The second season of “The Rehearsal” is immediately higher than the primary as a result of it’s about one thing. Within the present’s earlier season, Nathan Fielder developed and utilized his methodology—the so-called Fielder Methodology of role-playing amid elaborate simulations—to conditions wherein the individuals’ funding was principally emotional and narrowly private in scope. The brand new season begins with a bang: a simulated airplane crash, which heralds Fielder’s fundamental concept. He’s been learning the black-box cockpit transcripts that lead as much as such disasters, and observed that, though co-pilots share equal duty for flight security, they typically hesitate to obviously categorical their misgivings to pilots—and that pilots typically shut down the doubts and strategies of those that dare to voice their considerations. Fielder’s conceit is that his Methodology can be utilized to enhance the coaching of pilots and co-pilots, serving to the previous to share energy and the latter to claim themselves.
Instantly, the present features far-reaching stakes and locations new calls for on Fielder himself, who mockingly wonders in regards to the “deficit of credibility” he’ll have to beat as a comic getting into a website wherein lives grasp within the stability. Among the flaws of the primary season are nonetheless on full show; regardless of the inherent fascination of Fielder’s conceptual leap, and the inventiveness of his Rube Goldberg-esque contrivances, his impassively scrutinizing gaze stays as coldly entomological as ever, and the latent cruelty of his manipulations stays as acrid. However, within the new season’s second episode, a shift takes place that proves decisive and, a lot to my shock, elegant: he reaches deep into his personal expertise to search out echoes of empathy.
Having labored, early in his profession, as a junior producer on “Canadian Idol,” Fielder had the job of claiming no, behind the scenes, to lots of the singers who auditioned. Recalling that he disliked rejecting singers as a lot because the singers disliked being rejected, he phases a role-playing simulation of the method, utilizing co-pilots as expertise evaluators, as a result of, as he places it, “The holy grail I used to be on the lookout for was a way of rejection that left everybody glad.” When one co-pilot, named Mara’D, achieves the outcomes that Fielder seeks, he tries to determine easy methods to render her capacity, which one rejected singer ascribes to her “basic aura,” replicable and teachable. The singer is skeptical that such a factor could be completed, however, in a voice-over narration, Fielder lays his philosophy on the road: “I disagreed with this man. I consider that any human high quality could be discovered, or at the very least emulated.” This time, nonetheless, Fielder turns into his personal guinea pig; remembering a latest battle wherein he himself didn’t dare converse up in opposition to an authority determine, he rehearses an effort to take action within the current tense.
The dispute entails the removing of an episode of his earlier TV sequence, “Nathan for You,” from the Paramount+ website—a well-known episode wherein, as a way to name consideration to an outerwear agency that praised a Holocaust denier, he begins his personal outerwear line, expressly supposed to assist and supply Holocaust schooling. (Fielder’s proposed in-store show for it options swastikas and a duplicate of Auschwitz—precisely the form of sophomoric pseudo-audacity that made me dislike the present.) Now, in “The Rehearsal,” he doubles down: discovering that it was Paramount+ Germany which first eliminated the episode within the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, assault on Israel, Fielder simulates a showdown with its boss—and does so by portraying the corporate headquarters as Nazi headquarters. This mockery is briefly sophisticated when the actor enjoying the German govt (whom Fielder has costumed in a Nazi uniform) jumps out of character to problem him as “not honest, only a man with a grudge utilizing his tv present to smear us as an alternative of making an attempt to grasp us.” But Fielder’s showy nudging of scorching buttons he doesn’t really danger urgent overshadows what’s of tolerating curiosity within the episode: specifically, his questioning of efficiency and actuality, of seeming and being, because it pertains to the empathy that Mara’D shows, and to his personal incapacity to do the identical.
Although Fielder had asserted his notion that all the things could be “discovered, or at the very least emulated,” his staged Paramount+ confrontation leads him to take a position that “some persons are born nice performers” whose genuine emotions emerge “effortlessly,” whereas “for the remainder of us, irrespective of how honest we’re inside, it can all the time be a wrestle.” That’s the dichotomy he confronts within the third episode, “Pilot’s Code,” and he does it by deft indirection: coyly admitting to being nervous about performing a few of his psychological experiments on pilots, he exams one on an animal. Discovering a canine who’d lately been cloned from one other, Fielder tries to imbue it with the unique’s persona by replicating the bodily and emotional situations of the primary canine’s youth—and succeeds. That is the springboard from which Fielder takes his leap into the elegant. What comes subsequent is the very first thing in “The Rehearsal” that’s greater than a stunt, that reaches into the realm of artwork, exactly as a result of it’s a duplicate of a murals.
Having examined the failings of quite a few pilots, Fielder remembers an distinctive one who didn’t fail however, as an alternative, “invited suggestions at a important second”: Chesley Sullenberger, a.ok.a. Sully. In 2009, when a collision with a flock of birds broken each of his airplane’s engines, Sullenberger determined to land the crippled craft instantly, within the Hudson River, saving everybody onboard. The incident and its aftermath are dramatized in arresting element, in Clint Eastwood’s “Sully,” with Tom Hanks within the title position. The film is a superb one, its second of triumph surprisingly shadowed by tragic overtones; it’s additionally a narrative of persona, wherein Sully emphasizes how his personal character and expertise knowledgeable his option to land the airplane.
Although Fielder by no means mentions “Sully,” he in impact recreates it by way of the Fielder Methodology, going again to its supply—Sullenberger’s memoir, “Highest Duty”—and performing, onscreen, a trenchant important evaluation of the textual content that informs his simulations. (Even this research, which Fielder does by detaching pages from the e book and laying them out on an infinite worktable, with key passages highlighted, delivers an aesthetic jolt.) “My total life led me safely to that river,” Sullenberger writes, and Fielder, taking that line actually, decides to dwell Sullenberger’s life as totally as attainable. He shaves his physique, places on a bald cap, and—in one of the crucial astonishing photos I’ve these days seen—wears nothing however a diaper as he walks right into a room that’s been constructed on a colossal scale, such that he, as faux-infant Chesley, is infant-size in relation to it. (In an impressive little bit of comedy, cables descend from the rafters and, when he hooks them to his diaper, he will get hoisted into the crib.) There, he’s visited by Mother Sullenberger, a large puppet who, to maintain proportions proper, appears about fifteen ft tall.
Chesley’s childhood whizzes by shortly, and Fielder’s make-up and costumes shift to match. Child Chesley has his diaper modified, nurses, and spits up; Chesley, in boyhood, performs together with his sister and is joined by his dad and mom (performed by actors on stilts). Fielder, after all, has solely minutes of display screen time for the reënactment of the almost six many years that led Sullenberger as much as the fateful flight, and he follows Sullenberger’s memoir in restaging the incidents that the creator finds most vital. The adolescent Chesley learns to fly, dates a woman named Carole (performed by an actress), takes her up in a small airplane, and, whereas airborne and alone together with her, learns to “compartmentalize” the younger pilot’s duty for flight security and his emotions of sexual attraction. Fielder takes comedian precautions to painting Teen Chesley’s lust explicitly, and explains the process—changing the actress with a robotic, sending the crew off the set, and (invisibly) masturbating to provide himself an erection—in a line that’s concurrently a great goof and the very coronary heart of his present: “In spite of everything, this wasn’t a efficiency for you, the viewer—it was an expertise for me.”
Fielder is making an attempt to determine, in a surgically exact sense, whether or not the persona that enabled Sully to land his airplane safely, with the responsiveness to a co-pilot that the maneuver required, may very well be inculcated in different pilots by some related role-playing methodology. However Fielder is doing greater than seeing whether or not an individual could be Sullied; he’s Sullying himself, trying to endow himself with the qualities that he considers important to that pilot’s heroism. He’s giving himself classes in listening, in sincerity, in empathy—the very traits that the sequence itself has, from the beginning, revealed him (or maybe merely proven him) to be in need of.
