Meta Pseudo Semi Post Modern Reality

Title: The Rehearsal

Rating: 5 Stars

Reality shows, from their inception (whether you want to count An American Family or MTV’s Real World) have always been weird. On the one hand, the people on the show are real people. They are using their real names, are thrown together, and are told to act natural. On the other hand, there is the heavy hand of the producers and the editors. The characters (people?) are thrown into situations designed to provoke a response. The participants’ responses are then heavily edited so that each can appear to be of a certain archetype that most of us can now recognize (the slutty, drunken woman, the angry person of color, the sensitive non-binary, and so on). Not only that but the people in the show already know all of this and thus color their own reality to match the show’s expectations. It’s a wilderness of mirrors of what is or is not reality. If he was still alive, I’d be interested in what Marshall McLulan and his “medium is the message” philosophy would make of all of this.

Well if the typical reality show is a wilderness of mirrors, Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal is a multi-dimensional, interstellar, cascading chaos of mirrors.

It starts off innocuously. The central concept is that Nathan believes that any situation can be successfully managed with enough preparation. It’s crucial that every possible contingency be planned and rehearsed. By doing so, when the actual event occurs, the person will be so prepared that it is guaranteed to be successful.

This is demonstrated in the first episode. By supposedly recruiting from CraigsList, Nathan finds a viable candidate. It’s a man who for years has posed as having an advanced degree to members of his trivia group. The guilt of lying eats at him. He wants to confess to one of his trivia friends but is concerned that he’s lied about it for so long that she will consider it a betrayal. Since his trivia group is so important to him, being ostracized from it would be personally disastrous.

Nathan steps in. He builds an exact replica in a warehouse of the bar where the man will confess. He hires actors to populate the bar. One actor, under a ruse, manages to interview the woman that he will confess to so that she can understand her personality and mannerisms when rehearsing with the man.

The man and the actor pretending to be his friend endlessly rehearse. Every possible scenario is practiced. Standing nearby is Nathan, with a laptop, continually updating an increasingly complex diagram describing all of the possibilities.

At the same time that this is unfolding, we discover some other truths. Nathan is himself afraid of failing and is himself rehearsing. He builds a replica of the man’s apartment and practices meeting him. Also, Nathan is worried that, while he’s confessing, a poor trivia score will throw off the man’s attention. Therefore, he covertly learns the trivia questions that will be asked during the evening and then secretly gives the man answers in a seemingly free flowing conversation.

Do you see how byzantine this can quickly get? And here’s the thing, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

In subsequent episodes, they center upon a woman named Angela. She is a woman that wants to know if she’d like raising a child. Nathan sets her up in a house. Since it’s a time limited experiment, Nathan decides that something like every three weeks will age the child three years.

It starts with an infant. Due to work labor laws, the infants can only work so many hours. The infants are therefore periodically exchanged through a bedroom window. At night, a mechanical baby programmed to cry like a real baby is placed in the bed.

The woman does not plan to raise the child alone. Nathan first tries to match her up with a man. When that doesn’t work out, Nathan steps in and acts the role of the father.

At one point, Nathan thinks that the actors that he’s using are not equipped to perform the all inclusive roles that he’s defined for them. He proceeds to set up an acting school for the purpose of teaching actors how to insert themselves into another person’s life and to then take on their personality and mannerisms. He notices that one actor does not seem to be picking up his techniques. He’s worried that he’s not an effective teacher.

Yep, you guessed it, Nathan sets up a fake Fielder acting school. He acts as the problem student with a fake Nathan Fielder trying to teach him the technique. I won’t go into any more details, but the snake eats its own tail even more later in the episode.

At a certain point, it all falls apart. Angela leaves. Nathan, after a conversation with his parents, is wondering if he’s even capable of being a father. In Angela’s absence, Nathan, now just himself, continues the rehearsal.

When the rehearsal finally stops, one of the boys, himself fatherless, is having trouble detaching himself from Nathan, continuing to call him daddy. This concerns Nathan. He tries to solve it by, yep, more rehearsals. He rehearses with a different 8 year old child, a teenager acting like an 8 year old child, and a life size child’s doll. To try to help the child, he rehearses by playing the part of the child’s mom (yes, the child’s mom) to yet another fake Nathan Fielder.

What the actual fuck is going on here?

The answer is, no one knows. Not only that, but no one is supposed to know. We know that Angela is a real person. Also, Angela has some acting experience. Does Angela actually really think that Halloween is run by Satanists and, for that matter, as is Google? No one knows.

Are those Fielder’s actual parents? No one knows. It is true that Fielder recently went through a divorce. Is all of this some sublimation of his fears of basic unsuitability as a husband, father, or man? No one knows!

Is the little boy acting when he calls Nathan daddy? You’d think that there’s no way a child could fake that. Well, when Nathan does his rehearsal with a knowing child actor consciously acting the lines, the child actor seems just as believable.

In all of this, Nathan has the emotional range of Buster Keaton. He appears to be trying to make emotional connections but his blankness leaves all of his interactions cold. Is this stiffness and emotional unavailability real or is Nathan acting? No one knows!

That’s the brilliance of it. This is reality television through the mind of MC Escher. The show’s logic twist and turns upon itself until you’re left bewildered.