Playing the role of one of his actors,Thomas,so he can experience the experiment from the other side,Fielder receives a stack of pages,the legal release forms he is meant to sign so that footage of him can be used in the show. “So many pages,” Nathan-As-Thomas says. “Everyone seems to be signing it,so it must be all right.”
Writing inThe New Yorker last week,critic Richard Brody ripped into Fielder over a perceived lack of care for his subjects. “Deception prevails throughout,” he wrote,deriding the Canadian’s “gaze of superiority and dominance” as “arrogant,cruel,and,above all,indifferent” and saying “his cleverness masks the hollowness of his schemes”.
Brody is far from alone in his reservations,and I share them to an extent. I’m surely not the only one who detects a hint of emotional and/or psychological vulnerability in some of his patsies. But what redeemsThe Rehearsal (quite aside from the fact it is often hilarious) is its underlying,and thus far unstated,thesis:we are all just freaks and fakes stumbling our way through a constructed version of the life we think we should be living.
Fielder sums up his ostensible project in the first episode thus:“Maybe it’s easiest to choose a path when you can live the future first,to free yourself from doubt and regret,to always know the answers.”
But I’m convinced his real project is precisely the opposite – to demonstrate that no amount of planning can guarantee us the perfect outcome,because humans are not robots,they cannot be programmed,and random variables will always arise.
Besides,the very idea of the “perfect” life is also in Fielder’s sights.
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His earlier seriesNathan For You traded on his supposedly “really good grades” at business school (actually pretty average,as the screen shots attest) to set up a fauxKitchen Nightmares-style let-me-fix-this-broken-enterprise scenario. Now,though,the playing field isn’t just a business,it’s a whole life.
Consumer capitalism and the self-help industries are built on the idea that we can make ourselves happy by buying that thing,realising that goal,fixing that flaw. But the sordid truth is it is dissatisfaction,not perfection,that drives the entire system.
The Rehearsal functions at a meta level,I think,as a commentary on the way the ubiquity of cameras,social media and indeed of reality television has blurred the line between “actors” and “real people”. So many of us are performing idealised versions of ourselves for public consumption that we’ve become adept at mimicking connection,understanding and empathy without ever necessarily experiencing it. But maybe it was ever thus.
At its core,the show is about alienation rather than perfection,the fact that no matter how hard we try,our ability to connect is transitory at best,whether we’re neurodivergent or not,and no matter how many goes we have at it.
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“Every now and again there are these glimmers,these moments when you forget and you feel like a family – that’s when you know the rehearsal is working,” he says in episode three,and really,he’s talking about all of us.
I suspect that for all its origami layering of narrative structure,its onion peeling of characters within characters,its elaborately constructed sets and scenarios,at the heart ofThe Rehearsal is a pretty simple proposition:try as you might,you can’t plan for every eventuality. So stop trying,lighten up,live in the moment,experience it as it happens.