The Finale of “The Rehearsal” Is Outlandish and Elegant

Nathan Fielder, like Andy Kaufman earlier than him, makes performance-art comedy that doesn’t solely poke enjoyable on the world however experimentally perturbs it, and he plies this commerce within the buffer zone between actuality and artifice. He presents himself as one thing of a Kaspar Hauser determine for the age of synthetic intelligence, a foundling raised not by wolves however by a sophisticated and affectless race of extraterrestrial anthropologists. His object is to isolate and mimic the rudiments of human sociability. Fielder’s instinct is that many putatively regular folks share his personal bewildered dread of on a regular basis interactions, that are directly ruled by established, if opaque, social norms and topic to unnerving unpredictability. Youngsters study to tame uncertainty by repetition: they replay interactions in an effort to interpret and management the various challenges of their setting. Adults who undertake this tactic are recognized with repetition compulsion. Actors, nonetheless, remodel such neurotic conduct into the advantage of professionalism, and, as such, he sees their work as a broadly relevant observe for any civilian beset by doubt and equivocation. That is the premise of the “The Rehearsal,” Fielder’s try to deploy excellent facsimiles of precise environments—night-life venues, residences—to function human sandboxes for dry-run iterations. The entire thing has solely labored as a result of Fielder exhibits an unflagging dedication to the bit. His transformation of artifice into authenticity has been rendered credible by the delighted, deadpan alacrity with which he set huge sums of HBO’s cash on hearth.

Fielder guarantees his contributors lives of better freedom and ease: to playact the sport of life in a managed, low-stakes setting would put together them to satisfy precise interactions with newly relaxed spontaneity. Within the first, comparatively sane instance, a New Yorker named Kor frets that his pub-trivia workforce will excommunicate him if he comes clear about the truth that he doesn’t, the truth is, have a grasp’s diploma; Fielder not solely hires an actor to play Kor’s pal and teammate, he re-creates a whole Brooklyn bar to present their pretend conversations an asymptotic proximity to the actual. By the tip of the season, Fielder has taken his method to its logically batshit conclusion: he scaffolds everything of a little one’s growth from infancy to adolescence.

Fielder, nonetheless, was not simply the stage supervisor of those experiments in preëmptive reënactment; he was additionally his personal major shopper. Fielder was nicely conscious that no quantity of teaching may efficiently tame the disorderly interior lives of his contributors, and, as he ratcheted up the absurdity of their environments, the authenticity of their feelings turned key props on a stage finally set for Fielder himself. He wanted them to have actual emotions within the hope that he may develop a better facility for pure human interplay. The infinite regress of recursive self-awareness is pushed to date that it collapses in on itself, and Fielder’s religion in artifice proves no match for the inescapable energy of the actual. The finale—the place Fielder, who by this level has completely undermined his personal capability to separate rehearsal from actuality, breaks character and seems to establish because the precise father of one in every of his little one actors—is a surprising and genuinely destabilizing confrontation with sincerity. Then once more, perhaps it’s not.

The first season of “The Rehearsal” appeared to exhaust all prospects for the vanity that appearing—the science of the unreal—may present a prophylactic for all times. It didn’t. The second season is, someway, much more berserk than the primary, but it surely’s additionally extra disciplined and coherent. (If you happen to haven’t watched the present or acquired to the finale, two phrases of warning: there are spoilers to return, and even my try to explain what occurs will make me sound as if I, too, have misplaced my thoughts.) The quarry of genuine feeling proved a crimson herring; Fielder has deserted his curiosity in interiority for an curiosity in conduct, and the concept that there isn’t any facet of human conduct that can not be “realized, or not less than emulated.” The pilot episode opens with an ostensibly in-flight trade between an airplane captain and his first officer. When the captain, in a present of stereotypical conceitedness, ignores his first officer’s reservations about their trajectory, their little collegial quarrel is definitively resolved by an unceremonious and fiery plunge to earth. Fielder then materializes as a demonic observer backlit by an inferno. Because the digital camera pans out, we see that the entire episode was performed not at cruising altitude however in a flight simulator. Aviation is a site the place the operative metaphor of the present—that life is amenable to simulation—may be absolutely literalized.

Fielder, or not less than his character, explains that he has a hobbyist’s curiosity in aircraft crashes, and the primary episode makes use of cockpit voice recordings as dramatic screenplays for the darkish re-creation of a collection of precise disasters. These show out Fielder’s instinct that aviation security is determined by candid cockpit dialog, a very high-stakes—and, crucially, maybe tractable—instance of Fielder’s over-all preoccupation with the worry and nervousness that inhibits real communication. Fielder believes that his personal experience in elaborate role-playing eventualities may signify a serious contribution to aviation security. Though he wish to be taken critically as an ethical actor, he can’t renege on his obligation to entertain: “Despite the fact that I had the assets to probably clear up this life-or-death situation and save actual people from dying, I used to be given this cash to create a comedy collection. Up to now, I used to be failing. We have been over ten minutes into this episode with zero laughs.”

On three interconnected warehouses in Los Angeles, he constructs an exacting duplicate of a whole terminal of the Houston airport, full with a Brookstone and chain eating places. He hires greater than seventy actors to carry out the roles of safety personnel, gate brokers, and Panda Specific staff. All of this infrastructure creates a context of verisimilitude for pretend rehearsals designed to bear actual fruit. He invitations a cohort of actual pilots to step outdoors of their traditional self-conceptions and inhabit playful exchanges between First Officer Blunt, who by no means hesitates to precise what’s actually on his thoughts, and Captain Allears, who graciously accepts criticism within the spirit of self-improvement. These workouts may liberate them from the constraints of their routine self-consciousness.

Though the presumption of the present is that the aviation business has uncared for the interpersonal dimension of the cockpit, the self-discipline of “crew useful resource administration” has existed for greater than 4 many years. Fielder’s obsessive analysis appears to have missed the seminal contribution of “NASA Technical Memorandum 78482,” which referred to as for the substitute of the archetypally imperious captain and deferential first officer with a extra forgiving and cozy cockpit tradition. As William Langewiesche, the best aviation journalist of all time, put it in a harrowing 2014 article concerning the crash of Air France 447, this emphasis on candid teamwork included nothing wanting “a brand new method to the usage of simulators.” My level just isn’t that “The Rehearsal” has been anticipated. It’s that Fielder could also be a lunatic, however he’s positively not loopy.

Within the well-known “Unhealthy Religion” chapter of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” the reader is requested to contemplate the instance of a waiter in a café, whose constancy to a set of gestures signify his aspiration to the standing of automaton. His identification along with his identification as a waiter supplies a refuge from the overwhelming terror of existential freedom. Sartre contrasts the timid fixity of the waiter with the heroically protean determine of the actor, who treats the recitation of a script as merely one in every of many video games that he may play. Actors are free insofar as they acknowledge their performances as performances. Their “true” self is handled with the lightness of yet one more position.

When Sartre wrote his ebook, this classical method to character was about to be outdated by Technique appearing. Technique actors didn’t merely imitate their characters and pantomime their sentiments; they turned them and felt their feelings. These contrasting modes have been encapsulated within the apocryphal trade between Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman on the set of “Marathon Man.” Hoffman, legend has it, stayed up for 3 straight days to deplete himself for the sake of realism. Olivier is alleged to have turned to Hoffman and mentioned, “My pricey boy, why don’t you simply attempt appearing?”

Classical appearing, in its traditional failure mode, feels rote or mechanical. The failure mode of Technique appearing, by comparability, is that the obsessive try to manufacture an interior state of genuine depth has no limiting precept, and may drive you out of your thoughts. This dynamic is taken to its final excessive by the narrator of Tom McCarthy’s cult novel “The rest.” Within the wake of a traumatic mind harm and subsequent authorized settlement, the ebook’s narrator spends a substantial amount of cash within the compulsive try to re-create the bodily settings, and reënact the private interactions with which he associates obscure emotions of profound contentment. His more and more psychotic dedication to reënactment ultimately devolves into theatrical violence and destruction, together with drive-by shootings and a financial institution heist. Fielder, too, flirts with pathological extremes. Many moments from the season—the creation of a pretend reality-show competitors, that includes pilot judges, referred to as “Wings of Voice”; the idea that Chesley Sullenberger spent the ultimate twenty-three seconds of his descent into the Hudson River listening to Evanescence’s “Deliver Me to Life”—are frankly bananas.

“The Rehearsal” thus bears a superficial resemblance to the spiralling insanity of “The rest,” however the sign distinction is that Fielder—who teaches his personal appearing approach and calls it the Fielder Technique—isn’t distracted by the chimera of genuine feeling. In one of many present’s many intertextual references to his different work, he remembers what it was wish to play reverse Emma Stone in his mission “The Curse”: “I didn’t perceive how an actor may really feel love in a very pretend relationship.” Performing, as he sees it, isn’t about convincing your self however convincing different folks. Fielder populates his personal exhibits with actors as a result of their remit is to convey emotions—a vital a part of his incessant rehearsals—with out truly having them. He can experiment along with his personal performances with out worrying they may take his responses personally. They don’t seem to be, in spite of everything, common folks. They’re professionals.

The item of Fielder’s rehearsals just isn’t the nurturance of some elusive interior fact; it’s the hope that he may make his personal efficiency of self in on a regular basis life extra convincing. He’s not enthusiastic about authenticity or interior depth. He would identical to to find out how higher to be taken at face worth: “Each public alternative I’ve had in my life to convey sincerity I’ve became an entire joke.”

The finale of this season, “My Controls,” is among the most astonishing, ridiculous, and stylish episodes of tv I feel I’ve ever seen. It opens on a barren soundstage, the place Fielder is holding auditions for the position of airplane passenger. The actors have ready to ship traces drawn from a beverage-service scene: “Food plan Pepsi, please,” and different in-flight banalities. These scenes, Fielder explains, will likely be carried out not on a soundstage duplicate however at precise cruising altitude. There’s one small caveat. The position of the pilot will likely be performed by Fielder himself.

Two years earlier, he explains, he started to take flying classes. He concedes he was “not a pure, particularly when it got here to touchdown the aircraft.” Considered one of his flight instructors instructed him that he was “the slowest learner they ever taught.” They suggested that he return dwelling and deal with “chair flying”—sitting on a chunk of furnishings, in different phrases, and appearing as if he’s piloting an plane. There is a component of manifestation at work: he tells himself he’s “assured in each resolution,” and even imagines bragging to his pilot buddies about notably easy landings. By some means this works, and swiftly he sticks his precise landings. He will get his pilot’s license.

Over a brief succession of harrowing movies taken from the again seat of assorted rideshares—one driver texts, one other scrolls by TikTok—he makes a ultimate bid for his marketing campaign towards battle aversion as a real public service: “We’re all simply folks at the back of an Uber, making an attempt to keep away from a clumsy dialog, and I intend to show that.” After having didn’t safe regulatory, congressional, or business curiosity in his scheme to reform cockpit communication, he proposes a plan that’s simply loopy sufficient to work—or to kill himself and 100 and fifty others. Though this appears not solely narratively however morally and legally preposterous, he explains that an obscure loophole will permit him to captain his personal 737 so long as there are not any paying passengers. If he as a substitute flies actors—people who find themselves directly actual and make-believe—he’s technically within the clear.

With lower than 300 hours of flight time—a few fifth of the minimal required to qualify for a job as a industrial pilot—Fielder pursues his 737 kind ranking. The entire of his coaching, his teacher tells him, will happen in a simulator. He won’t ever fly the precise plane till he and his hundred and fifty actors board the aircraft for actual. Regardless of his bedrock dedication to the ideas of rigorous simulation, it takes him a theatrical beat to persuade himself that the simulator should be “actual” sufficient to gamble with the lives of actual folks. A month later, he turns into the least skilled pilot licensed to fly a 737 in North America.

There’s one hitch. This season has highlighted his recognition within the autism neighborhood, which appreciated “The Rehearsal” as a vivid illustration of “masking,” or the neurodivergent tendency to check and mimic commonplace social intercourse. The thought seems to cross his thoughts that the situation may account for his personal social perplexity. This involves a head when he’s confronted with the F.A.A.’s required medical questionnaire. A health care provider tells him that not one of the psychological circumstances talked about on the shape are materially related except they intervene with “the capability to carry out adequately.” If this exterior, behavioral appraisal appears dubiously ample, Fielder submits to a particular fMRI that purports to look inside his mind for extra concrete proof, however he gained’t have the ends in time to fly. He checks the “no” field on the shape. From a desk in a bleak lodge room, in his full pilot’s regalia, he turns to handle the digital camera: he’s going by with this certifiably demented plan to indicate “how onerous it may be for any pilot to say what they’re pondering in a cockpit setting”—not on uncommon events however “on each single airline flight.” Loads of artwork is a metaphor for our incapability to attach with each other. Most of it doesn’t entail a mortal threat to 100 and fifty folks for the sake of a tv comedy program.

One of many pilots who served as a choose for the singing competitors “Wings of Voice” can be an aspiring reality-television producer, and he agrees to signal on as Fielder’s first officer. As they’re making ready to finish the preflight guidelines, the primary officer says one thing barely uneasy about how actors in movies and tv don’t normally fly their very own planes. Fielder appears slightly peevish, reminding his colleague that he’s not simply an actor or comic: “I’m a pilot too, I suppose.” As they put together for takeoff, Fielder welcomes everybody aboard “on behalf of your complete flight crew, and, after all, HBO.”

The flight—two hours out into the desert and again to the San Bernardino airport—passes uneventfully, and Fielder will get his probability to play Captain Allears to his First Officer Blunt, who tentatively factors out some minor errors on the captain’s half. Fielder approaches the ultimate descent with some trepidation, offhandedly asking his first officer if the method works in actual life the best way it really works within the sim, however he nails the touchdown—each actually and figuratively. The assembled actor-passengers applaud him from the tarmac. He muses, in voice-over, that “nobody sees what goes on within the cockpit, and, so long as you get everybody down safely, that’s all it takes to be their hero.” The precept of the rehearsal has been vindicated by floor fact.

Because the winner of “Wings of Voice” sings Captain Sully’s favourite Evanescence tune, Fielder receives a voice mail about his fMRI outcomes. He stares on the display for a couple of seconds earlier than deleting the message. The outward competence he demonstrated as a pilot renders any prognosis irrelevant. It’s not simply that he doesn’t care whether or not he has been deemed autistic or not. It’s that the mysteries of interiority are solely inappropriate. What the present finally levels is an unsentimental rejection of the complete edifice of authenticity, and the cult of identification it evokes. He is perhaps autistic and a comic, however he’s additionally now a pilot, one with a brand new facet gig for an organization that transports empty 737s. The collection ends with a montage of his cockpit adventures. He has spent his profession making an attempt to determine if he’s O.Okay. inside, and now that burden has been lifted. “They solely let the neatest and greatest folks fly a aircraft of this dimension, and it feels good to know that,” he concludes. “Nobody is allowed within the cockpit if there’s one thing flawed with them. So, in case you’re right here, you should be positive.” ♦