Nathan Fielder does this thing with his hands. He holds the section between his thumb and index finger, where the first dorsal interosseous muscle is, and applies a little pressure. It is a subtle if fretful gesture that can easily go unremarked. Other times, he pinches his palm or, often, the skin above his knuckles. He sometimes squeezes his lower lip in a gesture that conveys a similar kind of anxious energy, a paradoxical combination of self-consciousness and lack of self-awareness. It never seems to distract his interlocutors, who might clock it in some intuitive way but might not remember it later, except as a feeling, the minor disquiet of having interacted with someone who fidgets.
We all play with our hands, grab our thumb, crack our knuckles. But these mannerisms take on new meaning in The Rehearsal, a show presumably designed to allow participants to rehearse for life’s big moments. To this end, the production recreates physical locations and actors impersonate key people, giving participants the chance to calibrate their responses to challenging conversations ahead of time. Throughout the six episodes of its first season, The Rehearsal displays an extravagant use of resources, the appeal of the show partially born out of the astounding disjunction between the scale of the problem ostensibly being solved and the effort expended to solve it.
Episode one, for instance, features Kor Skeete, a Brooklyn teacher who has been lying to his trivia team about having a master’s degree. To help Kor prepare to make amends, the production recreates the bar where Kor plays trivia. A recreation so faithful to the original, it even includes the rips in the seats, the hinges on the doors, and a half-deflated, left-behind balloon. The recreation is breathtaking in its completeness, the accuracy unnerving. Why on earth do this? You wonder. Ulterior motives must be at play.
Fielder’s gestures—fretful, tentative, possibly self-soothing—stand in contrast with the exacting force of The Rehearsal’s concept, offering a kind of reprieve. His constant fidgeting, which functions as a kind of “background gesture,”[1] gives a more forgiving account of the show’s creator than that of an uber controlling mastermind willing to go to astounding lengths, sometimes at the expense of his participants. Unlike foreground gestures which are obviously communicative, background gestures are made with little effort, and it is the fact that they are performed without much awareness that gives them their revelatory power. If he pinches his knuckles as an expression of persistent anxiety, doesn’t that imply a gentleness, or at least a special sensitivity that needs to be relieved by holding one of his hands with the other? Fielder’s background gestures allow us to sustain the illusion that we’re catching a glimpse of who he might be off camera. His fidgeting, a sort of movement he has not rehearsed, affecting the quality of his presence, rendering him delicate.
The quality of his presence becomes ever more central as the season advances. By the end of episode two, Fielder goes from facilitator to co-participant, shifting the dynamic of the show. What promised to be an episodic series with each new episode featuring a different participant, molts to reveal a show singularly invested in the second rehearsal. Originally designed for Angela, a woman in her 40s who wants to rehearse parenting a child from babyhood to teenage years, the second simulation stretches throughout the remainder of the show, eventually giving Fielder the chance to take on the role of “daddy.”
Angela’s rehearsal is set in rural Oregon, a state with labor laws limiting the number of hours a child can work and thereby requiring dozens of rotating child actors to maintain the illusion of a single, continuous child. It is this parenting rehearsal—each switch is treated with the dramatized seriousness of a secret operation in a spy film—that reveals the show’s true scale and intent. Rehearsals nest inside other rehearsals as real people and places are intercut with their facsimiles, giving way to flashes of dream logic. A counterfeit Angela comes in to give Fielder the chance to work through arguments before the arguments take place. Fake Angela is often there to confront Fielder with some of his most deep-seated fears and, as a result, is the way people often appear to us in dreams: distorted by our anxieties, remade in our own image. At one point she voices what might be the ur-problem of the show: “Do you want to feel something real? That’s sad. No matter how hard you try, you never will.”
With each new episode, the line between fact and fiction grows ever more brittle. By the end, the show will take us behind the scenes of its own production. One of the six-year-olds playing Fielder’s young son, a little boy named Remy who wants to continue calling Fielder “daddy” off the set, fails to differentiate between what is real from what isn’t, completing an intricate, sometimes disorienting, and often-moving commentary on the idea of authenticity, the role of creators, and the many ways in which we can and cannot prepare to live. Remy’s too-real heartbreak seems to prompt a gear shift, the risk of playing pretend with a young scene partner leading to a kind of capitulation, a breaking away from the premise entirely. Yet in the show’s final moments Fielder changes his mind and chooses, instead, to recommit to the role of “dad” in what is perhaps the clearest articulation of the show’s methodology: “again.”
Throughout, Nathan Fielder plays a character named Nathan Fielder who probably resembles the real Nathan Fielder to a greater degree than previous televised versions of Nathan Fielder. Unlike the Fielder of Nathan for You (2013–2017), so often oblivious to social cues when his obliviousness could serve the comedic premise, this Fielder is, apparently, trying to be himself. In a career marked by a splitting of the self, it has always been part of Fielder’s appeal, in his multiple iterations, to try to answer the implicit question a persona elicits: where does the real Nathan Fielder begin and how much of him might be coming through at any given moment? That the question itself is misguided does not prevent the desire to know from materializing in the heart of the viewer.
Like other Fielder fans, I cherish the moments in his oeuvre when you can see or think you can see a genuine reaction. A grin, a laugh, an unintended betrayal of his affectless persona to reveal a warmer version underneath. It is no coincidence that I read in his gestures a meaningful tenderness. I’m already persuaded it’s there. Perhaps it is this history of trying to find the real Fielder in fleeting moments—a barely perceivable smirk, a telling look—that prepares me to latch onto his fidgeting with such conviction. Yet, even for those without a trajectory of looking for Nathan Fielder in the in-between moments, his fidgeting creates an opening for you to identify with him. Fielder might have orchestrated the very situation causing you distress as a viewer, but at least he’s uncomfortable too. Take episode one. During the 44-minute episode Fielder will: pull the skin above his knuckles (5:50), pinch his palm (6:33), tuck his hands between his legs as he floats in a pool, making himself small (9:00), again pull the skin above his knuckles (11:15), bite his upper lip (16:20), grab the skin between his fingers (16:46), again pull the skin above his knuckles (17:02 and 22:48), grab his lip (24:01), pick at his nailbed (40:47) and, once more, pull the skin above his knuckles (43:25).
This display of skin-pulling and lip-biting continues throughout the show and acquires new valence during difficult conversations, such as when he asks Angela whether he can join her rehearsal. He does this sitting at the reconstructed bar from episode one while yet again pinching the skin above his knuckles and leaning in to drink a Coke, searching for the straw with his mouth the way a little kid might. He’s asking Angela (and, by extension, us) to trust him. And he does this largely by signaling vulnerability with his body, like an animal showing its belly.
There is a moment in the Nathan for You feature-length finale (and clear precursor to The Rehearsal) “Finding Frances,” that functions as significant precedent, gesture-wise. Bill Heath—an elderly also-ran Bill Gates impersonator Fielder is helping find his long-lost love—stands still as Fielder combs his hair. Fielder is very careful as he brushes Bill’s hair, the gentleness heightened by Bill’s petiteness and posture, both of which evoke a small child. Fielder, in the role of caretaker, is the once and future daddy. Surely, Bill, 78 years old at the time of filming, could have combed his own hair. But that scene, however brief and unremarked upon, of Fielder doing a small, intimate thing for Bill reveals an essential if underdiscussed aspect of Fielder’s work: some complicated version of sweetness is fundamental to Fielder’s method. Sweetness is, as much as anything else, a tool to approach the real people in the show, to ask them to lay themselves bare while reassuring the viewer that the participants aren’t in any real peril. And a way, too, to demand our own tenderness so that we may watch him generously. In The Rehearsal, when Remy, in half sobs, protests, “I don’t want to leave you,” Fielder kneels to his eye level, gently pads his leg and in a comforting tone says, “It’s okay. We’ll see each other soon.”
Still, if Fielder leaves nothing to chance, can we trust that his persistent fidgeting is entirely unintentional? Either Fielder reveals his true essence through his gestures—mild-mannered, sweet, and vulnerable—or he emphasizes those very gestures (a kind of movement that might very well come naturally to him) to create the illusion of an underlying sweetness and vulnerability. If there is, in fact, an authentic Fielder hiding in plain sight, noticeable through his body language, that makes you, the viewer, into a tacit collaborator. Fielder might manipulate the participants, but he does not, ultimately, mislead you. If making you feel as though you can see through his persona is part of the plan, that, in turn, makes you a mark. And it frames Fielder as an ominous figure. A game maker who has anticipated your reactions and undermined them before you even showed up to play.
A hint of what the true dynamic of the show might be lies in the first episode. In the hopes of getting his first participant, Kor Skeete, to be more self-revealing, Fielder plans a trip “strategically designed to endear me to him.” Both Skeete and Fielder are once-divorced, and Fielder uses this commonality to connect. “You mentioned you were married,” Fielder says, as they both float in a heated pool. When Skeete confirms that, “Yes, I was married for five years,” Fielder volunteers, “I was married for three years.” The conversation is cut short when a man swims past them as Fielder explains in voice over, “I didn’t want to go too deep into my private life so I’d pre-planned for an elderly swimmer to interrupt us, in the hopes that it would convince Kor I was ready to share more had the moment not been ruined. I wasn’t sure if my portrayal of vulnerability was convincing….” Fielder was, in fact, once married for three years. The dishonesty is not in the facts, but in deploying self-revelation to advance undisclosed intentions. There is callousness in offering a closeness one does not intend to deliver. That it is with warmth that Fielder plans to trick Kor could very well be instructive of the larger machinery at work.
However tempting it is to see his gestures as a calculated element of his performance, it is also the case that you have to trust Fielder, on some level, to be able to enjoy the show. Particularly when it veers, as it is bound to do, into complicated moral territory. At the end of the first episode, an actor playing Kor declares Fielder, an “awful, awful person.” But that is not the view of Fielder that The Rehearsal forwards. He is also the Fielder who plays dinosaurs with a six-year-old, the Fielder who created a stunningly ambitious show, the Fielder whose desire for genuine experience feels as authentic as your own. Choosing to believe that his body language is a glimpse of an unmediated and fundamentally gentle Fielder is perhaps choosing to participate, willingly, in your own deception. Luckily, The Rehearsal offer clues for ways to do just that.
As Remy struggles to leave Fielder behind, he says to his mom, “But I still love Nathan.” The little boy’s reaction is framed as confusion, a young child’s inability to tell real life apart from role playing, the Fielder playing his dad from the Fielder playing the Fielder playing his dad. Yet Remy’s confusion might be precisely the point. Pretend love is not easily distinguishable from the real thing. Love, even based on mistaken perceptions or ideas, still feels like love. And The Rehearsal works best if you love Nathan Fielder. If you believe in the worthiness of his desires and the soundness of his schemes. I would even recommend being in love with him. If you don’t feel it at first, you can start by pretending. Do it long enough, it will come to feel true.
Notes:
[1] Kensy Cooperrider, “Foreground Gesture, Background Gesture,” Gesture 16, no. 2 (2017), https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/gest.16.2.02coo?crawler.