The premise of the show sounds pretty reasonable to me: life is full of moments that evoke anxiety, conversations that you want to run through your head beforehand… rehearse, perhaps. In his new show, The Rehearsal, comedian Nathan Fielder takes this relatable experience and does what any person with a seemingly unlimited budget would do—produce an HBO show in which he constructs replica sets for people where they can rehearse every possible path and outcome of a specific stressful situation. Cue “men will literally pay to construct an entire Cane’s and hire a small army of actors to populate it instead of going to therapy” joke. Some mild spoilers ahead.
He’s actually getting at one of the features of anxiety that I find most difficult to surmount. I worry and run worst-case scenarios in my head before something happens, and then of course, usually something better than the worst-case scenario happens. So why did I worry so much? Everything is fine. BUT. What if it only went this well because I ran through every horrifying but potentially possible option in my head? Well, I’ll never know because I’m never going to go into a situation without running the proper anxiety loops. I ran through everything and have preemptively felt the necessary feelings. I rehearse too, but on a tighter budget than Nathan Fielder has access to and without his fun little laptop harness.
Can everything be properly rehearsed for… Can intimacy be rehearsed for? Can intimacy be optimized? Is authentic feeling made less authentic with practice? Our society is fixated on growth and optimization, and the unleashing of free market ideals has fundamentally changed the physical and social environments in which we seek and find intimacy as well as our perception of intimacy itself. Nathan (I cannot explain why I feel uncomfortable referring to him by last name only) is claiming to help people with particularly tense moments in their lives, relational turning points. He can help them do it better, do it “right.” The meticulous flowcharts and the dozens of run throughs involved in each rehearsal rely on the assumption that there is a correct outcome and that hardships are simply bumps in the path that can be carefully steered around. He has yet to say anything on the formative nature of such experiences and the idea that it’s less that things “go wrong” or err from the correct path and more that they go unexpected. Writing this paragraph, it occurred to me that I had earlier lauded him for manually executing a form of what I do in my own head sometimes. Am I making authentic feeling less authentic with practice? I think it’s closer to trying to shield and emotionally distance myself by preparing for every possibility and gradually disinvesting myself from any and all outcomes—it sucks the pain and joy out in tandem.
In an attempt to better understand how the ad-hoc acting class (on the Fielder Method, of course) he’s teaching is going, Nathan Fielder hires an actor to recreate his class so he can sit among the actors he hired to play his acting students and experience the class as a student, Thomas. He goes so far as to sneakily move into Thomas’s apartment (he encourages Thomas to move into an apartment similar to the person Thomas is trying to act like). He takes walking a mile in someone else’s shoes to its neurotic logical endpoint, only to bump into the realization that empathy isn’t achieved by maximizing your ability to relate to some, but by acknowledging their distinct humanity and their emotions as their own. You cannot be them or even imagine being them, but you can still respect them. Knowing someone and seeing them as a whole person can be totally different tasks, and are perhaps sometimes contradicting actions.
The Rehearsal arrives at a moment where there is a popularization of multiverses. Where Nathan Fielder is trying to get a better feel for other peoples’ specific experiences and emotions, the idea of the multiverse puts forward a suggestion that there are an infinite number of proximate yet unfathomable experiences and emotions. Maybe the appeal of the multiverse is in the prospect of better worlds than we currently live in. There is also an undercurrent of precarity in life right now that is constantly reminding us that any one thing could happen, and everything could be different, usually worse. The Rehearsal maps onto this feeling in an interpersonal sense really well, from the fact that Angela is rehearsing motherhood in a country that is forcing people into motherhood and then doing little to nothing to support them to the bizarre and mildly disturbing reincarnation of Nathan’s fake son via simulated opioid overdose. All our rehearsals are nothing against the systems in place that create the conditions that constrain our choices.
Nathan Fielder’s monotone and style of cringe comedy can imply a sense of blasé detachment from the events of the show; even while he delved layers deeper into rehearsing, I wondered whether this was all an elaborate ploy masquerading as a confused and well-resourced man’s journey into finding out other people are unknowable. It might be. In contrast, the premise of this show is in some ways so earnest that it feels like it horseshoes into cringe. While I agree with most of the Internet that Nathan Fielder is a concerning enigma, I’m increasingly convinced that he is mostly just taking a clever path towards a cringe truth: It’s embarrassing to crave vulnerability and not know how to attain it. He is trying to identify the constituent parts of vulnerability and engineer them to be better. I do this with my therapist, he does it with HBO. I might eat my words in a few hours. There are still two more episodes left, so many more rehearsals to be run, and at least a dozen more actors to briefly employ.
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Links
Jia Tolentino on housing, her landlord’s response to her article, and also abortion.
Being famous isn’t as good as being generationally wealthy. The money is in all the wrong places in our society.
A little word puzzle as a treat in hell. Take a breath and read about little snails.
Imogen Heap is everywhere and unparalleled.
WFH provides flexibility that has benefited many women but there is a point where there is no more bending, only breaking.
Moral and ideological purity on the left and a constant desire to make others feel bad will destroy the left. Fuck Puritanism.