The Rehearsal - Nathan Fielder - HBO

Schrodinger's Reality Show - You don't know it's real or not until you watch it (and maybe not even then).

well sure, that's the subtext of all these actors he's hiring to play specific people - they speak clearly, their conversations are focused, they tell you straight up what they're feeling - real people don't really act like that

which is why I loved the teen actor going "look who decided to show up" - there's no way an actual teenager would say that in that situation. but its exactly what an actor would come up with

Speaking for myself I'm just along for the ride. I'm not distracted about whether Angela or Thomas etc are 100% unscripted or not. It's just a hilarious never ending unfolding paper fortune teller sequence.

feels very Synechdoche New York to me

I thought Thomas Nathan had kind of a Wham era George Michael vibe

the other bit about reality television is nearly everyone who is on it at this point has watched reality tv before

there was an anecdote I'd read about one of the cast from the very first season of The Real World questioning someone from a later season about how real events were. to them, certain interactions were authentic on their own season because they'd happened organically (or at least as organic as anything can be on reality tv). but when a similar situation happened in a later season, they wondered if people were doing a bit based on what they'd seen before

which is funny because a lot of human interactions are definitely not unique and our lives have a lot of repetition. or maybe we're just living out minor variations of the same existence. who knows?

xp it's the hair and makeup, for sure

Yeah reality shows always have predictable beats to the way conversations / arguments play out. At a certain point, the people on the shows (""actors"") start to just play the part and the editors don't have to work quite as hard- oop wait never mind all reality shows are 100% scripted

The ancestor of a lot of reality shows, The Real World, notoriously messed with their own formula to change it from a bunch of people living in the same place to a bunch of people living and working together on a shared task in order to keep everything focused on the group.

I never watched the show until much later having not had MTV, but by the third season at latest there were people "doing reality show stuff" off the bat. The newer shows that have the same cast for multiple seasons are basically nightmares, because there's no way the people on them have not watched episodes of their own show between seasons, right? I'm blissfully unaware here, but have there been scenes on any of them where the people watch their own show?

Watching and reacting to their own shows was very much a thing on Terrace House

Still lolling at "you're a fucking disaster, my guy"

feels very Synechdoche New York to me

yes, feels very like a Kaufmann script but instead of a movie it's reality tv

If this starts at the pilot and goes onto the end of the series getting progressively strange is there further to go for a series 2.
Will people already be aware of it in sufficient numbers to make it more difficult to do, or is its stagedness already rendering that moot.

Interesting comments on the spectacle anyway. & interesting question of time. Like most people live in real time and try to balance out several threads running through their lives don't they? So the amount of time one would commit to spending the time this is suggesting to addressing one part of one's narrative seems to be difficult at least. Like is it suggested that everything else is put on a backburner while this is happening. I do remember a comment about hoping Angela didn't see the move to Oregon as a holiday.

THought the 2ary story in episode 3 was interesting the guy who is roped into helping out an actor playing a fictional grandfather who says he is going to leave some part of a treasure he has helped find. Hope he wasn't banking on that income, I was in the other part of teh room listening to that when the individual disappeared from the rehearsal . Did seem pretty callous and manipulative to have this set up for an emotional reaction Nathan was looking for.
Is this whole series just a set up to talk about ethics involved? & how fictional is Nathan Fielder himself

In addition to Synechdoche NY, watching the latest episode in particular I also found myself thinking of Primer, a movie about people playing doubles of themselves, and doubles of those doubles visiting the same spaces over & over again like lost ghosts, obsessed with recreating the moments in their lives over & over in order to "fix" them, only to find that those recreations are being manipulated by endless layers of doubles who are themselves recreating the lives of other doubles.

Of course the guy who made Primer turned out to be an actual dangerous manipulative psychopath, like the scary non-comedy version of what would happen if the Nathan For You character existed in real life.

"i love the movie Apocalypto"

I really don't know what to do with this

(not a spoiler)
My favorite exchange:
Angela: "And 100 million stood to attend him. His clothing was white as snow. His hair was like the whitest wool."
Nathan: "Whoa."
Angela: "Yeah."

wait do you think that's a reference to the aging mirror???

Was expecting the Curb Your Enthusiasm music at the end there

Of course the guy who made Primer turned out to be an actual dangerous manipulative psychopath, like the scary non-comedy version of what would happen if the Nathan For You character existed in real life.

― nobody like my rap (One Eye Open), Tuesday, 9 August 2022 13:15 (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Woah really? Links?

Google him. Arrested for domestic abuse etc

Funny to see him address the "meanness" interpretation of his shows when the Angela actress goes off on him (whose upset dialogue I assume he wrote)

Was expecting the Curb Your Enthusiasm music at the end there

― frogbs, Saturday, August 13, 2022 2:06 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol. But "These donuts are delicious" was perfect.

especially if you KNEW she was gonna say "sufganyot" right afterwards

“…and it was cool to own my own bar that HBO paid for”

holy shit that ending

Just rewatched the confrontation with Fake Angela and if he really found that actress in the acting class it seems like a genuine discovery.

her voice was identical

Nate’s Lizard Lounge

him saying “I’m nate” to a patron at nate’s lizard lounge >>>>

"i love the movie Apocalypto"

― Bruce Stingbean (Karl Malone), Friday, August 12, 2022 11:48 PM (yesterday)

all i could think about was how angela must be an ilxor b/c of ilx's love for that movie 15 years ago

The scene with his parents reminded me of Tom Green.

I was amused by how angry I got at Angela for completely ignoring the premise when Nathan was gone!

gonna say i was not surprised when miriam started talking about israel’s superior microchip technology. more surprised that she didn’t bring up sodastream

i just watched episode 4. this show is hysterical, mind-bending, and heartbreaking and i’ve never seen anything like it before (except of course finding frances)

so far, ep 4 has been my favorite. 3 and 4 in particular, so good

I was amused by how angry I got at Angela for completely ignoring the premise when Nathan was gone!

disappointing but it fits the nathan fielder story. in some ways he reminds me of precocious children who make up games on the spot with elaborate rule systems. They struggle to find people who will play the invented game, if nothing else, because it's too complicated and self-absorbed -- the rule changes always have 100% to do with the little kid and what they think should happen. Kids like that often end up playing alone

sorry if that sounds like an insult to nathan fielder and/or precocious children! there's nothing wrong with playing alone or making up elaborate rule systems, of course. fielder just reminds me of a kid who is in some ways stuck in that world

I don't even know what to think anymore.

Good essay from Sam Adams in Slate (doe Sam post here?):

https://slate.com/culture/2022/08/rehearsal-episode-5-nathan-fielder-hbo-explained-maybe.html

I'm curious if this particular storyline was planned all along or if they just shot so much material that they were able to cobble it together. There has to be like 100 hours of unused footage for this show. In fact I suspect the last episode might actually dive into that idea (iirc pre-screeners didn't get to see the finale which suggests everything is about to turn on its head again)

There has to be like 100 hours of unused footage for this show.

It really depends how much has been scripted, right?

wtf are you talking about, KM? Angela is on a reality show, she pretends the kids and house are hers. The fact Nathan jumps in is meant to be ephemeral, but she already went off script long before he changed the rules, which admittedly fucked the experiment. He “took over” and then left, but she basically decided it was a farce despite the fact she had time for her role. Just complete disinterest in the premise

Nathan rewinding things was completely a break with premise and I get her disconnect there, though

also, rip to Nathan’s irl marriage and the fact his mom thought he was creating another situation for an admittedly fake spouse to march over him.

if he really found that actress in the acting class it seems like a genuine discovery.

IT is getting weirder. Well presumably since it is all scripted and everybody is an actor that must be planned.
But Nathan deciding to take over somebody else's narrative once they have left leaving him the sole parent to how many acting children? Are they still having 3 boys play Adam. Like not weird enough that he would want to raise his fake kid or fake his kid Jewish when it's a fictional situation anyway.
Like is the idea that we think that he who is presumably a versatile fictional role can't tell the difference between real and pretend. So weird.
I bet Angela is gooing to turn up in something else before long, if not in this in a different role.
I was thinking that Nathan's mother was an actress I'd seen in a few things Orange is The New Black and Station Eleven to name 2.

Nathan's mother is not Lori Petty.

I did say was thinking so like past tense.
Hadn't realised Lori Petty was Tank Girl when I saw her in more recent things

Would add another layer if the parents turned out to be actors too though.
LIke is the entire thing about supposed representations of the 'real' anyway.
Or is it just an existential comedy show about like epistemology like.

mental tricks, optical illusions and basic desperation.
& desolation.

Doing magic tricks is reportedly part of Fielder's origin story. Not only does he do a trick to break the ice in at least one episode of Nathan for You, I've read a profile or two where he does a trick to break the ice with a reporter. So sleight of hand and optical illusions are really his thing, the existential/epistemology stuff is like the exploration of illusion in a narrative context.

From that Slate piece I linked to:

The rehearsals themselves apparently parallel ideas from both Kabbalistic study and Jewish midrash, although it’s doubtful that Nathan the character is aware of this. (As for Fielder the writer-director, whom the Forward likens to “a Kabbalistically imagined Jewish God”—who can say?) But they’re rooted in a simple secular precept: Life comes down to a handful of decisive moments, and how you fare in those crucial moments determines whether you will succeed or fail. Nathan tells the actors he’s teaching the Fielder Method that the slightest misstep on their part “could ruin someone’s life,” a line repeated by the actor he hires to play himself. But it finds its most poignant expression in the second episode, “Scion,” when Nathan takes on the role of co-parenting Adam. “It’s scary to imagine raising a child,” he reflects, “when you always know that a single misstep on your part could ruin their entire life.”

And later:

He’s so invested in the idea of narrowing life to a series of predictable, and therefore manageable, possibilities that he hasn’t grasped a basic truth: No matter how much you practice, you will never be ready. What matters most is the ability to accept imperfection, in yourself as well as in others. You will make terrible mistakes, and suffer the consequences: marriages end, people die, things that should have been said never are. But if mistakes were permanent, Angela would still be “standing on the corner drinking 40’s” and not taking part in Nathan’s bizarre experiment. The most important lesson the religious instructor teaches Nathan has nothing to do with Judaism. It’s when he asks if she wants to rehearse her confrontation with Angela and she tells him she prefers to “shoot from the hip.”

So, presuming an at least somewhat scripted/predetermined end is in sight, it becomes an even more complex moral puzzle box: a (somewhat) scripted story of a man playing a version of himself rehearsing scenes based on real scenes (that may also be scripted) about choosing what paths (scripts) we follow and learning (through rehearsal?) that the most honest/"real" path is possibly the one that is unscripted.

I’ve heard him talk in interviews about his love of magic and how it was a good social crutch for him as an awkward young adult, a way of having controlled & manageable social interactions. “Do you want to see a magic trick?”, then you do the trick, you both talk about the trick, the interaction is going to remain within very predictable guidelines.