Scene partners
One consistent takeaway from Nathan Fielder's work is don't trust anyone who wants to put you on television. You might know that you are going to be exploited for entertainment and even believe you can play it to your advantage, but you remain at a structural disadvantage. You are being recruited to perform in a spectacle whose rules are subject to change before, during, or after the fact.
This is especially obvious in Fielder's old pieces for This Hour Has 22 Minutes, "Nathan on Your Side." (He's not.) In this clip, for instance, he goes to an electronics store circa 2004 to talk about MP3 players and gets the salesman to rehearse a sales pitch under the assumption that Fielder will play along, which of course he doesn't. Instead he takes it to a level of "realism" that undermines the salesman's grasp of what is really happening.
Any social encounter requires some shared understandings of what roles everyone is trying to play — that's one of the basic ideas, anyway, in Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In Fielder's work (which seems like a systematic deconstruction of that book's assumptions, if not an elaboration of all the potential implicit in Orson Welles's F for Fake), the presence of the camera stands in for the general instability of those shared understandings. It muddles the sense of who's onstage and who's backstage, who is performing and who is observing. It indicates that anyone can be playing for audiences that aren't there and no collective investments automatically inhere among those sharing a particular stage.
Goffman suggests "reserving the term 'sincere' for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by their own performance." But does that mean that "sincere" individuals forget that they are performing, or that they relish the effectiveness of their knowing performance? The idea that one can simply be sincere without acting at all is rightly ruled out altogether.
For The Rehearsal, that basic idea is extended to six hours' worth of different permutations of role playing at varying degrees of recursiveness. The self-evidently absurd premise that Fielder wants to help people rehearse key moments in their lives serves mainly to clarify that everything is already a LARP when you choose to approach it that way. The rehearsals don't prepare participants for reality; they just demonstrate that reality consists of an endless string of interlocking performances in which anyone can be replaced by an impersonator or an imposter: It's Capgras syndrome played as comedy. The most unsettling aspect of the show, I thought, was when actors would embed with unknowing targets under false pretenses to gather information about them to essentially steal their personality. What pretenses aren't ultimately false from some angle? With billions of cameras in the world, there is always an angle.
In the LARP world, no one has a fixed character, just a set of free-floating characteristics that anyone can claim. No particular role is an essential one: When Fielder asks one of the many actors playing his child in the show within the show whether he seemed like a believable dad, the actor tells him he was a "great scene partner." At the same time, any emotional reaction anyone experiences derives not from inner dispositions but from how the characteristics and roles have been combined and orchestrated. Life can therefore be approached as a game in which one tries to control the conditions that produce particular affects. Make me laugh.