Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for Season 1 of The Rehearsal.The first season ofNathan Fielder’s fantastical new inventionThe Rehearsalhas come to an end, closing the lid on the open-top soundstage that had come to be his version of a finely planned and constructed life. Navigating life events through a series of meticulously crafted and practiced scenarios, Fielder’s new show parodies life as a farce of decision tree logic and surface representations. Although ultimately presenting the most original and absurdist piece of television in recent years, unexpectedly concluding with a meditation on free will and the ethics of performance and child acting, it has to be said that the initial premise of the show undoubtedly shares a strong resemblance toCharlie Kaufman’s 2008 film,Synecdoche, New York.
Synecdoche, New Yorkrevolves aroundPhilip Seymour Hoffman’s Caden Cotard, who receives a grant after the success of his theater adaptation ofDeath of a Salesmanand uses it to finance his grandiose next project. For this project, he, much like Fielder, creates a life-sized replica of New York City in which he casts actors to play various characters and doppelgängers of the people in his own life, telling them to live out their lives as instructed. WithThe Rehearsal, Fielder takes it upon himself to expand upon this, taking a documentarian approach to capturing such an idea, and running with it, in typical Fielder fashion, as far as it can go.
If such a premise needed grounding (God forbid), thenJean Baudrillard’s 1981 bookSimulacra and Simulationis where to look. The book, largely the basis forThe Wachowski’sThe Matrix, proposes that in the postmodern age signifiers have slowly become detached from the signified to a place where, increasingly, it is not important what is real but merely what is represented. Baudrillard proposes that as this phenomenon progresses into its final, “third order of simulacra,” the distinction between reality and representation vanishes, and there is only the simulation. Where Kaufman, as is so often the case, uses this idea to haunting existential effect, the fact that Fielder’sexperiment,for lack of a better term, takes place using real people, with real situations and imitators, extends his presentation of a simulacrum beyond Kaufman’s.
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This notion really comes to the fore in Episode 4 of the series, “The Fielder Method,” where Fielder forces the viewers to work just to keep up with the multiple layers of artifice. Here, I kindly request patience as I attempt to deconstruct such a convoluted and finely interwoven system of imitations. In the episode, Fielder opens the titular “Fielder Method” school of acting to recruit actors for the show. As it progresses, however, he becomes conscious that one student, Thomas, isn’t fully engaging with the method, which involves shadowing (or, stalking) a random person known as their “primary” in order to become this person for their role. To alleviate his concerns about his teaching style and try to get into the mindset of Thomas, Fielder re-enacts the class with an actor playing a fake version of himself as the teacher, whilst Fielder himself takes the class in the role of Thomas.
Things go further still, as the real Fielder encourages Thomas to immerse himself further in the life of his primary, by getting the same job as him and moving into a new flat where more actors will play his “roommates.” All the while, Fielder advances his own imitation of Thomas by moving into Thomas' actual home, before being encouraged by the fake Fielder to, as was the case before, consider gaining the employment of his primary and moving out. Such convolution creates a mirror maze of postmodern illusion, almost starting a feedback loop of representations replacing the real, or, in Baudrillard’s words, “an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”
Thomas, here, has gone so far as to essentially live as his primary, to the extent that his career, living situation and personality bear no resemblance to his own life. This works to completely blur the lines between reality and representation, almost parodying the internet age’s imitation of reality and giving us the most extreme representation of Baudrillard’s concept seen onscreen, outdoing even Mr. Postmodern himself, Kaufman. WhereSynecdoche, New Yorkworks on a level of surreal absurdity, this instance is a perfect example of how you can’t help but quiver in disbelief when the conceit is transposed onto the lives of actual people.
The recent finale of the season placed this into even starker light. The main Rehearsal that ran throughout the season was based around Angela, a woman debating motherhood for whom the experience of raising a child was simulated in a fast-tracked manner, with her “son” Adam being aged at a rapid rate by regularly swapping the actors out for older and older boys. In the final episode, Fielder takes the reins on this rehearsal, choosing to raise the boy on his own after Angela decided to leave the show. Fielder, though, continues to have conversations with a fake Angela, played by an actress, to try and see if there is anything he could have done differently. With the episodes having been released a week after each other, this interaction in itself leads to a strange phenomenon whereby your remembered image of the real Angela fades slightly and leads the more recent one of the fake Angela to replace it. The viewer in this situation almost becomes implicated in Fielder’s postmodern reality, where the ability of the fake to imitate reality threatens to replace the authority of the real version.
This is by no means the crux of the finale, though. As Fielder starts to raise Adam on his own, he throws him his first birthday party. This is where the focus of the episode moves toward Fielder running into an issue with one of the child actors, Remi, who played Adam at age 6. After being swapped out for an older rendition of Adam, Remi is upset at having to leave the house where he has been playing out the fantasy of father and son. It comes to light that the young Remi does not have a father of his own, and is struggling to accept the transition of Fielder turning from “Daddy” back into Nathan.
From here, as something of an exploration of the ethics of such a format, Fielder imitates the role of Remi’s mother with another, older actor playing the role of Remi, in an attempt at finding comfort at what confusion he might have caused to the real Remi. It is here, in the final scene of the show, that it most spectacularly revels in all of its postmodern, simulatory glory. With moments of genuine emotion intentionally hard to distinguish with Fielder, it would be remiss to call it so, but as he, in the role of Remi’s mother, tearily declares “No, I’m your dad,” you feel the confused weight of the simulacrum reach a crescendo.
Despite this sublime ending moment, you still can’t help but feel that the real Remi, in his adolescent confusion, emphasized the point of all this postmodern chaos better than Fielder could ever have done himself. In his struggle to readapt it is clear that for young Remi the representation of a father was enough of a reality for him. It’s impossible to know whether he is capable of the distinction between what was acting and what was genuine connection; for him, at least in that moment, everything has become completely fused. The distinction between reality and representation has vanished. There is only the simulation.
