Can a Clown Really Make a Difference?

Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal

At the end of April, the first episode of the second season of The Rehearsal was released, a television series by Canadian comedian, actor and filmmaker Nathan Fielder, also known for Nathan for You and, more recently, The Curse, which he co-wrote with Benny Safdie. The title of the series gives away its premise: Fielder helps people caught in difficult situations by allowing them to rehearse them in elaborate simulations, often featuring meticulously constructed sets. Actors, trained in the so-called Fielder Method – where extras spend time observing the person they are meant to portray in real life during their daily routines – play the people in the participants’ lives, allowing various outcomes of certain situations to be explored. The scenarios range from relatively simple (someone wanting to confess a lie to a fellow member of a trivia club for instance) to increasingly complex (for example, someone practicing raising a child).

Fielder’s television persona is markedly awkward. He’s the opposite of the classic television personality, who seamlessly fills every silence with charm and eloquence. Fielder is more a television anti-hero. He can hardly be accused of showmanship. Where reality TV typically aims for as much unpredictability as possible to maximise its “entertainment value”, The Rehearsal inverts that logic. Of course, the simulations in The Rehearsal often go awry anyway, but Fielder exploits these failures in his own idiosyncratic way. He’s always present on screen, equipped with a special backpack-mounted table that allows him to take notes on his laptop at any moment. The rehearsal concept, combined with a substantial budget, enables him to exert control over every detail and to redirect or replay any moment. Fielder is both the instigator and the mediator of his chaos. In this way, he resembles a traditional ethnographer navigating the landscape of reality television, portraying society as a whole, and people, as acting, feeling and fundamentally uncertain beings, as something exotic. His awkwardness can almost be read as a kind of scientific attitude. He doesn’t observe in order to explain but to make the impossibility of total control palpable.

Yet the controversy stirred up by the rehearsals seems to slide off him with ease. In the rehearsal that occupies the majority of the first season, a woman named Angela wants to explore whether or not she wants children. Fielder, himself unmarried and childless, eventually decides to participate in the experiment. When one of the child actors – who are systematically rotated according to the simulated age – becomes emotionally attached to Fielder, the moral ambiguity becomes explicit. The combination of hyper-controlled environments and Fielder’s constant presence creates a specific openness to such ambiguity. In the end, none of the participants truly benefit from the rehearsals; Fielder is mostly studying himself. He’s the centre of a series that exists solely for and through him, in which his irony allows him to accommodate, or perhaps absorb, the ethical ambiguity.

Fielder is not only a television maker but also a comedian. His presence is intended to produce a comic effect. Humour allows one to explore and transgress ethical boundaries without immediately having to acknowledge them. A comedian dares to voice the unspeakable. As a comedic television creator, he ironically adopts certain television tropes. A notorious example is the Claw of Shame episode from Nathan for You, in which Fielder has to escape from a dangerous contraption in under a minute or else risk exposing his genitals to a group of children, all in the presence of a judge and a police officer. The set-up, the live commentary, the jittery camerawork, and the mounting tension created by repeated close-ups of Fielder’s underwear, which is systematically and expertly being removed from his lower body by a robotic arm as time runs out, all come straight from the television playbook. It’s the perfect setup for a broadcast nightmare and the end of Fielder as a media personality. In The Rehearsal, the form is more subtle, but the method is similar: through over-identification with certain television conventions and codes, Fielder turns the context of television production itself into the subject. He places participants in a kind of waiting room – a liminal space in which they constantly adjust their behaviour to Fielder’s gaze and expectations.

Fielder’s irony, and especially his on-screen persona, recalls that of Renzo Martens, who in Enjoy Poverty (2008) presents himself as the embodiment of the white neocolonialist. Both Martens and Fielder offer criticism by “performing” as figures from within the very system they critique. Martens travels to Congo with the message that poverty is the country’s most valuable export product, and that locals would do well to learn how to exploit that capital themselves. The film stages a self-proclaimed white saviour who does not denounce the existing mechanisms of exploitation but instead radicalises them. Martens doesn’t merely mimic colonial discourse; he appropriates and performs it. Both Fielder and Martens use the double role they inhabit (an artist, in Martens’s case) as a kind of carte blanche to not only question ethical boundaries but to temporarily suspend them altogether. What remains is a peculiar dissociation, an almost psychopathic relationship between maker and reality. Fielder remains somewhat suspended in his ambiguity, whereas Martens pushes through to the point where he himself becomes part of the very problem he portrays.

The Rehearsal is part of a broader trend in which more and more Americans and people around the world get their news from comedians. To a large extent, these comedians now shape public and political discourse. In the United States, this trend stretches back to progressive figures such as Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) and Stephen Colbert (The Colbert Report) as well as to more right-wing voices like Joe Rogan. While Fielder’s show doesn’t share the formal characteristics of daily news shows, it does share their sense of satirical identification with the media they aim to criticise, especially in the case of Colbert. One way to place his work, and that of other comedians, within the American context is through the Russian concept of stiob, drawn from Alexei Yurchak’s book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (2006), a study of a particular form of irony during the late-socialist period in the Soviet Union. Stiob is a form of parody that takes its object so seriously that it becomes nearly indistinguishable from what it imitates. It’s a strategy based on over-identification with “hegemonic forms”: the rhetoric and gestures of a system in decline. Critics of stiob often consider the exaggerated mimicry of a regime or corporation to be just as immoral as the original system itself. Yet such criticism only adds to the effect of stiob: the anticipated public condemnation serves merely to underscore the excessive devotion to the form.

Both Fielder and Martens make use of a form of stiob: they embrace the style and logic of the very system they critique, undermining it from within. But whereas Martens’s radical performativity makes clear that political change within a neocolonial framework is impossible without an acknowledgement of complicity, Fielder leaves the possibility of change unaddressed. His irony observes, analyses, and simulates, but it ultimately revolves around its own centre. It opens no radically new perspective.

“Maybe every new idea is funny until it’s proven.”

Based on the first season, it was difficult to predict where The Rehearsal would go next. From the first episode of season two, however, it quickly becomes apparent that Fielder is addressing a much larger and more abstract problem: plane crashes. In one of the opening scenes, Fielder explains that his own research – a hobby, as he claims – has revealed that many of these disasters can be traced back to the unequal power dynamic between pilots and co-pilots, and more specifically to the latter’s lack of assertiveness in crisis situations. He makes a case to an expert from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), tentatively offering both his services and HBO’s substantial budget, to investigate, through rehearsals once again, how fatal crashes might be prevented. After a brief, slightly awkward silence, the expert admits, “I think you’re on to something there.” For a moment, Fielder seems taken aback by the realisation that his idea might actually work. But, he asks subsequently: can you really set anything in motion if no one takes you seriously? To put that question to the test, Fielder later stages a clearly staged rehearsal scenario in which an actor performs as a clown trapped under an ice cream van, calling out to bystanders for help. The comedy is meant to turn into seriousness but the bystanders are slow to respond. The thought experiment is a familiar one: can a comedian truly effect change? Fielder offers no clear answer.

The shift away from concrete, everyday situations to the abstract domain of plane crashes suddenly lends The Rehearsal a political dimension, albeit an outlandish one. Contemporary American politics, marked by resignation, fear, and apathy, clearly lurks in the background. The plane crash has not of yet – recent events in Washington notwithstanding – become a symbolic representation of what’s wrong in the United States today. Although the second season hints at the possibility of political transformation, Fielder’s expansive playgrounds, supported by HBO’s seemingly limitless budget, only reinforce the sense that real change is out of reach. His irony only maintains that awareness. He plays the role of someone with political power. But what remains when critique loses its grip on reality?

Martens uses his irony as a tool of confrontation. His film functions as a work of art that seeks to abolish itself, one that is radically implosive. Fielder, by contrast, continues to wander through his own simulations. As a viewer, one remains relatively unmoved by these entanglements. The clown may play clever tricks, but he refuses to really act. Perhaps this is the tragedy of Fielder’s irony: that it teaches us to stop expecting anything at all.