A critical review of The Rehearsal
What social foibles can reveal about our innermost selves
Disclaimer: I initially wrote this review as a silly little gimmick. A friend told me I should watch Ep 1 of The Rehearsal. As someone who has only ever been recommended shows like Nathan for You, and I Think You Should Leave by ex boyfriends who always found the humor funnier than I did, I was resistant. I promised that I would watch it though under the condition that he would have to read an intentionally pretentious critical review of the episode that I would write. We agreed to these terms. But low and behold I finished the review and I actually liked it a little. I hope you’ll give it a chance, even if you haven’t watched the episode, in the same way you might attend class for a book you didn’t read. So without further ado…
*spoilers included*
Nathan Fielder’s new work, The Rehearsal, delivers what we’ve come to expect from him—it is uncomfortable and provocative, interrogative and, plainly, funny. The Rehearsal abides by the same social subversions and interpersonal oddities as his last show, Nathan For You. Both latch upon the lives of unsuspecting laypeople and wreak havoc. It’s unclear if the shows do this beyond repair.
In the first episode of The Rehearsal, we are introduced to Kor, described accurately by the episode’s IMDB page as a “Brooklyn-based trivia aficionado” who is looking to rehearse a difficult conversation with a friend wherein he will admit to lying to her for years about his educational background. It’s immediately clear upon our introduction to Kor that Fielder may have met his match in the painfully awkward department, but Kor is sweet and surprising and heartfelt, difficult to dislike.
The show, though ostensibly a social commentary, is actually implosive, landing its most devastating blows to the idiosyncrasies of the self rather than that of the collective. We watch a scene in which Fielder and Kor attempt to bond:
“Is it sad for you?” Fielder asks Kor as the two wade uncomfortably in the shallow end of a public pool. He’s referencing Kor’s marriage that ended in divorce.
“I consider it one of the biggest failures of my life,” Kor responds plainly.
“What?” Fielder asks. He makes him repeat himself. The audience’s collective skin crawls.
“I consider it one of the biggest failures of my life,” Kor says again, this time louder. Just past Kor and Nathan, an old man splashes into the pool and begins to swim laps. The audience is moved to laughter—and nausea.
A clunky silence hangs between Kor and Fielder.
The elderly man flaps past them, spraying water as he goes.
As Kor and Fielder exit the pool, Fielder’s voiceover narration plays over the scene:
“I didn’t want to go too deep into my private life, so I had pre-planned for an elderly swimmer to interrupt us, in the hopes that it would convince Kor that I was ready to share more had the moment not been ruined.”
He ends the soliloquy with a salient, “I wasn’t sure if my portrayal of vulnerability was convincing.”
It would seem that as audience members we cringe and laugh and dislike what Fielder is doing here because it is disrupting social mores, flooding our senses with the feelings of discomfort and self-consciousness that come from the kinds of social interactions we’d all rather forget. But the real magic happens when Fielder reveals what is going on for him internally during this scene. We laugh, actually, because it is inherently absurd to see ourselves in another, and we do see ourselves there when Fielder remarks on his attempt to manipulate a situation to make him appear vulnerable, to portray vulnerability. When we hear Fielder’s internal dialogue, we laugh, or we are disturbed, or both, because we are suddenly struck by the fact that the effort to convince someone of our own humanity is often of greater importance to us than the experience of actually feeling it.
The whole episode and Fielder’s naked self-reflection that often follows his interactions strike us as absurd. Though I must admit (albeit somewhat begrudgingly) that I think it succeeds in asking the question it sets out to pose: is this any more absurd than reality? I know, it makes me want to roll my eyes too. My resistance to admitting that this question came to mind for me is due to the fact that I believe this is the question that Fielder is banging us over the head with— with a heavy wooden mallet. And yet, his brute force proves at least somewhat effective.
The moment where Kor and Tricia meet and Kor confesses his secret to her gives rise to something genuinely beautiful. The two friends overturn each other and reveal something new, something deep and delicate and true and, perhaps most miraculously for two people who have known each other for years, surprising. It feels somehow wrong or misshapen to be moved by a moment of intimacy that happened in such bizarre circumstances. And yet, you’d have to be in a severe empathy deficit to feel apathetic towards the outcome.
Fielder isn’t doing something special because he is being awkward, ludicrous, strange, he is flabbergasting his audience primarily through endurance. He keeps raising the stakes, keeps upping the absurdity of the given scenario, which is always already absurd on its face. This quality makes The Rehearsal downright Melvillian, in part due to the general whiff of misfortune and loneliness that hangs about the host and his subjects, and in part due to the show’s unrelenting pursuit of discomfort. One of Herman’s most popular characters, Bartleby, is mostly disturbing because he violates social conventions in chronically “preferring not to” do any of his assigned tasks. This violation alone drives the story forward, until we find our protagonist curled in the fetal position behind prison walls. Fielder similarly follows the thread to the end of the line, and then takes it further still. As viewers we curl our toes and cross our arms, squeamish in our desire for it to end, and yet, bloodthirsty in our desire for it go on.
There is an air of deep sadness that Fielder’s chosen subjects/costars/victims/collaborators carry, one that even the ridiculousness of his stunts and fumbling social faux pas can’t seem to conceal or distract us from entirely. Although, it’s possible that part of the poignancy of his work is that he does not try to hide it, but rather foists it upon the viewers— like a dinner host serving his guests a fish with his head still intact— a gruesome reminder of what it is that we are really doing here. It is purposely morbid, ensuring that the diner, or in this case, the viewer, must be consenting to their own disgust before and while chowing down. The fish’s eye stares back at us as we churn its flesh in our maw, Nathan Fielder makes us laugh as we watch sad people want things. And thus, the most lasting impression we take away from The Rehearsal is not our opinion of Fielder as a person nor his mischievous manipulations nor his subjects nor our culture at large, but rather the smell of salt on our own breath— the feeling we are left with about ourselves.