There’s a good piece from Alissa Wilkinson examining the tangled and complicated web that Nathan Fielder is building in his new show The Rehearsal. I liked all of it quite a bit, but given that this is a theology blog, we might as well focus in on the last bit, where Wilkinson astutely identifies parallels between The Rehearsal and Biblical parables / allusions. I think it’s worth examining Wilkinson’s observation not in a literal sense but as a broader theme of Fielder’s work in general. The reference for this piece, however, is not the Bible but the Vedic texts and the concept of Maya, which was covered a bit in this earlier blog about Simulation Theory.
Wilkinson could be right that Fielder is intentionally highlighting aspects of the Bible or Judeo-Christian mythos in general, but it feels like a fool’s errand to try and predict where this is headed with any degree of certainty (something Wilkinson acknowledges, as well). Fielder has been so successful at creating false realities in the past that one of his sketch ideas for Nathan For You–where he staged a viral video to attract tourists to a petting zoo–was successful enough that it went viral way ahead of the airdate of the episode. The guy is really, really good at figuring out what makes people tick and then weaponizing that against his subjects, and sometimes the subjects aren’t limited to who is on the screen.
Fielder’s body of work is all about Maya, the Vedic concept that says the material world is a trick or an illusion. The literal interpretation of that is quite dangerous and could lead someone down a paranoid delusional fantasy world where none of the people or things around them are real. That’s where some of that nihilistic “everything is permitted” goober stuff comes from, except in this case the consequences are karmic.
Literalist interpretations of holy texts are only for zealots and fools, but the source of Maya’s meaning is pretty straightforward: everything you’re told is a device and a potential distraction from your intended way of life. It’s all made up; an invention of our minds that we project out to the world together. There’s a fun way to marry Maya and the Noosphere–the concept of a global dimension of understanding that we all evolve with–in ways that feel scientific but always fall short given science’s problems with stuff we can’t see.
Things that clash with this constructed (and wobbly) narrative cause us great distress, but at the core of this distress is the fear that nobody knows anything. It’s a bit of a Freshman Philosophy of Mind 101 type cliche, but everything you know exists inside your own mind, and all of that information is something that has been transmitted to you from other minds, either those that live with you concurrently (friends, neighbors, teachers, mentors) or those that preceded you (dead people that wrote down ideas or created images that resonated because of those ideas). If just a little bit of that is off kilter, at scale over generations, it could add up to what amounts to a catastrophe of reality; the ultimate existential fear become manifest. Maybe, maybe not. You’ll find out when you die.
Wilkinson’s observation may seem left field or like a bit of a reach, but all of Fielder’s work is a fundamental interrogation of the creator / creation relationship of reality. The connection between Judeo-Christian parable and The Rehearsal may be intentional or it may be coincidence, but its presence is a reflection of the types of devices that get deployed time and time again by most creators when trying to interrogate the nature of creation. We have remarkably limited frames of reference, usually divided between some combination of science, philosophy, and God. Whether Fielder is intentionally doing this or not seems almost beside the point for the time being, at least until the totality of this first piece of work is in our field of view.
We can only extrapolate from our own perception of reality or context clues. Fielder is engaged with his faith, and one of his most astounding bits of work on Nathan for You was Summit Ice, the outdoor apparel collection that directly acknowledged the existence of the Holocaust. He also got divorced in the past decade, as Wilkinson notes, which paints the primary Rehearsal at the center of the show—where Fielder is participating in a fake marriage with fake children—as almost therapeutic self-immolation.
That endless inquiry of the circumstances that create us is what makes the show work, and what makes Maya such a remarkably persistent concept through philosophy, theology, and history. Fielder is making us question the nature of a key beacon of our shared reality by showing us how the sausage is made on the television, the medium that the highest proportion of Americans engage with. Nothing we see on television is real. It’s all staged, and Fielder shows us the strings that get pulled to reveal just how much faker everything is than you’d expect. You may think that “fake” just means an editor is putting stuff together after it’s shot, but it really means that there’s an army of producers, writers, actors, etc. that manipulate people until they do what the creators want on camera, then curate only the most effective pieces. Everything you’re seeing is a literal trick, not a slice of life with the fat trimmed.
But in order to take the audience on that journey, Fielder has to show us people who are contending with the same issues. People who are stuck on some idea that they have in their head about what is holding them back or preventing them from achieving happiness or satisfaction. It can be something as stupid as not having a Master’s degree and feeling inferior to your trivia team, as seen in the pilot episode of The Rehearsal. It doesn’t matter how trivial once in the mind of the person creating their own prison of imaginary concepts. The only way for this person to break out is to confront reality, which often clashes with the ideas they have in their head. The staging isn’t about comfort with the script (as the pressure of the situation has already made Fielder’s subjects go off script) but lowering the emotional stakes of reality, thus making it easier not get hurt when removing the psychic armor you’ve assembled.
While critics engaged with the question of whether Fielder’s show was cruel, the third episode has a genuinely moving and emotional moment with Patrick during his staged argument with his brother, finally brought to tears and open about his inability to move on from his father’s death. These are the kinds of revelations that people pay therapists many thousands of dollars for, which is not meant to excuse any perceived cruelty but to point out that Fielder is doing a little bit more than just putting goofy people on TV.
Based on his past work, Fielder seems too smart for a show that would be as simple as jokes at the expense of others. “Punk’d but for therapy” isn’t a bad conceit, but is midbrow. Fielder’s journey of examining the relationship between Creator / Creation and the undying concept of Maya involves interrogating his own creation and acting as an omniscient creator, showing us the collateral damage that comes when people try to maintain the trick instead of confronting it. Fielder’s show is Biblical, as Wilkinson correctly pointed out. The question is whether it’s intentionally Biblical, or if it’s unavoidable to draw Biblical parallels into a piece of work that fundamentally examines the things we believe about the world.