Easier to let our double do the work.
For Nathan Fielder, the professional and digital cultures of our high-tech hyperreality have turned Gothic. His most recent series, The Rehearsal, coalesces around encounters with doppelgängers and what those uncanny encounters reveal about our insecurity of being perceived as anything but our most ideal self. Here we encounter not a theater of life but a theater for better living, where participants regularly encounter their own worst enemies: themselves. From imposter syndrome to AI deepfakes, The Rehearsal constructs a window (or is it a mirror?) into an ideal self, a particularly fraught vision in a contemporary culture of self-image. From hearse to rehearse, Fielder’s Gothic reality television proves that the only thing more terrifying than the ghosts of our past are the specters of our ideal futures.
Since its first season in 2022, The Rehearsal’s participants have rehearsed impending life events that are accompanied with undue degrees of emotional difficulty. From confessing white lies to practicing the routines of motherhood, no life dramas are too big or too small to rehearse. Of course, for Fielder, rehearsing is not simply practicing. In the show, rehearsing dissolves the boundary separating the ‘fiction’ of the rehearsal from the ‘real’ event being practiced. Every reality show needs its participants, but The Rehearsal’s participants exemplify the series’ central ethos: when one participates in the rehearsal of their ideal life, fantasy doesn’t just become reality, but what we take for reality begins to look awfully fantastical. With a vigilant attention for detail, the set designs and doubles enlisted for each rehearsal become a mirror image of reality—which is to say that every rehearsal feels like a Potemkin village presided over by none other than your own doppelgängers.
Innovating the reality television format, Fielder imports that quintessentially Gothic figure: the double. In its Gothic idiom, as canonized in texts like Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the double destabilizes our sense of an original self—a self-sovereignty policed at the border between who we think we are and who we believe we are not. While Freud’s Unheimlich locates the double’s uncanny effect in an unwanted return of the repressed, Fielder’s update to the double prepares viewers to see the uncanniness of our digital age that is defined less by this classic model of repression than it is by an incitement to overproduce and overshare our doubles. Instead of fighting or fleeing these doubles, today we circulate them freely. Situated at the nexus of original and double, The Rehearsal indexes a cultural investment in how we see ourselves transforming our fantasies into realities. When we digitally curate (if not hallucinate) our aspirational avatars, when we outsource our participation to YouTubers, influencers, and streamers who perform “reacting” as we merely watch, and when in the aftermath of COVID and resurging authoritarianism participation in democratic politics and civic life are actively eroded, it would be putting it mildly to say that we have surrendered to passivity. We are interpassive. As Žižek put it, though we may celebrate the “democratic potential” of our digital era that enables us to “participate actively in the spectacle,” interpassivity characterizes the “much more uncanny phenomenon” of letting the spectacle participate for us.
The condition of the present relies on the entangling of the fantasy and the real, but Fielder’s rehearsal method takes this social subtext and turns it into a narrative engine, into text. With fiction and reality explicitly blurred, The Rehearsal’s participants offload the burden of possessing a self onto their ideal doubles. Linking reality television with democratic politics, the show’s use of participation as such illuminates the “uncanny” effect of interpassivity. Our doubles perform our social, cultural, and political participation for us, allowing us to retreat further from the unpredictable—perhaps unrehearsable—discomforts and inconveniences of common struggle (see: the reality television star to demagogue pipeline). Like our mirror image, our seeking out of political echo chambers and self-affirming AI extends the double into a larger political and media economy that risks turning coalition building amongst diverse participants into a homogenous hyper-commonality of the same. It is no coincidence then that several of the real scenarios rehearsed in the series never come to fruition. As Fielder reflects on a participant who abandoned their rehearsal, “maybe for some, the rehearsal is enough.”
Regardless, rehearsing as a practice of making the ideal into reality comes freighted with the uncanny ability to unsettle what we think is real and what we think is not. As Fielder describes the uncanny set designs throughout The Rehearsal: “there’s something strange about entering a space that’s indistinguishable from another. In moments, you can forget where you are.” In these uncanny spaces, this dislocation of the self undermines the show’s advertised premise that inexhaustible reality testing can master all contingencies. For those of us afflicted with social anxiety, the show’s elaborate recreations, meticulous attention to detail, and byzantine verisimilitude makes the invitation to script every social interaction, to cue up every social interaction, nearly irresistible. However, the show’s ostensible purpose to cultivate agency for participants—to illustrate how the world, with enough practice, is what we make of it—inadvertently reveals how this same world makes us. To rehearse in order to perform a more authentic version of ourselves not only belies the very notion of authenticity, but shows to what extent, even when we are not overtly rehearsing, life is composed of theatrical fictions that place no small amount of pressure to perform in expected ways. Easier to let our double do the work. By transplanting the double from Gothic fiction to reality television, Fielder sees both the fiction of reality and the reality of our fictions. This doubled perspective sees through social ideals through which fantasies must be made into realities.
And yet, if the show’s participants want to be masters of their own universes, they routinely instead find themselves as participants in Fielder’s. The mimetic machinery of Fielder’s rehearsals dramatize the structure of interpassivity through which participants enjoy through their doubles (and by no means is erotic enjoyment off the table). As Vulture described the trailer to the show’s first season, “Nathan Fielder Plays God.” Fielder acts as all-knowing deity: auguring the trajectory of conversations with maze-like flowcharts, training actors in the ways of “The Fielder Method,” constructing faithful-to-scale replicas of bars and homes, and bedecked in his now iconic laptop harness. He shepherds participants into the edenic world of his own creation with studio lots quarantined from the shame of failure, faux pas, and blunder. However, Fielder’s god-like conjurations of worlds and people that bear uncanny fidelity to their original rebounds on his own fallibility. “When you practice being other people for long enough,” says Fielder, “you can forget to learn about yourself.” In the simulacra of his own design, doubts about the efficacy of the project and the image of what a television host should be pursue Fielder at every turn.
Fielder’s filmography, lookalikes, doppelgängers, and doubles have upstaged their originals. This running gag threads together more than a decade of Fielder’s corpus. The Rehearsal owes an indebtedness to its precursor: Fielder’s hit show for Comedy Central, Nathan For You. Airing from 2013 to 2014, Nathan For You spoofs the expert renovation genre format of reality television epitomized in shows like Extreme Homemaker, Queer Eye, or any fare chosen at random from the smorgasbord of content starring the always acidic Gordon Ramsay. Cast in the role of business-expert-turn-television-host, in Nathan For You,Fielder capitalized on both the aspirations and precarity of post-2008 small-business America to test outlandish (and at times legally questionable) marketing strategies for real business owners desperate for a competitive edge in a hostile market. For an abridged sampling of Nathan For You: In “Private Investigator/Taxi Company,” Fielder spawns a dozen Fielder body doubles to throw the private eye Brian Wolfe off the scent of the real Fielder’s trail. Or, in “The Hero,” Fielder assumes the form of another’s double, wearing an entire body suit in order to “wear another man’s skin” and increase the latter’s popularity and social clout. However, like those hurting small businesses struggling to measure up to their franchised competitors, Fielder’s encounter with doubles—in the Wolfe episode, a double that enjoys Fielder’s ideal life with a fiancée and a house, or, in “The Hero,” a doubling that allows Fielder’s social awkwardness to molt behind the mask of another—illuminate his own insecurities. Fielder’s masterful ability to press ctrl-c upon any human being and paste into existence their mirror image largely comes to reveal Fielder’s own shortcomings, ungainly social skills, and emotional insecurities.
This previous version of Fielder returns as a specter looming over The Rehearsal’s second season. Doubling down, Fielder strives in season two to prove not only that miscommunications between captain and first officer have caused the majority of commercial airline crashes, but also that the rehearsal method can provide scripted icebreakers that facilitate better communication within the cockpit. But Fielder’s aim for congressional approval of his “method” for the Federal Aviation Administration hits turbulent self-doubt: can a comedian be taken this seriously? Here, the genealogy of doubles throughout Fielder’s work does not simply establish a motif of doppelgängerdom, but also transforms into the cumulative effect of a narrative throughline. Fielder becomes a host reckoning with his double in its several permutations throughout his career spent in front of a camera. There is nothing more Gothic than the double as the return of an irrepressible past—Fielder’s most of all. When images of ourselves and our past circulate permanently within a culture of interpassivity (images that Fielder attempts to outrun in vain), repression appears as a luxury seldom afforded.
Like Goliadkin in Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846) whose habit of committing awkward blunder after awkward blunder prevents him from attaining social prestige, all the while witnessing the social ascension of his own doppelgänger, Fielder uses himself as a case study of the consequences of making our ideals reality. Parodying another reality television genre (the talent competition), in The Rehearsal’s second season, Fielder gauges the confidence of first officers by creating a fake singing competition show, Wings of Voice, where airline pilots serve as judges providing critiques to aspiring vocalists. Fielder also becomes one of these judges upon learning of his abysmally low score from a rating questionnaire that asks participants to rate their judge based on likability. Fielder uses the opportunity to rehearse a more sincere version of himself—less awkwardly glib and more positively affirming. After doing so, Fielder receives a rating of six from a contestant (a modest increase), but then, turns the survey paper upside down so that the “six” rating suddenly appears to be a nine. Again, Fielder’s unreliable perspective blurs the line between what is real and what he wants to be real. “I’ve always felt that sincerity is overrated,” says Fielder in a voice-over. “It just ends up punishing those who can’t perform it as well as others.” If all sincerity is to some degree performed, as Fielder seems to ask, is performed sincerity as close as we get? The answer lies in the mirror inversion from six to nine—where Fielder demonstrates that enough is never enough for our ideal doubles. Participation can only ever be a rehearsal for the ‘real’ thing, rather than the play of fantasy that makes up reality itself. And what better medium to unsettle sincerity than one in which fiction and reality remain indeterminate? To call The Rehearsal Gothic reality television is to point to how participants confront their mirror image as an ideal to be made real. In confronting this double, the interpassive feature of reality television reconfigures the Gothic as a genre poised to illuminate the politics of participation in which our doubles deliver us from participating with others in a way that risks disclosing our shortcomings.
In season two’s finale, Fielder divulges that he has spent two years actually becoming a pilot. Among his rotation of teachers, however, his inability to master a key skill—landing the plane— has earned him the distinction of “unteachable.” Notwithstanding a wounded ego, Fielder performs make-believe landing scenarios at home until he finally lands the real plane that grants him his license. Fielder’s mastery, however, collides with a possible autism diagnosis, a revelation that speaks to the more widespread mental health problems amongst pilots that go unaddressed for fear of having their licenses revoked. Nevertheless, Fielder earns a commercial pilot’s license, purchases a 737, and fills it with actors before flying it over the Mojave Desert to demonstrate the efficacy of the script between captain and first-officer. Both Fielder and his first officer participate in a scripted dialogue where they play the roles of “Captain All-ears” and “First-officer Blunt,” roleplaying as attentive listeners and candid communicators, respectively. After this first successful flight, viewers learn in the episode’s conclusion that Fielder now works for a company that relocates decommissioned 737s—no small feat for one once declared “unteachable.” Nevertheless, Fielder’s final, scathing lines speak for themselves: “They only let the smartest and best people fly a plane of this size. And it feels good to know that. No one is allowed in the cockpit if there’s something wrong with them. So if you’re here, you must be fine.”
Though finally looking down on the rest of us, Fielder’s satirical edge in these final lines leaves his signature comedic self-doubt lingering in the air. Fielder’s script designed to enable more open communication in the cockpit worked, but perhaps at the expense of communicating the urgency around mental health crises within the aviation profession where ideals about the self come at the cost of sidelining personal wellbeing. Unwilling to confront his possible diagnosis, and instead highlighting his mastery—from the success of flying to the success of the script—it may feel as if Fielder has failed us. Instead, however, Fielder has performed as he always has: as a host attached more to his ideal image, to his televised double, than to any revelation of truth that might compromise that image. Repression, then, is still at work here. But, whereas the double of an earlier Gothic sensibility appears as bearer of this repression, the doubles of The Rehearsal (Fielder’s included) now represent a means of avoiding the repressed. Conjuring these ideal doubles into the real, Fielder enacts the very interpassive logic that we find ourselves entrenched in today. A host that plays parasite to his own ideal double, Fielder privileges the uncanny power of art, allowing the narrative construction of the The Rehearsal, and Fielder’s place in it, to unravel the very images of ideals that the ethos of a rehearsal promises.
In the final, ghostly shots of Fielder flying decommissioned 737s across the world, The Rehearsal wrenchingly allegorizes the costs of our ideals becoming real, teetering on the tightrope between fantasy and reality. Lit in the glowing rim of the horizon, dawn or maybe dusk illuminating the cockpit, a resounding loneliness suffuses these last shots—a loneliness that renders the season’s grappling with social isolation and mental health in commercial aviation all the more harrowing. In a time of anomie and atomization, the work our doubles do can be reassuring. But, as Fielder’s stratospheric climb suggests, apotheosis is lonely business. Although we gain the double of our dreams when we conscript our fantasies to a singular ideal reality, we lose the power to imagine those realities differently. At first blush, such a claim seems counterintuitive when our daily intake of phantasmagoria feels especially hallucinatory. But, the participants of The Rehearsal attest to the opposite: many would throw themselves, or at least a version of themselves, at the chance to escape the imaginative possibilities of a different world and simply produce a version of themselves more conducive to the reality of the world as is.
As popular wisdom would have it, flying a commercial plane is largely a matter of subordinating oneself to the autopilot—perhaps the interpassive subject par excellence. Which is to say that our doubles deserve credit. They save us from making decisions, rescue us from the humiliations of self-doubt. Most of all, they deliver us from the inconveniences of a more participatory commons. Until, that is, an engine ignites and we are suddenly thrust into participation in all we had taken for granted. As our doubles teach us, we make a paucity of a commons when there is nothing we do not already have in common. Maybe we should not be identical to our ideal doubles. And maybe this difference is both the site of our fear and the locus of our humanity. For The Rehearsal, this difference is the source from which art draws its power to kindle our participation in the world differently, to empower the imagination against forces that would solicit it from us only in the form of an image. In fact, this attachment to an image of ourselves is what perhaps Fielder’s simple icebreaker for first-officers and captains runs afoul of. The scripted scenario between First Officer Blunt and Captain All-Ears represents the first ‘rehearsal’ where fantasy, not reality, is the point. Letting go of attachments to mastery, to ideals and professional hierarchies opens up the possibility for first officers to exercise expertise and for even the most professionally entrenched captain to be wrong. In the world of professional aviation, this is the playing out of a different world entirely—where the discomfort and differences of the interpersonal come to bear on the stakes of participation.
Before his rise to stardom, Fielder’s debut on the red carpet was preceded by the magic carpet: a thirteen-year-old performing magic tricks at birthday parties. As the adage goes, magic is nothing but smoke and mirrors, and Fielder’s television career has leaned most heavily upon the latter until the threshold between what is real and what is illusion shatters. Like a true magician whose success depends upon the participation of his audience, for Fielder the politics of participation always come to bear on the performance of rehearsing. To succumb to the mirror world of our culture industry that warps and enjoys our participation for us is to lose more than just ourselves. More than this, it is to lose the potentially emancipatory power of an uncanny, uncomfortable relation to our doubles. That is, the capacity to re-imagine and rehearse new forms of participation that refuse to pit art against life. What would it take to imagine participation, and participate imaginatively, not as a practice towards mastering the world, but as an empowered re-presenting of the world anew.
Matthew Moore is PhD student in English and American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis where he studies 20th and 21st century American literature. He lives in St. Louis with his three chihuahuas.
Article photo: painting by Sebastian Bieniek, titled ‘Face’ (2015). Oil on canvas. via Wikimedia