The Rehearsal - Nathan Fielder - HBO

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

idk i just don't think it's that cool or like taking comedy to the next level. like it's kids man. and the shit he does with them is fucked up.

I would prefer something that did understand consent and I would think consent depended on having an understanding of processes that one was very unlikely to have that young.

i think people are too quick to be like "no this is intelligent tv! there's layers to this! using children is putting a mirror on society!" when it's not actually any of those things. people love nathan and defend him to death. take a step back and look at those eps of nfy and it's actually p fucked up.

Speaking for myself all I was saying was that I don't take anything I saw in the show at face value, including the narrative that a few of the child actors were confused and could not tell real from make-believe. As far as I know those were just plot points in the show as well. Now, whether any of the child actors were confused in the same or other ways OUTSIDE of what we saw, that's another thing. Or maybe both is true and that is sad for those kids and not so funny after all.

This was fascinating television but i dunno if i liked it or can even recommend it exactly? With some distance, it's like a strange dream.

My first reaction after the finale was that the episode was essentially scripted—if not line by line, at least in the “Curb" way. Like, do I believe the real Nathan Fielder, in the course of putting together his show, had some sort of unexpected epiphany about himself or his work on camera? No. I believe he planned the show with a narrative/thematic arc in mind, and as such, he intended from the outset for his character to insert himself into the house, for the show to increasingly focus on “Nathan” and the show’s premise, and that the pointed dialog from fake Angela was scripted. As such, I figured the whole situation with the child actor believing it was real was fictional as well, though that tweet upthread from a family member works against it.

OTOH, my partner took the entire episode at face value as real, unforeseen events—I suppose the answer lies somewhere in between.

I think either the chronology is a little off or he really did leave Angela on her own to go through the motions with ever-aging child actors for a significant amount of time

The irl timeline is one of the many mysteries of the show.

I doubt the months of having a house rented and occupied for months on end was remotely real. But still if they are only filming the small bits that need to be shot to make a narrative it still takes somebody learning parts and rehearsing them and the bits being edited.
Assume that a series of clips supposed to show time lapsing over a given time must be filmed in about that time, though if they're going to go as far as faking weather for the area who really knows. BUt if it is over a longer time then tehy would need to continue to have access to the same place?

When you're out on the town...

Nathan Fielder is at the Mets game and they put him on the Jumbotron 😂 pic.twitter.com/8N66HLRAue

— Lee J 🪩 (@Lee_Jameson) October 8, 2022

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/kor-skeetes-un-rehearsed-celebrity-life

https://www.gq.com/story/gq-hype-nathan-fielder-men-of-the-year-2022

men for fielder of the year

Fashion can be so ridiculous. In the second photo in that article, you can maybe just about tell that Nathan is wearing a black belt - a few centimetres of it are showing.

Belt (price upon request), by Ann Demeulemeester.

"Oh man, I love that belt he's wearing! I must request the price to see if I can afford to make that kind of impression!"

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/kate-berlant-in-conversation-with-nathan-fielder

i have liked some of Kate Berlant's work but Cinnamon in the Wind left me cold.

ok

it's improv so i imagine it varied from performance to performance. being in the audience for that kind of show is more or less necessary, you have to be part of the energy of the room and watch her react to what the crowd is giving out or else it comes off (as I found it on tape) premeditated, hyperaware and joyless... and not in the way she intended.

i thought it was really good, i find her enjoyable to watch even if i'm not cracking up

Enjoyed the show for the most part until the last episode. I thought there was going to be some “stop”, so to speak, with the rehearsal when he realized what had happened with Remy. The fact he kept going and portraying Remy’s mother and “acting” as her left a real sour taste for me.