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Nathan Fielder, like Andy Kaufman, creates performance comedy that not only satirizes society but also experimentally shakes it, practicing his art in the middle ground between reality and fiction. He presents himself as a kind of Kaspar Hauser for the age of artificial intelligence, a foundling raised not by wolves but by cold, sophisticated extraterrestrial anthropologists. His goal is to identify and replicate elements of human communication. Fielder’s intuition is that many seemingly normal people experience a similar, confused fear of everyday interactions that are simultaneously governed by established, if opaque, social norms and subject to frightening unpredictability. Children learn to cope with uncertainty through repetition: they recreate interactions to interpret and control the various problems of their environment. Adults who use this strategy may be diagnosed with repetition compulsion. Actors, however, transform such neurotic behavior into a virtue of professionalism, and so he sees their work as a useful practice for anyone beset by doubt and ambiguity. This is the basis of “Rehearsal,” Fielder’s attempt to create perfect replicas of real spaces—like nightclubs and apartments—to serve as sandboxes for experimental iterations. All of this is made possible by Fielder’s unrelenting dedication to his craft. His ability to transform the artificial into the authentic feels credible because of the enthusiastic, quiet efficiency with which he has invested vast sums in HBO.
Fielder promises his contestants a life of greater freedom and ease: playing at life in a controlled, low-stakes environment will prepare them for real-life interactions with a new, relaxed spontaneity. In the first, fairly reasonable example, a New Yorker named Cor worries that his pub trivia team will expel him if he reveals he doesn’t have a master’s degree; Fielder not only hires an actor to play Cor’s friend and teammate, he recreates an entire Brooklyn bar to make their fake conversations seem as authentic as possible. By the end of the season, Fielder has taken his method to its logically insane conclusion: he’s created an entire developmental history of a child from infancy to adolescence.
But Fielder was not only the director of these preliminary reconstruction experiments; he was also his own primary client. Fielder was well aware that no amount of coaching could ever completely tame the disordered inner lives of his participants, and as he increased the absurdity of their surroundings, the sincerity of their feelings became an important prop on a stage eventually set for Fielder himself. He needed his participants to have real emotions, in the hope that he could develop a greater capacity for natural human interaction. The infinite regress of recursive self-awareness had gone so far that it had collapsed on itself, and Fielder's faith in artificiality was rendered incomparably less significant by the inevitable power of the real. The finale—where Fielder, by this point having completely undermined his ability to separate rehearsal from reality, breaks character and seemingly identifies himself as the real father of one of his child actors—is a shocking and genuinely destabilizing clash of sincerity. Then again, maybe it isn't.
The first season of The Rehearsal seemed to exhaust the conceit that acting—the science of artificiality—could be a prophylactic for life. It didn’t. The second season is, in some ways, even more intense than the first, but also more disciplined and consistent. (If you haven’t seen the show, or haven’t made it to the finale, two words of warning: There are spoilers ahead, and even my attempt to describe what’s happening will make me sound like I’ve lost my mind, too.) The mining of genuine emotion turns out to be a red herring; Fielder has abandoned his interest in the interior in favor of behavior, and the idea that there’s no aspect of human behavior that can’t be “learned, or at least imitated.” The pilot opens with a supposed midflight exchange between an airplane captain and his first officer. When the captain, displaying stereotypical arrogance, ignores his first officer’s doubts about their course, their little collegial squabble culminates in an unceremonious and fiery crash to earth. Fielder then emerges as a demonic observer, backlit by Hell. As the camera pulls back, we see that the entire episode took place not at cruising altitude, but in a flight simulator. Aviation is an area where the show’s operative metaphor—that life can be simulated—is open to full interpretation.
Fielder, or at least his character, explains that he has a fascination with plane crashes, and in the first episode, cockpit voice recordings are used as dramatic scripts for a grim re-enactment of a series of real-life crashes. They confirm Fielder's intuition.
Sourse: newyorker.com
