It was recommended to me to watch the HBO series The Rehearsal. So I did. I am not entirely sure what to make of this show. This blog will be me exploring my own feelings regarding what takes place and to see where I end up. In other words, I actually do not know how I feel at this point. I am literally going to travel down a rabbit hole and see what happens…
I also need to warn of spoilers here. If you have not seen this series by Nathan Fielder, then you ought to watch the show first before reading this post. On the other hand, perhaps you might find my analysis valuable to help you understand whether you will want to invest the time in watching the show at all. This, of course, is entirely up to you.
Briefly, the show is about a guy who helps other people with challenging, but relatively mundane, real life situations by rehearsing those situations in order to try and achieve the most optimal outcome. For example, in the opening episode, we have a man who has been lying about his education to his trivia buddies for the past twelve years, and has decided finally to come clean. The man is afraid of the reaction one particular trivia buddy will have, and so the rehearsals are intended to ensure that his buddy will remain his buddy after the truth is revealed.
In other words, Fielder is going to attempt, to the best of his ability, to simulate with perfect accuracy the situation whereby the man will engage when he reveals his deception. This entails Fielder building a full sized replica of the bar where the individuals will be hanging out, filling the bar with actors who will portray the various potential people that will be present, including an actor portraying the buddy who will be learning of the “horrible” lie.
The entire series is filled with such pedantically assembled rehearsals of mundane activities and situations, with the creation of detailed sets and the hiring of a literal army of actors. It is quite amusing the passing comments regarding budget throughout the series, especially when staff are hired to maintain the illusion of winter time around a house during the middle of summer. It seems there is no limit to the lengths Fielder is willing to go to perfect his craft.
As a comedy, the series is quite good. The level of ridiculousness that is achieved by the show is far and beyond any other show I have ever seen, and I laughed a lot. But during the viewing, I found the humor was constantly overshadowed by something else. Something sinister and insidious.
It seems others have been suggesting that Fielder was manipulative and sadistic, taking his “contenstants” and embarrassing them on live television. When I suggest something nefarious is going on, this is not what I have in mind. I need to make this clear at the outset. The problem I found with the show is something more subtle, and perhaps even difficult to see unless one just happens to be trained in hard core analysis (like perhaps philosophical analysis) and perhaps even possessing a bit of OCD.
To properly discuss my concern, I first have to talk a little about my personal history. I have a challenging relationship with my siblings and my parents. I am not always sure if my siblings and parents realize this, but I cannot really be around them anymore. It is more than just that they “drive me nuts.” When I am around them, I start to lose parts of myself.
The problem I have with my family has to do with the understanding of actions and consequences of actions. Of cause and effect. My family complains a lot about the going-ons in their lives. They complain about how hard their lives are. They complain about how the world is so unfair. They complain about how others do not take care of them in the ways they feel they are supposed to be taken care of. My family seems to feel that the world owes them something. My family feels that other people owe them something.
However, from my vantage point, it seems to me that something very different is going on. To me, it seems like all the terrible and painful situations my family members end up in are a direct result of the choices and actions they each take. I am able to see the chains of events that have transpired through days, weeks, months, even years, that have led from decisions they have made to their ultimate downfall and suffering. I do not know why or how I was able to do this from such a young age, but I did. And the worst part was that I didn’t even really understand how much I was doing the same things until I finally gained distance from my family.
Less than ten years ago, I left the city I grew up in. I moved to another city in another province. Far enough away that it was unreasonable to see in person my family or many of my existing friends at the time. This distance slowly revealed to me the problem I am expressing. I started to recognize just how much my own actions and decisions were affecting my own situations. How my own world view was responsible for my happiness and well being. And, I admit, I had a lot of help with all this because I was then living with my current life partner. She was instrumental in me seeing what I could not, up to that point, see.
The reason all of this is significant is because I learned to see how my own choices and actions led to all the consequences around me. My world was so much more within my control than I ever realized. I still cannot control other people, nor can I levitate above the ground, but through my choices and actions I can have a profound impact on the circumstances and situations I find myself in. I can choose to be happy, for example. And I can just as easily choose not to be happy.
This all applies to my family and friends as well. And this is where I have challenges. Because it seems to me that my family and many of my friends all choose not to be happy. They seem content to complain and carry on about how bad their lives are, and they seem never to see how it is their own decisions and actions are making their lives so miserable. I find it incredibly difficult to listen to people complaining about things they could very easily change. I often try to say to them that if life is so bad, why not change it. But they just look at me like I am somehow crazy.
This is how I see the show The Rehearsal. I see the show with the same critical eye that I see my family. I see how the various characters, and especially Fielder himself, are orchestrating their own downfalls and their own difficulties. What is worse is that Fielder appears to be trying to fix his situation, by conducting these rehearsals, not recognizing how his rehearsals are in fact having the opposite effect. The rehearsals only serve to exacerbate the situations.
I think the most frustrating thing for me is how Fielder barrels down his path to the abyss by focusing on the very thing that is causing him so much trouble. His simulations are imperfect, and so he focuses on trying to make his simulations more and more perfect. He seems to be of the opinion that if he could simply get to a high enough level of accuracy, his simulations will somehow both reveal and make possible the perfect rehearsals for the perfect outcomes. In the third episode, he has the epiphany that he needs better emotional resolution in his characters, because he believes that it is this lack of emotional connection that is causing him the troubles.
What Fielder does not understand, just as many scientists or statisticians do not understand, is that he is privileging information in his selection process. He is introducing bias in his decision regarding what he holds important. For example, when he trains the actors in his “Fielder Method,” he is privileging the sorts of ways the actors ought to watch their targets in order to gain the greatest amount of accuracy in their performances. Ultimately, the method leads to an almost literal stepping into the shoes of the target, living what they believe are the same lives, working the same occupations, etc.
However, what neither Fielder nor the actors seem to realize is that a large part of what makes a person what they are is unobservable. As often comes up in the discussions I have about consciousness, I cannot experience your experiences. I cannot think your thoughts. I cannot feel your feelings. René Descartes rightly pointed this all out in his Meditations, and the unfortunate conclusion that can be drawn from such things is that mine might be the only consciousness in existence, leading to the very real possibility of solipsism.
What is worse is that when the actors, and Fielder himself, start to occupy the roles they observe their targets filling, they start to introduce further biases in their method of occupation. For example, Fielder suggests to Thomas that to better understand his target, he ought to move into an apartment with some artistic roommates, because they had learned that the target lived in an apartment with musician roommates. Later, Fielder himself, while in the role of Thomas, also moves into an apartment with some artistic roommates, even going so far as to use the same names for the roommates as well. As accurate as the simulated simulation is, it is clearly not the same. Aside from using different actors in the roles of the roommates, the apartments are mirrored in their set ups as well. Likely due to constraints of budget again, it is not feasible to absolutely replicate the simulated apartment. It is also worth noting that the audience never sees the original apartment for which all these simulations are being copied from, perhaps because that original is unavailable to be viewed.
The driving force of my concern here is not whether Fielder is sincere in his effort at duplication or replication, but in the simple fact that perfect duplication or perfect replication is not possible. More to the point is the fact that in order to achieve the simulation, subtle choices have to be made to “bridge the gaps” were information is missing, which leads to the creeping in of unfortunate biases.
Later in the season, it does seem like Fielder ought to start to recognize these challenges when he starts noting how any formulation of replacement for Remy is always inferior in some way to the original. The use of older actors pretending to be six year old children, or even the use of dolls, in both cases never works. Fielder ought to be able to recognize the problem, but instead simply pushes further and further into his own insanity.
Which brings me to my final point: insanity. Fielder is so focused on his goal that he misses all that he does to alter and change the situations in his attempts at perfection. He changes the model he is trying to attain in order to make it more likely to attain the model. But he has to CHANGE the model each time to do this. Meaning that the idealized source of all his concerns keeps changing. He is not looking at anything remotely real by the end, but only of a simulacra.
This show is a demonstration of Jean Baudrillard‘s concern in his work Simulacra and Simulation. While normally the formation of simulacra tends to be a slower and more time consuming process, Fielder has succeeded in generating his simulacra of reality in a matter of a few episodes of his show. By the finale, with his apparent flub, Fielder has confirmed his existence in Baudrillard’s hyperreal, complete with the formation of… Well… We have to wait until the second season to see what he has become. Will he confuse the child actor Liam, who plays the other child actor Remy, who was playing the imaginary child Adam, as his own actual son? And if so, who has he confused? Adam? Remy? Liam? Someone else entirely?
For Baudrillard, the problem is the detachment from the real. To lose the source of grounding and end up in some sort of relativistic plane of existence. Where symbols are of symbols only, with no connection to anything that is actually real. To mistake the symbols for the real and start living a life that is devoid of connection to the world as it actually is. To not understand that there even could be a world outside our illusions, and mistake all the illusions for everything there is. This is the ongoing challenge of social media in our present age, mistaking people’s profiles for the people themselves. When the people mistake their own profiles for themselves and start living their virtual lives as though these virtual lives are their actual flesh and blood real lives.
Which ultimately leads me back to my original question. Did I like this show? How do I feel about this series? I am still not sure. I do like that the series has got me thinking so much about things. I do enjoy anything that gets me thinking, especially really hard like this. But at the same time, it simultaneously frustrates me to see a person so deep in his own psychosis as to not understand what is going on. To be so lost that they cannot see how their own choices and actions have led them directly to where they are now.
I supposed this will all hinge on the second season for me, assuming that one is created. To see where Fielder ends up. Is he as cracked as the finale is suggesting, or was the flub just a momentary lapse and he will recover? Is his show just an extremely complicated personal experiment where he will learn something new and interesting about himself and the world around himself? Or did he just slide head first into the abyss and is now completely lost?
I think if he went through an enlightenment, taking all he learned and processing it, reflecting on it, and evolving as a person, I think I would be happy with that. This is essentually the path I have taken over the past ten years myself. And yes, it is true that I am being biased in my privileging of going through an enlightenment like this. But that is my privilege to assess the series in this way. As a piece of art, I connect with it in my own way.
On the other hand, I suspect the series is more likely to go in the opposite direction. Like social media, I expect the series to continue racing down into the darkness, convinced that if Fielder just holds out a little bit longer, his “Method” will eventually generate fruit. I imagine Fielder will simply push harder and raise the bar on the ridiculous until what little sense that is left is lost completely. The “precession of simulacra” completed in its entirety, and even cycled several more times just to be safe. As Baudrillard would suggest, until everything is left completely meaningless.