Pop Culture

Nathan Fielder's reality experiment and its forerunners

Nathan Fielder with a god’s-eye-view of The Rehearsal.

There are two kinds of people: those who have never heard of Nathan Fielder’s new HBO series The Rehearsal and those who have spent, at minimum, a full calendar week thinking and posting about it. For those out of the loop, the project sees Fielder employing the full resources of an HBO production to both “rehearse” and re-create mundane life events in exacting detail, in a spirit of inquiry that goes, shall we say, to some unexpected places. Much has been made of its engagement with the ethics of non-fiction filmmaking — although the phrase “much has been made” both overstates the reach of this experimental comedy program and fails to capture the vitriol of its detractors — so for my own purposes, I’ll approach the series from a different angle. 

When this premise was first unveiled, partisans of Fielder’s Comedy Central program Nathan For You immediately noted its similarity to “Smokers Allowed”, an installment from that earlier series which engaged both with the theatrical concept of rehearsal and the practice of recreating a spontaneous event. In that episode, Nathan (the on-screen character as opposed to Fielder the actor and filmmaker) proposed to skirt an anti-smoking ordinance by rebranding a dive bar as a theatrical venue, with the addition of a velvet curtain and a pair of audience members. Nathan then attempted to recreate his “play”, using a recording of the evening’s activity to write a banal script and casting actors to re-enact this spontaneous activity. As typical he inserted himself inappropriately into the proceedings, in the centerpiece moment asking an actress to repeat her line “I love you” to his face until the experience moved him to tears. 

What stirred me about “Smokers Allowed”, and in The Rehearsal, was not its discomfiting and often revelatory engagement with the relationship between the on-screen subjects and the invisible filmmaker, but the concept of recreation itself. Fielder’s work strikes me as innovative; there has never been anything like The Rehearsal’s queasy finale, “Pretend Daddy”. But filmmakers and students of non-fiction cinema have been diligent in pointing out the continuum of influence that Fielder is working in, and there are literary precedents for his experiments in recreating reality.

In Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder, the subject of curating and replicating a spontaneous reality receives sustained treatment. McCarthy’s narrator, both impossibly wealthy and traumatized after a near-fatal accident that forced him to relearn basic motor functions, determines to use his settlement money to recreate an indistinct memory, a time when his movements felt natural and right. He employs actors and set designers to recreate a pathway through a particular apartment building, getting scents and textures just right, so that he can re-enact this walk. After achieving the effect, he becomes fixated on the process of recreation, commissioning increasingly transgressive scenarios. Crucially, this sinister departure from the original project relies on the narrator inserting himself into recreations of situations that he has only observed or imagined, not events in which he directly participated. 

Remainder has permanent real estate in my brain; it lives there rent-free, as the saying goes. My experience of recommending this novel to others is that they either feel similarly, or they hate the book with a passion. This seems to be a running thread, as Fielder’s work inspires similar feelings of either fascination or disgust. I also have to acknowledge that there’s a sensory gratification that these works achieve. There’s something soothing to me about the early recreations in Remainder, not in the same way that the protagonist describes it, but in the same way that Nathan seems to respond to the second, scripted performance of “Smokers Allowed”. Toward the end of that sequence, he anticipates and fist-pumps silently as the performers’ independent movements — a group selfie and a skateboard trick — achieve “spontaneous” synchronicity. There’s a deeply satisfying effect achieved by watching, or imagining seemingly everyday occurrences while knowing that they have been strictly stage-managed. 

After watching The Rehearsal’s fourth installment, “The Fielder Method”, which cycles through multiple recreations of the same events, I found myself looking at the world differently, more attentive to detail and to the sights and objects that are often overlooked. This suggests why I connect both Remainder and The Rehearsal with Nicholson Baker’s debut novel The Mezzanine, which takes the form of a comic odyssey about a man going to buy a pair of shoelaces: a brief, mundane episode dilated to cosmic proportions. Its narrator finds fascination in his interactions with humdrum technology, inventions whose functions are so commonplace they don’t come in much for reflection — shoelaces, drinking straws, paper towels. All these works stimulate something in the consumer, the reader or viewer: a kind of heightened attention to mechanism. In order for Fielder or for Remainder’s narrator to execute their re-creations, all the minute objects and technologies of the environment must be cataloged, as in The Mezzanine, sourced and precisely placed. The human actors in these recreations, too, are positioned as machines, with their dialogue de-emphasized and performance directed toward the repetition of certain physical movements. 

The Mezzanine has been a personal favorite since I read it in my college years. It read then, as now, like a nostalgic text from a pre-Internet era, in which reflections on the mediation of everyday life through technology could be warm, poetic, idyllic. Not everyone feels the same way. Thinking about the effects of these works as ASMR leads to the analogy of  the pimple-popping or extraction video phenomenon, popularized by the r/popping forum. Like responses to Remainder, or to Nathan Fielder’s work, responses seem divided into those who are captivated by the videos and those who find them repellent on an instinctive, primal level. Collecting these novels together with Fielder’s project allows us to identify a certain genre of fictional experiment (although The Rehearsal can be classified as non-fiction, it depicts the creation of a fictional reality); we might call this genre extractive fiction, in that it re-focuses attention on behaviors and mechanisms that hide in plain sight. In the process, some truth about everyday reality is revealed, and a study of other works in this genre suggests why it can inspire such revulsion. 

Baker’s subsequent fictions focused on another submerged phenomenon: sexual gratification. His novel Vox is a Gaddis-lite exercise in straight dialogue between a phone sex operator and her customer, often surprisingly banal and again, warm in the way that the characters find connection and eventually erotic pleasure through sharing mundane experiences in conversation. This tendency became more troubling in his 1994 novel The Fermata, in which the narrator Arno uses a supernatural ability to freeze time in order to indulge his sexual fantasies. He has a slippery, insidious sense of ethics about his power; he doesn’t like to steal and can’t countenance rape, but copping a feel or undressing women while within the fold of un-time — the fermata of the title — can’t count, he thinks, as violations. The impossible space allows for its own morality, and besides, he often thinks of himself as imparting the gift of invisible pleasure to the objects of his attentions. Writing for the London Review of Books, Adam Mars-Jones said “It’s true that Arno goes in for pilferage rather than grand theft, but that doesn’t exactly put him in the clear. His misdemeanours are like unreportable acts of sexual harassment – sexual harassment on the astral plane.”

Both The Mezzanine and The Fermata take the reader into a kind of bullet-time prose, in which a single moment can be seen in 360-degree view and contemplated at leisure. The quest for a 4K understanding of lived experience, what might be called hyperrealism, is at least as old in literature as Proust. In Baker’s novels this exploration, witty and fluent, flatters the author’s talents and suggests a mastery over the observable environment, a mastery that becomes a disturbing, abusive quality when his attentions turn to women. Considering the violent turn that Remainder takes in the later recreations and the way that Fielder both anticipates and engages with critiques of his work as exploitative, extractive fiction inevitably reflects back upon a sinister male presence who manipulates reality for his own benefit.

This tendency emerges especially when women are the authors of extractive fiction, using it to describe the misogyny underlying an environment. When I saw Kitty Green’s 2020 film The Assistant it reminded me of Remainder, although at the time I couldn’t articulate why. Viewing it through the lens of extraction the connection becomes clearer. The movie takes place in the offices of a film studio whose unseen, bullying, lecherous executive has been modeled on Harvey Weinstein, as has the culture of silence and fear instilled throughout the office. The protagonist is an executive assistant played by Julia Garner — first one in, to turn the lights on and make coffee in the morning, last one out each night — but with the exception of a scene opposite Matthew MacFadyen’s HR executive, the film rarely privileges her internal monologue, and she speaks little dialogue. Instead Green focuses on objects and actions, lowered glances, whispers, sudden exits, the sounds of copy machines, staplers and feet on cheap carpet. Green’s focus on mechanism reveals how everything in the office is organized for a singular purpose — here, the pleasure of its monstrous boss.

Helen DeWitt’s 2011 novel Lightning Rods brings the idea of extractive fiction full circle. In it, a salesman named Joe develops an outrageous “solution” to the problem of workplace sexual harassment, which is necessary to explain in some detail in order to identify the novel’s extractive technique. His invention is inspired by a sexual fantasy about a game show, in which a panel must determine which of three female contestants, seen only from the waist up, are secretly being penetrated from behind by a sex performer hidden by a partition wall. In Joe’s eyes this suppression of all external signs of the sex act renders the ordinary behavior of these women erotic, by providing knowledge of a concealed reality in which all women are constantly working to accommodate male desire; an echo of Arno’s invisible predation in The Fermata. Joe’s business Lightning Rods offers clients an optimized, streamlined conduit into this reality by taking over their hiring and introducing into the workplace women who — anonymously, via a glory-hole like device — will be available for regular sexual services. In the process the men of the workplace operate with a transformed understanding of their office environment. (One of the women Joe employs as a Lightning Rod multitasks, while in the receiving position, by reading Proust.)

DeWitt’s novel, which languished in manuscript form for a decade before publication, still anticipated by several years the satirical premise of Nathan For You, itself gone viral several times over. Both works take their inspiration from the logic of entrepreneurial capitalism, in which even the most bizarre or immoral ideas are shoved through legal and procedural hoops in the name of innovation. But DeWitt also anticipated the ethical concerns that arose in the process of making that show, implied through The Rehearsal’s recreation and retroactive interrogation of dynamics that recur on both series: the morality of the male figure who provides reality with its organizing principle. Throughout Fielder’s rise to wider success and name recognition, a steady drumbeat of dissent has critiqued his work as exploitative of its participants, exploding into the dominant discourse surrounding The Rehearsal. The framework of extractive fiction suggests not that these critics act in bad faith but that this line of critique is preconditioned by the creative methodology itself. Any work that takes as its subject the recreation of spontaneous reality through mechanisms — both behavioral and technological — necessarily provokes an investigation of the power dynamics that motivate that reality.

This theory explains, in part, why Fielder’s Judaism repeatedly surfaces in his work. While Fielder does not style himself as a “Jewish comedian” (Nathan says in The Rehearsal’s fifth episode that he “hadn’t been to synagogue in years because it’s so boring”), his heritage and upbringing sometime become sources of conceptual comedy, as in the Summit Ice episode of Nathan For You, or of interpersonal conflict, most dramatically in his disagreements with Angela, an evangelical Christian who acts as one of his subjects on The Rehearsal. This reading is indispensable to the series, which as extractive fiction necessarily interrogates its own methodology and in turn identifies the one matrix of power in which Fielder, as a member of a religious minority, occupies the lower end. 

More critically, the methodology of extractive fiction requires a God figure, and not a benevolent one. While Remainder has its narrator restaging acts of violence and criminality, DeWitt and Green identify the ordering principle of their environments as male sexual predation. Baker, too, cannot help but depict Arno as a sort of sinister deity, despite the novelist’s equivocating attitude toward the ethics of his scenario. This inevitability is the upshot of “The Fielder Method”, in which Nathan takes on the role of one of his subjects, only to realize that there is no removing his own coercive influence from the re-enactment. If this sort of project requires a villain, Fielder has cast himself well in the position of trickster God – the filmmaker as “Pretend Daddy”. 

The Rehearsal transforms drastically between each installment, eventually abandoning the original premise — that each week would center around a new participant in Fielder’s experiment — to focus solely on Nathan’s simulated rehearsal of fatherhood, which reveals itself in hindsight as the project’s inevitable destination. Inevitable not only because the extractive fiction must engage with the animating patriarchal force at its center, but because the sentimental pull of the parent-child dynamic provides a tool for Fielder to complicate and perhaps mitigate the negativity of his presence. Throughout the series the Nathan character makes efforts to appear more sympathetic and approachable than in Nathan For You, with Fielder’s amused/frustrated/distressed reactions increasingly breaking through Nathan’s flat affect, in turn providing another ironic counterpoint to the extreme machinations of the production. Yet in the filmmaking, too, Fielder looks for paternal sentiment to leaven and complicate his manipulations, best captured in an old-fashioned, in-camera trick shot which sees the character of Nathan’s pretend-son Adam enter into a playground slide as a troubled teen and emerge as a beaming six-year-old. This visual idea foregrounds the artifice of the project while suggesting the inherent sadness of the parental figure, who constructs the reality in which the child lives but cannot reverse or re-do what has been done.

One of the extractive fictions most cited in comparison to The Rehearsal is Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 film Synecdoche, New York, in which the author figure (playwright Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) reconstructs his life as a decades-long theatrical rehearsal inside an impossibly vast warehouse. Kaufman’s film has far more on its mind than extractive techniques, leaving the performance space for long stretches to explore other surreal ideas about aging, marriage, and parenthood. Typical of Kaufman’s cinema, the film treats Caden as a surrogate author figure to interrogate the problematic, neurotic male artist, but also in keeping with Kaufman’s well-established interest in gender (see Being John Malkovich) and with the dilemma of extractive fiction, he attempts to solve for this problem by substituting the paternal figure with a maternal one. In the final scenes Caden surrenders control of his project to an actress named Millicent Weems (Dianne Wiest), and in turn assumes her role as a caretaker named Ellen within the ruins of his production. In Kaufman’s characteristically neurotic conception of the creative process, the problem of control causes Caden no end of personal crises; he only finds peace (and, at the moment of death, a solution to his creative dilemma) by surrendering both his creator position and his male identity. 

Fielder, too, assumes a female role in the final minutes of the season, identifying this as the necessary step to conclude his project. The finale, “Pretend Daddy”, depicts Fielder’s efforts to mitigate the unintentional damage the production has caused, by spending time with a child actor named Remy who has no father at home and wants to continue playing the role with Nathan. For detractors of the series, this was the final proof of Fielder’s arrogance and recklessness; by making entertainment out of a child’s real distress, they argued, the rickety ethical framework of the series broke apart completely. That Fielder ends the season with this episode indicates that in a sense he intuits this criticism. Apart from the conclusion of the fatherhood rehearsal, the Remy issue clearly represents a point of no return, at which Fielder can no longer within his fictional framework continue to play “daddy”, as the underlying reality of the rehearsal has become irreparably tainted by his influence. 

Accordingly, he assumes the role of Remy’s mother, casting an older and more discerning child performer to play the boy in a series of re-creations of the real Remy’s involvement in the program. This leads to the extraordinary ending in which Fielder-as-Nathan-as-Remy’s mother delivers a tearful monologue about the pitfalls of parenting and the disappointments of childhood to the fake Remy, in which he slips and refers to himself again as “dad”. Fake Remy breaks character to point out this mistake, and Fielder then pauses and repeats “I’m your dad”. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this concluding note is the mix of emotions — surprise, confusion, excitement, amusement — that play across Fielder’s face in that pause. In assuming the motherhood role, he finds a way to creatively conclude his series and work toward a climactic moment of catharsis, but inevitably and perhaps even unconsciously subsumes that role again within his dominant position as father-creator. Having finally bumped up against the real limits of his attempts to exit or transcend the extractive framework, the season ends — and daddy’s home.