Lewis Powell

Okay, this wasn't on my "To Write About" list but I apparently have a lot to say about it.

Nathan Fielder has a show on HBO called "The Rehearsal".  It is basically crossing the line between Andy Kaufmanesque and David Lynchesque, while also going on for like Baudrillardian investigation of how can things which represent reality not supplant and distort our understanding of reality.

The premise as presented in the first episode is that Nathan is going to find people who have big moments in their life that they are nervous about, and help them prepare for those moments using intricate rehearsals.  The person in the first episode is Kor, who is enthusiastic about pub trivia, and who was insecure about everyone else on his trivia team having post-BA degrees, so he had lied and told them he had a masters. It's gotten to the point where some of them are sending him job listings that he is not qualified for, and it is stressing him out. He wants to come clean but he is nervous they will be upset about the lie.

Nathan is going to get actors to play Kor's friend, and the ambient folks in the setting where it will happen, to rehears ways it could go.  An odd premise, but straightforward enough. Except that we the audience get the reveal (as does Kor) that Nathan rehearsed the interactions with Kor, using this same method.

The Kor episode is, by itself, a masterpiece of television.  The final moments of the episode involve an intercut of Nathan rehearsing the closing of his conversation (with fake-Kor) and his actual closing conversation with Kor, which is done really well to reveal the way that Nathan is holding back to some extent (though not from the audience, it seems).

Okay, from here on out, there are going to just be big old spoilers. Stop reading here if you don't want spoilers. Definitely do not read any more.

The second episode involves a woman named Angela who wants to find out if raising a child will be right for her. Nathan is going to get a series of child actors swapped out at some scaled frequency, to play a baby through age 18. At night there will be a robot baby, because of laws concerning child labor.  We get a glimpse of Angela's world views. Angela is religious (though she names the baby Adam because is sounds nice, not for religious reasons). There is a lot of intricate stuff going on in the attempt to create verisimilitude. Nathan hires someone to stay up all night and make the robot baby cry, so that Angela will have to wake up and soothe the baby at night. Since Angela plans to have a co-parent if she will have a baby, he encourages her to meet people for dates and see if anyone seems like a good fit to invite into the rehearsal with her.  Meanwhile, Nathan has transported the replica bar he created from the last rehearsal to Oregon and hangs out in it when he isn't in his hotel room. Nathan uses his detailed rehearsal and flow-chart method to talk to the parents of the child actors about changes that come up in the rehearsal plan. And so on. The show is clearly taking on a different character, because Angela's rehearsal is going to be a months long event. It will definitely not be wrapped up in this episode. Angela finds a good match on a date, and invites him to participate in the rehearsal. He turns out to be a very weird guy, but also, there is enough crying from the baby (at Nathan's behest) that he leaves in the middle of the first night. Nathan proposes that he play the role of the co-parent. Was this Nathan's plan the whole time? Was this a plan that was devised when a participant left unexpectedly? On a scripted tv-show you just know that everything was planned the whole time unless a real life event impinged and the writers had to work around it. On normal reality television, you assume the producers are putting their thumbs on the scales. In a documentary, you trust that the events unfolded largely as presented, modulo the perspective of the filmmaker.

The conversation where Nathan is asking Angela if she is comfortable with him joining the rehearsal as a (platonic) co-parent has some very weird highlighting of the power dynamics.  She says explicitly that she likes to pray on things before making a decision, and he mentions that he doesn't want her to feel pressured due to him being in charge, and then asks her whether she has any reservations about trying it out. She then makes a comment about wanting to be in better communication and then she says yeah okay lets try it out.  Now, if Nathan were the subject of someone else's documentary, this scene would scream "oh we're showing how he is pressuring her, even though his words 'say' otherwise" but Nathan is the person making the show. He cut this scene together. He might have even cut answers of unrelated questions together to create the impression of pressuring her when she knew the whole time that she was going to be co-parenting with him. (Or he just manipulated her, and filmed it, and then put it on his show, why invent weirder stories than needed?).  Because this is presented as a documentary/reality show about scripting things to try to predict/control the outcome...it just defies attempts to render this transparent for the viewer. It is Kaufmanesque in that regard.  it's all a bit. Or is it?  I'm somewhat reminded of the Tig Notaro bit where she says the indigo girls are just off stage ready to come out, and then indicates that she is kidding (or is she) back and forth, for ages.

The third episode continues Angela's story, as Nathan tries to balance work and co-parenting, while delving deeper into the off-the-grid homesteading lifestyle that Angela envisions, and reincorporates other people's rehearsals, specifically Patrick: Patrick's inheritance from his grandfather is controlled by a younger sibling, who has approval on whether to disburse it, because the grandpa was worried about Patrick's taste in women. Nathan decides that to heighten the verisimilitude of the rehearsal and add an emotional element, he will create a parallel situation between Patrick and the actor portraying his younger brother, so he stages an excuse for Patrick to bond with the fake-brother's fake-grandfather (Patrick believes this to be the faux-brother's real grandfather), including the promise of some money after the literal gold they have dug up has been appraised. Then days later Nathan relays that the grandfather in question has died.  The actor is reluctant to give the promised money from his "grandfather" to Patrick, because of what he knows about Patrick's girlfriend from their time rehearsing together. Patrick has a very emotional time during their rehearsal in a fake fast food chicken restaurant, surrounded by actors pretending to eat chicken. He does not complete his session with the show. (Fans immediately start wondering if Patrick really ghosted the show, whether Patrick himself is an actor, whether Patrick will return in later episodes, etc.).  There is an interview with the fake grandpa here.  

Now seems like a good time to mention that honesty is very important to me. My fascination with this show is because I am so unsure of whether I will ultimately hate it or find that is says something valuable and interesting about honesty, or both.  Even up to this point, the show largely feels like it is still in the realm of just "is it cruel/exploitative in the way that reality tv is? Is it exploitative at all, given that people agree to be on it?" discourse, or at least, could be contained to that level, with some added fourth-wall breaking.  But the fourth episode is where my reaction to the show became, fundamentally, "what the fuck is this show, what is it doing?"

Nathan goes back to LA because he needs lots of actors for the rehearsals he is doing, he's been running a fake(?) acting studio called the Fielder Method. He trains students in the techniques needed for getting into the characters for rehearsals which is like, subtly observing real people in social settings, learning more about them, and then figuring out how to inhabit them in an unscripted, improv-y way as scene partners for these rehearsals.  Then he wants to figure out how he did as an instructor, so he does a post-facto rehearsal of his class, as one of his students, with a fake-nathan teaching the class, so he can see how the class went.

There have been a lot of think pieces about this show. In my opinion, the best one so far is this vox piece.  I won't go through the full description, but it winds up several layers deep with Nathan getting a student in the class to move into a new apartment in sherman oaks to better inhabit the character they are shadowing, and then Nathan-as-that-student moving into that student's apartment, to better understand how that student feels about the class.

The student is not comfortable with lying. This is not subtext. This is something the student says early in the episode, and Nathan says as the student multiple times during re-enactments.  We also see a glimpse, later of the experience of signing up for the class/show with Nathan narrating the internal experience of being such an actor/student.  The article linked above has a nice summary of this:


Okay, so when I was watching episode four that moment made me jump back to the part of episode 2 where we see a scene where Nathan seems to pressure Angela into agreeing on-the-spot to let Nathan co-parent. Now we have a scene where Nathan elaborately forces us to see how he took a student who doesn't like lying, and goes through the psychology of how he effectively getting this student to be okay with surveilling a stranger to learn more about them, how to do their job, and report back for this acting class. At the end of the episode, that student is playing the role of Paramedic for the absolutely most wild back half of an episode I have maybe ever seen.

Nathan gets back to Oregon and has been gone for a week, which is about 9 years in the accelerate timespan of this experiment. The initial interaction with the now-15 year old Adam (who he has not interacted with before in-character) is awkward, but subdued and unemotional.  Nathan asks Adam to break character and speaks to Joshua, the actor. They talk about how Joshua would feel if his dad had been gone for 9 years and just returned with that level of casualness.  Earlier in the episode, Angela had mentioned (apropos of nothing, it seemed, but, again, we have only the edited footage) that she hated her father.  Nathan asks for a re-do of his return home, grounded in Joshua's suggestion that he would be resentful and angry about a cavalier return after being absent for 9 years. Joshua also went to go talk to/observe, in the interim, some friends of his who didn't have their dad's around growing up. Nathan walks in and his seething son leaves the room angrily. Adam has a drug problem. Nathan and Angela try an intervention. Nathan asks Angela if she wants to reset things back to 6, so he can be part of Adam's childhood. She is fine with it. There is a fake OD.  Thomas (the student from before who did not like lying) is one of the fake paramedics.

When Twin Peaks the Return aired, I remember two things: every single episode I was like "how was this being aired on tv, this feels like a fever dream of experimental cinema" and also that it distinctly felt like it was building to something, and every episode it was like, part of my brain kept trying to figure out what was coming next. And this is combining that with the Andy Kaufman/Tig Notaro, "ah, is this the layer that is the end of the bit, or am I still about to pull the rug out from under you, yet again." This thing is rugs all the way down.

But, I do think one noticeable trend is that Fielder is drawing attention, repeatedly, to the way in which people like Angela or Thomas or whoever, are in situations of unequal power dynamics, or confusing social pressures, and that not just Nathan, but the production set up generally, takes advantage of those things.  I don't think we have gotten to a point where it is saying anything about that yet, but it is too noticeable not to stick out for me.

So, everyone should watch this show and either hate it or not hate it, but then tell me what they think.