The Rehearsal - Nathan Fielder - HBO

The idea of consent surely involves having some understanding. & I'm just wondering if some of those involved are mature enough to give consent.
Not to reduce the intelligence of children but I do wonder if they are old enough to understand a situation to be a stage removed from it.
Like Remy acting that he thinks Nathan is daddy. Wondering what one does understand at 6 and what is going to take away from a situation consciously or subconsciously. Seems to be doing things possibly a little too realistically.

I have absolutely no idea what to make of this. All I know is that the words my my wife used to describe it, when prompted, were totally not the words I would have used to describe it, which maybe gets at ... I don't know what it gets at.

Why was the "brief nudity" listed in the ratings details?

Nathan's ass crack at the very end

Why was the "brief nudity" listed in the ratings details?

i didn't notice that, but i do remember that the very final shot was of nathan's buttcrack

it was scandalous. i can no longer go about my everyday life without being disturbed by it

Hey, spoilers!

(That was an xp to the ass crack reveal)

the crack changes everything

the crack says this line which is witty but also clearly scripted

can’t stop wondering what the final shot tells us about season 2

even after rewatching it, i still have no idea what happened. i am the worst watcher of this show

my first thought was that he had adopted Remy, or at least agreed to continue pretending to be his dad.

i know that's not right. i'm just mentioning it to make clear what a gigantic dumbass i am

The subtext, I think, (maybe not so sub), is Nathan working through his divorce, the fallout from his failed relationship and missed chance at having a family of his own. That and his admitted difficulty relating to people and experiencing what they experience. In the end, he does both.

yeah nathan becomes emotionally able / available to be a father through the process of rehearsing, thus shrugging off his damaged past

Him rehearsing as Remy's mom does make me think that could be expanded as a whole season: rehearsing as different people in his own life

Wasn't he divorced almost a decade ago? Seems like a somewhat obscure subtext to explore in this show, the not very well known Fielder working through a 10-year old divorce to someone we've never met and even he rarely talks about. I admittedly have seen a lot of think pieces about this show hinging on Fielder, the real person, but I think The Rehearsal works better as a broader, more general exploration of emotional truth and reality vs. literal truth and reality, vis a vis acting, an almost alchemic process that transforms fiction and lies - that is, pretending - into a heightened "real," where the emotional truth achieved through acting/lying can become as or more powerful than actual reality. (I know very little philosophy, but I'm sure this has been explored in a tome or two.) Regardless, this show is so rich and multi-faceted that I feel it's barely dipped below its many surfaces. And I fear likely won't or can't go much deeper, before it ends or is cancelled, but I'm not sure it matters, since vagueness and ambiguity works to its advantage.

Incidentally, there was a lot of talk about Richard Brody's dismissal of this in the New Yorker, but I am curious what certain naysayers like he thought about the finale, which absolutely did not go where some (any?) expected it to go.

There wasa thing I was trying to allude to yesterday that I'm not sure came across. Presuambly story arcs as p-resented in the tv show would not have been filmed exactly as such , & angela's behaviour at one point would also allude to this.
But what is presented as a story arc is presumably filmed not in order and not in a coherent fashion anyway. But is edited together to seem as though it is. So involvement of children in a story arc is not going to be how they are experiencing things necessarily. But there is going to be a lot of rehearsal and retakes going on which might have the effect of drilling some ideas into heads that might be better without it.
Which is why i was wondering about cognition and how much these children were taking onboard. & if consent revolved around understanding and further to that what a child would understand. LIke obviously there are films/tv being made all the time where a child is in a situation that they are not going to have a full understanding of. Wondering to what extent the presentation has to do with this, like a drama vs a pseudo documentary. THough a child may take things away from either acting situation that may be above their heads or however one wants to put it. & may be stuck with consequent thought/some level of trauma.
I'm just puzzled which presumably means this show is working to some degree.
JUst hoping it isn't leading to those involved needing years of therapy

Actually Angela thing is more that the character does not want to stick to the role she is supposed to be acting out. Worlds within worlds. The making of is another layer on top of taht in which whoever the actress is may be somebody completely different to born again Xian Angela.
Do the family units depicted in this actually exist in the real world like child actor and parents have taht connection in the real world this is filmed in rather than depicts

xp I wouldn’t say the show is “about” the divorce, just that it emerges as a plot in the process of making the show. I actually assume Nathan made this intuitively, following his crazy conceit where it led and working magic in the editing room rather than prescriptively setting out to tell any particular story.

I appreciate that Nathan at least so far doesn’t seem to be giving any interviews explaining anything. Very Lynch/Malick.

I wonder how much of that has to do with the announcement of the S2, especially if a second season was always planned. If he's continuing the same "story" then he's likely enmeshed in it right now, right? Has he done any talk show appearances in support of this show?

Incidentally, there was a lot of talk about Richard Brody's dismissal of this in the New Yorker, but I am curious what certain naysayers like he thought about the finale, which absolutely did not go where some (any?) expected it to go.

The last shot of The Rehearsal, I was secretly prescient, because, after the first five episodes, I said to myself that it's up to viewers to consider whether he's showing his ass or mooning them; I hardly expected that the season would end with that metaphor shown literally.

— Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow) August 20, 2022

"you're a great scene partner" was such a funny gut punch line

Liam is a better actor than most adult actors on most HBO shows

and

"you're a great scene partner" was such a funny gut punch line

― symsymsym, Wednesday, August 24, 2022 1:08 AM (eighteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

fully otm

*the rehearsal season 2*

Nathan Fielder: I wanted to see if Mark Wahlberg was telling the truth so I built a real plane with real terrorists flying at a real building to see if he was on one of the planes on 9/11 if it wouldn’t have gone down like that

— zach reinert (@zachreinert0) August 25, 2022

finally finished this. until the last couple of episodes I guess I regarded it more as an amusing curiosity, maybe finding the artifice and the oppressive silliness a bit too much for me to really get invested. (I think I was the rare person who liked episode 1 more than 2-4?)

but then seemingly out of nowhere these astonishing moments of genuine tenderness and humanity, I was honestly shocked to find myself as moved as I was…I think anyone who’s worked in childcare knows the feeling nathan seemed to have experienced with remy.

Really hope they are done with the kid actors in s2 tbh

I have all confidence that season 2 will be completely different.

Errol Morris gets it. https://t.co/U2SttTV5E0 pic.twitter.com/vJRs3hU560

— Scott Tobias (@scott_tobias) August 27, 2022

I may have said this before but I bet Fielder follows Herzog’s dictum of not seeking literal truth but the “ecstatic truth”.

now this is how you do a meme

(probably NSFW)

https://i.imgur.com/JYuO5po.jpg

Leonardo Dicaprio’s girlfriends when they turn 25 pic.twitter.com/aRxBPDkONw

— Men For Fielder (@MenForFieIder) August 31, 2022

okay, four episodes in i think its pretty clear that this show is "about" mental illness
― i cannot help if you made yourself not funny (forksclovetofu), Saturday, August 6, 2022

I don’t know if I would be where I am today without speech and language therapy. It haunts me, honestly, to think that I probably wouldn’t have the relationships or career path I have now were it not for my early behavioral intervention. But by having this meta-cognitive awareness around my autism, I can appreciate the help I received while recognizing autism as a vital part of my identity and acknowledging my limitations rather than suppressing them.

That moment of Fielder trying to make a good first impression on Kor is something most of us can relate to. But through a lens of disability, it speaks to the loneliness of how masking deprives autistic people of our humanity, of not being afforded the space for awkwardness and messiness in order to make other, more neurotypical, people feel comfortable and secure.

I only just got around to watching the season finale over the holiday weekend. There is something tragicomic in the Fielder character's slow progression from rehearsing the future and anticipating its challenges to rehearsing the past and asking "What could I have done differently?" Somebody upthread mentioned Beckett, and that's very much the vibe I get.

There is something tragicomic in the Fielder character's slow progression from rehearsing the future and anticipating its challenges to rehearsing the past and asking "What could I have done differently?"

This is for real the deepest thing I've read about this show, otm

Agreed and until reading this I didn’t even fully notice/comprehend that that was where we ended up

it's a good point

the more i think about it the more uneasy i am with nathan's use of children. 2 episodes of nathan for you were about kids close to sexual situations. and now the whole season the rehearsal ended up being about kid stuff. like its funny maybe once.

In both those cases (and The Rehearsal, too) he's definitely exploiting kids to manipulate the emotions of adults. It's for sure a pretty cheap trick. Even if the kids were never actually in any sort of danger or whatever, it's really no less sleazy a move than horror movies that put little kids in peril. Effective, but still kind of easy and sleazy. Though I'm not sure how much worse it is than, say, his Holocaust themed clothing store (or, for that matter, peer Sasha Baron Cohen taking advantage of two actual Holocaust survivors for the sake of his dumb comedy). Transgressive comedy that takes advantage of what we intrinsically recognize as tasteless, another (queasy) sleight of hand trick that "The Rehearsal" sort of acknowledges in passing when Angela criticizes Nathan for eating poop. Of course it's not poop, it's just a candy bar, but the effect is largely the same, even if the literal act is essentially victimless.

All assuming any of his projects have any actual reality in it at all?

do think there is cognition involved in anything utterly fake since it is presumably rehearsed if so.

To clarify, I don't know for sure what is and is not to believed as presented, but even more than the reality shows he is parodying I've always got it in the back of my mind that 100% of it is probably scripted, including the narratives about how people in the show are affected by the show, because even those parts are "in the show" and just as much likely to be prewritten.

Like for an actor o be saying something it must be learned to some degree. It's not like it can be channeled from elsewhere or anything and not show that. So there will be some touching on of themes not understood etc so wondering what effect that has.
& if there is enough understanding to actually shut things out before one has a more mature understanding of things and even if one can fully then.
Just did find it very weird the use of child actors for some of the thought here. Not to be overly pro censorship but did have me wondering to what extent things were understood that were touched on

LIke it has to have some understanding for them to deliver, not going to be absolutely abstract. Or they wouldn't be able to coherently.
& is it enough to build to some heavy misunderstandings that they need to work through at a later date.

JUst seems to be something I wouldn't really touch on just to make an amusing tv show. But may be something that has some degree happening every time you have a child actor in a show with adult themes they don't understand. Don't think its completely throwaway.

he keeps doing it. he seems fixated and it's not really that funny.

I thought it was really neat how the final episode turned that whole concept on its head, by using an actor who thought the fake situation was actually real. It did make me wonder a lot about child actors and how often that sort of thing happens. A show like Shameless puts its child actors in much more extreme & graphic situations than this show does & I can't help but wonder if some of them have difficulty differentiating real life and television. afaik this is the only show that really explores that.

also as far as his tendency to use child actors, Nathan's shows thrive on uncomfortable & unpredictable situations, and what's more unpredictable and morally ambiguous than using kids for an adult TV show?

taking real life kids to an evangelical church where they preach about hell all the time