Getting up to what is really real
Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal and the novel that secretly inspired it
Earlier this week, I posted the first episode of my novella, The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter. All eight episodes will go live every Thursday throughout Substack Summer, leading up to the thrilling SEASON FINALE!
Don’t worry, though, I will continue to post those essays, reviews and jottings that you’ve come to know and live. That’s the VDL promise! Concurrent with the serialization of MindShifter, which is a novella about a television show, I’ll be sending out dispatches about other books that that portray TV, in one way or another. These essays will appear every Sunday.
Novella episode every Thursday1; essay every Sunday.
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This week, we’re looking at Nathan Fielder’s mind-bending The Rehearsal, and the avant-garde novel that maybe inspired it. Enjoy!
When the moment comes, what do you do with it?
Do you extend the moment for as long as you can, wallow in its intensity, delay everything else that will follow? Or do you delay the moment itself for as long as you can? Practice again and again, so that when the moment comes off, it will go perfectly?
These are the questions raised by The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder’s show on HBO, which recently wrapped up its second season. The premise of the show, as explored in its first season from 2022, is that Fielder wants to help people prepare for life’s big moments by rehearsing them in advance, again and again. Here’s something I wrote about that first season to catch you up:
For Season 2, Fielder sets his sights on something more ambitious. He doesn’t just want to help people navigate awkward social situations. He wants to save lives.
At the start of the season, Fielder walks us through a theory of his, one he’s convinced is true. Airplane crashes are often the result of poor weather or faulty mechanics. But they are also caused by poor communication. Drawing on real FAA transcripts, we see many reenactments of situations where a plane crashed due to a lack of communication in the cockpit. The pilot of the plane, the captain who’s in the lead, makes some questionable decision that endangers the flight. But the first officer, who should be able to speak up and take control of the plane, instead sits back, defers, remains silent. And the plane crashes as a result of that lack of communication. Social awkwardness, Fielder’s abiding theme, leads up to real-life tragedy.
To avoid such tragedy, Fielder constructs his usual elaborate sets and scenarios to provide real pilots with situations where they can learn—where they can rehearse—how to be more assertive. I mean, kinda. Yes, he uses his HBO money and resources2 to construct a perfect replica of a terminal in the Houston airport, and yes, there is a practice cockpit that is the equal of any training simulator. But what do the pilots do, exactly?
One awkward pilot learns how to ask an actress for a date. To do this, Fielder casts multiple different actors and actresses playing out some innocent romantic scenario, again and again, so that the pilot can watch and learn. It’s funny and creepy in equal measure.
Eventually, Fielder becomes convinced that the only way to portray these awkward moments in the cockpit with any kind of accuracy is to, well, actually fly a plane. And so he does: he spends months learning how to fly, logging hundreds of hours. He rents a 737 and hires actors to act as passengers.3 He actually flies the plane, and then, he goes on to fly more and more, the rehearsal and the event itself become synonymous.
It is bracing television. It is also uncomfortable, and possibly unethical. Indeed, toeing the line of the unethical is part of what can make documentary filmmaking so thrilling. Did they really do this? Are they really getting away with it? Watching the show, though, I kept thinking of a book, a novel, that seemed like it offered a key to understanding it. A novel about rehearsing, one that even ends, like The Rehearsal, on an airplane.
Remainder is a novel by British author Tom McCarthy, published in 2007. Well, that’s not quite right. It was first published by a small press, based in Paris, in 2005, then was acquired by Vintage and published to a much wider, global readership. Small presses for the win!
Remainder is also about a man who comes into a lot of money, and does strange, elaborate things with it. An unnamed has an accident: he is struck by…something, falling, from the sky. Something big. He doesn’t remember anything more than that, as the accident affected his memory. But he does receive a huge cash settlement from his lawyers, on the condition that he not say anything about the accident. Easy enough, as he doesn’t remember it.
What to do with the money, though? Help African villagers, as one friend suggests? Blow it on cocaine and strippers, as another suggests? Nothing appeals to him, though. Until, while at a friend’s party, he remembers something. At least, he thinks he does.
Standing in the bathroom of a loft apartment, he sees a crack in a wall. This crack summons something within him, something like a vision. Another bathroom, in another apartment building, with a crack in its own wall. There are others in the building: a woman frying liver downstairs, a pianist practicing scales, a young man fixing his motorbike in the courtyard. The man can’t say if this vision is a memory, or his imagination, or something he saw in a movie. He just knows that it feels real, in a way nothing else does. And so, using his huge cash settlement, he sets about to recreate it.
He hires a consultant from a company called Time Control. Time Control manages time for people—executives, wealthy financiers, movie stars. The man, speaking with a sudden forthrightness, tells Time Control what he wants. He wants to find the building from his vision. He wants to hire people—actors, perhaps, or perhaps, re-enactors—to act out the roles he recalls. The woman frying liver, the young man tuning up his motorbike. He wants them to repeat those same actions, again and again. And he wants to watch them do it. Move about in the world. The vision, as he recalls it, sustained. Frozen. Repeated.
Since he has the money to do all this, the man gets what he wants. Actually, let’s identify the man more clearly. He goes unnamed in Remainder. Even though he narrates the story, he tells us as little about himself as possible, pointedly omitting his own name. He wants to rid himself of his identity—of all identity. Zadie Smith, in a bravura essay for the New York Review of Books, calls him the Reenactor, which is perfect. His identity become his purpose.
The Reenactor constructs his set and populates it with his reenactors, much like Fielder and his faux airport. Unlike Fielder, though, the Reenactor is not interested in navigating and thus perfecting social interactions. The Reenactor wants to do away with the social world altogether. Rather, he wants to inhabit space, and his own body moving through it, perfectly. Smoothly. Unself-consciously.
He descends the staircase. He nods to the liver woman as she takes out the trash. He does this again, and again, and again. Each time, he feels a tingling go up his spine to the base of his skull. It feels very, very good—the only good feeling he experiences, in fact. The only time he feels real.
The Reenactor’s reenactments escalate. He reenacts an instance of him going to a garage and getting his tire (or tyre, since he’s British and this all takes place in London) fixed. A man is gunned down near his old neighborhood. The Reenactor reenacts, playing the role of the man killed. A black man, by the way—Remainder is uncomfortably clear on that point, and Smith elucidates that discomfort in her essay.
His tingling goes off the charts. It's so good, he begins to fall into trances. It's impossible not to note here that the nonwhite subject is still the bad conscience of the contemporary novel, obviously so in the realist tradition, but also more subtly here in the avant-garde. Why is the greatest facilitator of inauthenticity Asian? Why is the closest thing to epiphany a dead black man? Because Remainder, too, wants to destroy the myth of cultural authenticity.
No culture, no identity, says Remainder. Only the physical matters. Only space matters. Only matter matters.
Eventually, the Reenactor reenacts a bank robbery, a physical operation of immense complexity. Except, rather than perform the reenactment on a set, why not perform it in a bank? And why not reenact with actual customers who aren’t even aware that they’re in a performance, a reenactment? Why not merge the event and its reenactment into one single endless instant?
Of course the heist goes poorly, yet the Reenactor and his Time Control manager escape on a plane. Or not escape, for the Reenactor doesn’t want to go anywhere. He wants to turn the plane around, again, and again, forming a figure eight in the sky. A loop he can remain within forever.
Did Nathan Fielder read this novel? Did he get the idea for reenacting the routines of airplane pilots from this strange, chilly story? I mean, I’m not saying that, but I’m not not saying that, either. Both Remainder and The Rehearsal share an obsession with repetition, reenactment, as well as airplanes.
The aim of the respective repetitions, however, are almost diametrically opposed. Fielder wants to repeat the scenarios again and again to worm his way into the social sphere, to hack it, to the point where everything is accounted for and nothing is left up to chance. The Reenactor wants to do away with the social world entirely, to erase it so that only movement is left.
Both agree, however, that the world as it exists is not enough. To get the world right, to make a place worth occupying, one must live through it again, and again, and again. And if you don’t have the money to make that happen, at least you can watch someone else.
Due to a mistake on my end, I am having to send out Episode One again, for filing purposes on my newsletter’s website. Apologies for the duplicate email; it won’t happen again!
One of the most interesting, and funniest, threads of the show is that Fielder constantly tells us that all of this is very expensive, and that HBO is paying for it. Even though it’s less expensive than, say, Game of Thrones, the way the money is constantly foregrounded makes it feel more expensive. To say nothing of the immense logistical efforts the show must have taken, from construction to training to transportation. Like Brecht insisting that stagehands are visible onstage during any performance of The Threepenny Opera, Fielder wants you to notice the effort.
This is because Fielder lacks the experience, the flight hours, to pilot a plane for actual paying customers. But if the people are on the plane are actors he has hired, that provides him with the loophole he needs. This, for me, was the most worrisome aspect of the whole story.