The cruel and arrogant gaze of Nathan Fielders The rehearsal

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Nathan Fielder is a master of the look, or rather the Look. This all-caps look is the visual centerpiece of Fielders’ new series, The Rehearsal, on HBO Max. It is the gaze in which parents hold children, teachers hold pupils, judges hold the accused. It is the appearance of the mastery itself, the optical handle that makes the subjects squirm. It is the appearance of power. But Fielders’ subjects are volunteers, and they submit to his power in anticipation that he will do them good. In The Rehearsal, Fielder’s idea is that behavior is predictable and that he himself is good at predicting it. His volunteers come to him with a problem; his plan is that when these real people rehearse, with the help of actors, the scenarios involved in these troubles, they will be able to anticipate the possible outcomes and thus bring about the one they desire. But his idea of ​​repetition is not a simple verbal contest around a table. He is obsessed with the influence of the physical environment on behavior, and small leaps in behavior on large-scale results; he recreates, in the form of enormous and complex sets, the relevant environments of the subjects.

Let’s take the first subject, in episode 1, a man from Brooklyn in his fifties, a professor named Kor Skeete. A longtime member of a quiz team, Kor tells the truth about a lie: he claims to have a master’s degree when he only has a bachelor’s degree. Arriving at Kors’ apartment to plan rehearsals, breaking the ice with small talk, Fielder’s rather, let’s call his on-screen persona Nathan confesses to Kor that this very interaction was a product of Nathan’s own rehearsal. Fielder (the director, working behind the scenes) had sent a fake team to Kors’ apartment to investigate a non-existent gas leak; the team actually photographed and mapped the apartment; a film crew built a life-size replica of Kors’ apartment in a studio; Fielder cast an actor to play Kor and planned the small talk down to the smallest detail, including this confession. In Nathan’s repetition of this confession, the actor responds, Wow. At Nathan’s actual confession, Kor also responds, Wow. In this cut from the actor to the subject, Fielder is clearly in awe of his own methods and insight.

At that point, just five minutes into the first episode, I wanted to throw my laptop across the room or just throw Nathan Fielder out of it. Not only is the gas crew’s deception itself a reckless betrayal, but the look of superiority and dominance he casts on Kor struck me as arrogant, cruel, and, above all, indifferent. What I hoped, more than anything, was that Kor would tell Nathan to leave his apartment and his life to cut his losses. What I wanted was to at least hear Nathan ask Kor what that Wow filling the scene meant, ask him for emotional details, and hear Kor talk about his own feelings about being deceived. Bad luck: Kor continues to play the game, and Nathan shows no interest in what Kor thinks of having been deceived by the man to whom (as Nathan says in voiceover) he entrusted his life.

The show goes through key questions, such as what Fielder, who sought out his volunteers by placing a postpromise Craigslist list of topics, what was expected of them, what they expected from the process, and what involvement, if any. appropriate, in the ultimate broadcast product they would have. Fielder does not address these issues at all in subsequent episodes.

Deception prevails everywhere. Fielder sets up a fake website in order to lure a woman named Tricia, whom Kor plans to confess to, into the project unknowingly (and the deception goes far, even to a bogus job for her); we never know when she learned which shed she had been roped into. When Nathan takes Kor on a skeet shooting trip to upstate New York, he arranges for the guns to fire blanks; when they go swimming, Nathan arranges for a third man to interrupt a moment of mutual confession; before a trivia game, Nathan stages an elaborate series of seemingly accidental encounters that fuel the answers to the unwitting Kor. The latter, in particular, Nathan recognizes as a betrayal (Kor calls the group’s trivia contests sacrosanct), and he worries about it; he shows a repeat of himself confessing to an actor playing Kor and getting a bitterly angry response. As a result, Nathan never says if he confessed to Kor. (The show also doesn’t reveal if he ever let Tricia know what she was being tricked into.) We don’t know how or when Kor found out about the trick, or how he took it when he did it.

The docu-fiction classics offer instructive comparisons. In Jean Rouchs La Pyramide humaine, from 1961, students who have improvised dramas based on their own lives also view the images and comment on them. William Greavess Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, from 1968, features the crew filming themselves and criticizes the director for including these images in the film. The members of Fielders’ crew remain non-entities, mere on-screen emblems of planning and labor, though all along I wish his cast and crew had symbio- ed had spoken on camera about working with him. It is not a question of time but of care. In contrast, The Rehearsal plays like a multi-part embodiment of the joke (be it Jack Handeys or Steve Martins), Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you criticize him, you’ll be a mile away and have his shoes.

The second episode features a forty-four-year-old woman named Angela, who would like to have a child but has no man in her life, and wonders if she should become a single mother. To help her understand, Fielder sets her up in a big house in a small town in Oregon, fills the house with surveillance cameras and hires child actors, from babies to teenagers, to portray the potential child of ‘Angela. (Fielder is more explicit about the practical complications of working with child actors, deadlines, negotiating parental consent than about the personal reactions, expectations or involvement of his primary participants.) Nathan also tries to help him find a partner to raise the fake with. -child, whom she names Adamand, when that doesn’t work out, Nathan himself volunteers to function as Adams’ co-parent. (Her participation in the fictional family life changes the tenor of the series without changing her approach to the subjects.) Angela presents herself as a devout Christian; she displays an obsession with the dangers of satanic cults and gives voice to some notable conspiracy theories regarding the power of the devil in daily life, but her staring-eyed doubt about these ideas remains lingering and inquisitive, without any investigation into the causes. and sources and without the scathing political satire of Borat After Moviefilm.

The terms and conditions of Angela’s participation in The Rehearsalher sense of who Fielder is and what he does and the practices inherent in the production would be all the more interesting to hear, given his briefly expressed skepticism at the regard to mainstream media life. They would be all the more significant as the glimmers of his discomfort and his own motivations, even his own disappointments, would appear. Likewise, a third participant, an Oregon man named Patrick, submits to Fielders’ methods in order to confront his brother, the executor of their grandfather’s estate, who denies him his inheritance. In order to get Patrick in the right frame of mind, Nathan pulls an elaborate prank involving a rehearsal actor and his apparent real life (which is actually staged); here, too, Patrick’s response to apparent nonsense, let alone deception, remains silent. In voiceover, Nathan expresses a strange bewilderment about his power to create feelings for others’ repetitions but not for himself. It’s a confusion that reflects the intellectual and emotional void at the center of The Rehearsal. First, Fielder can’t joke around; he pulls the strings. Second, his participants Kor, Angela, and Patrick have come to him with problems he’s supposed to help them solve, while Fielder, whatever personal problems he can solve over the course of the series, has a problem. primordial which prevents him from all: his very authority.

As a filmmaker, Fielder is interested not in a physical process unfolding over time, but in his own intellectual process in the genuine ingenuity of crafting his conceit, which events on screen only do. illustrate, as data points rather than experiments. He revels in his own thoughts as he matches the living conditions of his subjects to his storytelling, thanks in large part to his own voiceover. Fielders’ main stake in real life is the one on screen: making the show a success. The vanity and ambition of The Rehearsal drive it. Fielder cannot relinquish control; his obsession with detail, with predicted results, suggests his failure even as a filmmaker, the inability to find dramatic form for the series’ full range of implications and experiences. If the series is intended to be comical, too bad, to shed light on the problems that matter to the participants and to further play down the deceptions to which it subjects them. And, if The Rehearsal turns out to be not a documentary at all but a mockumentarya running through fiction, pranking us all, in which no real subject has volunteered, it would just be a wet squib of deceitful self-mockery that runs out in the first minutes of the first episode. Fielder enters to confirm the results, the first being his own powers of mastery, anticipation, and most importantly, entertainment. As the series progresses (small spoiler), Fielder amplifies the complexity of his repetitions, creating an ever-deeper spiral of preparations and imitations. His intelligence hides the emptiness of his projects. No digression, no prop, no detail can encroach upon Fielders’ taut, compact, self-contained sketches. He looks at the people he is filming, but does not seem to see them.

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