’s March in the summer of 1970 that was marking the 50th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. They killed it because it was critical of the women’s liberation movement in a way that the editors took issue with.
Prickett: Here’s the thing: To make your way, especially probably as a woman in a boys’ club, you have to really assert your individual gifts and talents, and it takes an enormous amount of ego sometimes to write a book. Everyone needs an ego to be a person. But then I think sometimes, especially to be a writer, to be an artist, or to be like somebody who’s talked about in magazines, that is hard to square with the demands and mandates of class-based social movements.
But the older I get, the more I appreciate certain things about her. Or I appreciate and envy things at the same time, like that she started her career so late, that she did so little that was embarrassing, that she really didn’t have to sell herself. She didn’t have a movement or anything really to sell out.
I remember something I think her lawyer said about her, which is that she doesn’t have great presence, she has great absence. It’s the fact that she’s not photographed. In magazine writing now—what there is left of it—there’s an expectation that, not only will you write the piece, but you will promote the piece and publicize it, and publicize the magazine and be photographed at the party.
So there just really is, more than ever, envy in someone who probably didn’t even refuse attention because probably she just was not born with the ability to metabolize it. She didn’t know what to do with it. She wasn’t someone who naturally received attention the way that someone like Babitz would. But still, the fact that she didn’t have to participate in that attention economy at all is, depending on how you’re feeling that day, admirable or infuriating.
Eve Sneider: I had assumed for a long time that she became really averse to doing any kind of public-facing anything in the wake of her lawsuit. But what I found in my research was that she was refusing interview requests for her first book. She writes about this a bit, that the norms around self-presentation at The New Yorker at that time were that: You didn’t have to do it, and frankly, you were better than everyone.
For all of those reasons it’s a little difficult to imagine her occupying the same space as a Didion, a Babitz, or a Sontag. Like yesterday, I was scrolling on Instagram, and I was fed some sort of slop post about starter packs for different Didion and Babitz archetypes. You would never find a Janet Malcolm meme online like that.
Prickett: It’s very chic to disappear, and it’s always nice to have the option.
Sneider: New York magazine wanted to run a joint tribute the year that both Janet Malcolm and Joan Didion turned 80, and Malcolm was the one who said, “I’m not going to do that.”
Prickett: Does she have less of an ego, or does her ego manifest differently? I think it’s very easy to confuse vanity and narcissism. Being photographed is a skill. If you learn it, you keep that skill forever and it takes 10 seconds; you’re doing someone a favor. I think sometimes people mythologize her absences as being these principled decisions when, very likely, she probably just didn’t do a lot of things because she couldn’t.
Sneider: Totally. Although I do think that on some level, she didn’t do anything to dispel the mythos of Janet Malcolm either.
Prickett: When you look at the trial [and] you read about that trial, it’s very clear that she came off as aloof and arrogant, but often she was just nervous. She didn’t know what to say and how to say it, and she had to be coached a lot. They even told her what to wear. That’s very endearing to me.
I don’t say any of this to be denigrating. When you feel like someone can’t do anything but write, you have to hand it to them in a way. When you talk about her being a writer’s writer, it’s because she really had no choice.
Sneider: I’ll say for starters that her archive doesn’t contain much of the sort of official legal documents. My understanding is that maybe she had planned to write more about that at some point. I will say she saved a lot of news clippings about herself and her work and her trial. And I found those to be enormously enlightening. I really did not fully appreciate the extent to which she was reviled at the time of the lawsuit and the trial, and after the publication of The Journalist and the Murderer.
One of the things I appreciate most about Malcolm’s writing is her prescience on the topic of subjectivity. She was so much more willing to think about the limits of a person’s perspective long before that was a topic that was coming up in media circles left and right.
Prickett: Same way about subjectivity in her work, you say in your book that all of her stories are also stories about how she got the story essentially.
Sneider: She’s constantly engaging with process and also with ethics. Look at something like The Silent Woman. Halfway through she comes out and says that she’s on team Ted Hughes. The reader has to sit with that.
Prickett: She has the personality of a librarian. [Laughs] I’m just very personally team Sylvia Plath, but also, like, team Jacqueline Rose. Of course she comes down the side of Ted Hughes because—what’s the generous reading?—it’s just the more interesting position to take. She’s a journalist, and journalists have murderous desires, so she sympathizes with someone who might… I don’t know. She has the personality and a bit of the aura of a librarian who writes letters to men in prison.
Sneider: I mentioned the Ted Hughes admission more again as an instance of her kind of directly engaging with her own subjectivity. In that vein, I really love “The Window Washer,” which is her essay from 1990 about going back to Prague [where Malcolm was born and lived until her family fled Nazi persecution in 1939]. You get two thirds of the way through and then she has this very beautiful interlude about how the man that she’s writing about is an opportunity for her to revisit and interrogate aspects of her upbringing.
On a writing level, I find her choice to insert herself in those both very direct and roundabout ways to be interesting and confusing and incredibly distinctive.
Prickett: Wasn’t it that piece where she said she got a letter from someone who never liked any of her other writing but liked that piece? And then she’s like, That’s when I knew I had failed.
I don’t know if you two had a chance to read the Lance Oppenheim New York magazine profile, but one of the things that jumped out to me is that he mentions his favorite book is The Journalist and the Murderer.
Sneider: Oppenheim also did an interview a number of years ago with [fashion newsletter] Blackbird Spyplane where he talks about The Journalist and the Murderer and Philip Roth’s The Counterlife. It was a Roth book that Malcolm really loved, and that she quotes in the afterword of The Journalist and the Murderer. It is a crazy experiment in fiction about what it looks like to try to leave room for multiple alternate scenarios to play out within one work. It was interesting to me not only that Oppenheim is a The Journalist and the Murderer fan, but also that he, at least at one point, was thinking about those two works in conversation.
Prickett: Is that the afterword where she talks about the journalist trembling on the shore, or is that a different one?
Sneider: I believe so.
Prickett: I think it is, right? It’s really apropos of the film, or I guess vice versa. I don’t know if Elizabeth Holmes has read The Journalist and the Murderer, but in the film you see her asking Nathan to take the plunge with her. And I think it’s almost the exact same metaphor as in that afterword. Now, obviously, it is a stock trope. It’s not such a crazy coincidence. But when I saw the Lance Oppenheim thing, I was like, Oh, yeah, that makes total sense that they would have loved that moment.
Sneider: Malcolm has this page in her notes about countertransference and the New Journalism, and she writes, “I can let myself get sucked in in order to experience it, but must pull myself out, must always be in a position to get out, stand on the shore, and look at the lake rather than drown in it.”
Prickett: Because the water is the cold water of self-exposure. [Fielder] seems genuinely to feel like an outsider who doesn’t know what people are saying or what they mean when they say certain things, and has this whole bit about maybe being autistic in The Rehearsal. We were talking about how Malcolm has limitations that are transmuted or transmogrified into style. Fielder, like Malcolm, makes a lot out of his limitations.
A throughline in the movie is this New York Times quote that’s attributed to Liz Holmes. When speaking about portrayals of her in the media, the Times journalist reported her as saying, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” According to Liz and Billy, what she really said is, “They’re playing a character they created.” This moment is then echoed at the end, when Nathan, in the real time of the scene, edits one single word in his own recollections of his final conversation with Liz at the prison (which is, of course, itself being reenacted by him and Amanda Seyfried) in order to make her statement mean something different. I’m curious about your reactions to that moment, to how this film engages with what Malcolm refers to as “the morally indefensible project of journalism.”
Prickett: I do think that there are many villains in this movie, and the Times is one of them. They employ more journalists than any other institution in America. They are responsible for this kind of post-truth culture that people say that we’re in, and which this movie is deemed to put on display. Of course, they stand by the reporting. That is what any institution would do, probably. I’m not even saying that the reporter is lying or misremembering. I don’t know that they’re obligated to give their notes or their recordings to Nathan Fielder—probably not. But the Times doesn’t have a public editor anymore. They haven’t since 2017, which was the last time you saw them take stock of their failures.
Nathan, being a little older than me, invokes the Times as the authority. This is the paper of record. Instead, he finds this instability at the heart of the professional truth-telling enterprise. I’m wondering if you see this documentary in some ways as being a commentary on failures of journalistic ethics, or just the degradation of journalistic ethics over time.
Sneider: There’s a slipperiness to anyone’s words, but especially their [Liz and Billy’s] words, which to me feels fundamentally at odds with the project of a journalistic institution like the Times.
Prickett: During her trial, Malcolm talks about how unnerving it was to pick up the paper of record and find recorded an impression of herself that doesn’t accord with her self-image at all. I think she writes: “Fallen woman of journalism.” That’s how she found herself described. Eventually they published a retraction, but the harm was done.
She basically feels that once they brand you, you can’t be unbranded. Do you feel like that’s still true? I think that in the film, you start to feel like it’s not, and actually that, for better or for worse—likely worse—entertainment, rather than journalism, has this power now.
Sneider: I’m interested in the thread you pulled on branding. One thing that Malcolm remained really incensed about throughout her career was the way that everything that was written about her from the trial onward mentioned the trial, which is, I think, pretty standard journalistic practice—when someone has been involved in a major trial like that, it gets a parenthetical at least.
I’m interested in Holmes’s branding as well. My brother-in-law pointed out to me that this is a great way to rejigger the SEO around Elizabeth Holmes, especially after everyone’s watched The Dropout or read Bad Blood. Now the first thing you see when you search “Elizabeth Holmes” is more likely to be this documentary about the slipperiness of truth and the ways in which nonfiction storytellers falsify the narrative.
Prickett: It’s true that the gravamen in the film is very different from the gravamen at trial. But at trial, there were way bigger smoking guns. She photoshopped the logos of pharmaceutical companies onto reports. That’s not a slippage.
Sneider: I had never thought about Malcolm as doing her own kind of reenactment until I was thinking about her in the context of You Can See Everything and Nathan Fielder’s affinity for rehearsing and rehashing things. I think Malcolm actually does a lot of reenacting, but the most explicit example is The Impossible Profession, where she meets with the same psychoanalyst every week at the same time, as if for therapy, she says, verbatim. That is the structure of that book. The whole premise of that book is that she is reenacting a psychoanalytic relationship where she gets to be the analyst, and the analyst is in the hot seat.
Prickett: It’s similar to how, say, Seyfried and Fielder are rehearsing what Fielder has seen on camera. He shows it to her. They discuss it. They’re reenacting versions of the conversations that the crew are having all day.
Sneider: Yeah. Except for that one moment where Oppenheim speaks, when Billy mentions the Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Netflix documentary, and Oppenheim goes, “That’s not a real documentary.”
Prickett: I liked those moments in the movie of defensiveness and pure ego reaction. You see it in moments of insecurity, where the creator feels a risk to their status: Fielder says, “You’re not the director,” to Billy. Amanda Seyfried, near the end—the coldest you ever see her is when she’s like, “No, I’m an actress. I didn’t do that. She did that to herself.” These were great moments for complicating everybody’s position, or revealing everybody’s vanities and narcissism.
It’s interesting. I feel like a lot of people love Janet Malcolm for explaining to them what journalism is. In the same way, this documentary—I think part of its huge success… I have a lot of admiration for Fielder’s work. Obviously, I think he’s very funny. I think he has genius. I guess I would count myself a fan. But I was slightly taken aback at the outpouring of affection and obsession, really.
Sneider: Certainly, I feel like the state of play, or baseline understanding, among my peers is that what you are reading or watching has been tampered with and has been shaped, and there are editorial decisions that have come to bear and that are seriously impacting what’s coming to you, and that is just a given. But what this movie does well, and what I would argue Janet also does really well, is give you hints at how you’re being messed with.
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