A few years ago, I took my best friend’s little brother out for lunch when he was on a stopover where I live, and I peppered him with questions. His answers did not disappoint. I heard about social rifts between military and nonmilitary trained pilots, about rivalries between airlines—including a fairly detailed and somewhat surprising class hierarchy among service providers—I heard about the lingo, I heard about the dynamic between pilots and flight attendants, I heard about how he had once stepped into a cockpit where the previous pilot, as a joke, had labeled one of the console buttons with a Post-it that said “chemtrails.” As we got up to leave, I told him I thought we should start a podcast to tell people about all of this amazing, humdrum, death-defying workplace drama. I said we could call it Who the Hell is Flying This Thing? He offered a cursory chuckle. He didn’t seem to think it was a good idea.
Something is going wrong in the cockpit. This is the premise of this season of The Rehearsal. In research Fielder has apparently been doing since the end of the show’s hit first season in 2022, he’s found a troubling trend. Turns out that, in a surprisingly large number of black-box transcripts from major airline catastrophes involving pilot error, there’s evidence that the co-pilot was aware of what was happening but didn’t intervene to stop it. They either stay silent, utter tentative or weak warnings, or have their concerns brusquely dismissed by the captain. And in none of these cases did the co-pilot simply exercise their right to wrest control of the aircraft from the captain whose judgment was impaired. Fielder’s hypothesis—which does not seem wrong—is that lives are being lost because co-pilots feel kind of squicky about standing up to their commanding officers, even when it’s their job to do so. The Rehearsal gets its giant, handcrafted reality-simulation apparatus up and working in order to solve this problem. It’s a perfect scenario for a Fielder joint: cringe, with life-or-death stakes.
But even as The Rehearsal is built with a miniaturist’s eye for social detail, it is executed on a grand scale. Fielder, as he brings up repeatedly on-screen this season, has a tremendous, outsize budget for his niche comedy series. And so he hires a cast of thousands, builds gargantuan sets on a whim, leases a 737. Most of the show’s six episodes take place in an exact replica of a terminal at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, filled with actors playing the roles of workers and passengers. A comedy that could easily—and would usually—simply follow Fielder around, observing his stilted, occasionally hilarious dustups with ordinary people out in the world, instead expends excessive amounts of time and money to recreate those contingent moments in a laboratory setting.
The highlight of the season, for me, is Fielder’s own attempt to inhabit the mind of “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot Chesley Sullenberger. Fielder reads and narratively maps Sullenberger’s autobiography, and then proceeds to act as Sully at various pivotal moments of his young life, including a deeply unsettling breastfeeding scene. The thing that has stuck with me, though, is the production design of Sully’s childhood. In order to produce the correct scale when Fielder plays the pilot as a small boy, the house set is built at enormous size and the actors playing his parents walk on tall stilts under their preposterously sized clothes and operate cartoonish false arms. It’s a kind of surrealist puppetry I found to be among the most visually lovely things I’ve seen on TV in a long time. Comforting, but slightly scary; warm but also sinister. It’s an image of the gauzy formative memories that linger from our own youths. Intimate, yet remote. Fielder spends so much time trying to replicate stuff; it was startling to see him replicate a feeling.
Instead, the whole thing becomes about Fielder’s private—by which I mean known only to us, the audience—concern that he might be on the autism spectrum. A few episodes earlier, in order to get a meeting with a congressman, Fielder meets with an autism organization. The congressman is involved with both the Federal Aviation Administration and autism advocacy. So Fielder uses his show’s resonance with the neurodivergent community—a resonance he gleans from positive reviews and online essays about the first season—to get into the meeting. In the process, though, Fielder (the character on-screen, to be clear) begins to suspect that he might have a diagnosis of his own. He submits to an fMRI prior to the flight and, after landing, seems to dodge the voicemail that would inform him of his diagnosis. It’s a stymied revelation that hovers over the back half of the season. Is this show about Nathan Fielder getting an autism diagnosis?
In between the two seasons of The Rehearsal, Fielder co-created and starred in the Showtime TV series The Curse. It was his most prominent role as an actor playing a fictional character, a fact Fielder brings up a couple of times in this season of The Rehearsal. The previous season was interested in acting and actors, as well—it introduced the “Fielder Method” of role research as stalking—but this season, it’s almost an obsession. While the final rehearsal falls apart a little as an exploration of social dynamics in the cockpit, it fully holds together as an exploration of the bizarre and unholy sorcery of acting. Fielder makes a tremendous show of getting every actor’s consent to fly on this plane with him—a plane he’s never flown in his life. As he says, “I became the least experienced person licensed to fly a 737 in North America.” What the show wants us to see is their discomfort and their acquiescence. None of these people should say yes, but they do. His explanation of the legal loophole that allows him to charter and fly this plane is at once dazzled and denigrating. “You can’t fly paying passengers,” he explains, but you can fly if “the plane is filled with actors.” It’s a good line because it echoes an old joke about the shallowness and expendability of actors, but it’s also a good joke because of the way it marvels at what acting can and will allow him to accomplish.
While the flight doesn’t solve the cockpit problem Fielder identified at the start, it does demonstrate that problem at scale. Fielder, the least experienced person licensed to fly a 737 in North America, has cast one single person to play themself: the co-pilot. In flight, this co-pilot, despite his obvious terror at the prospect of what they’re doing, rigorously holds to the kind of noninterventionist behavior Fielder saw in all those transcripts, merely because Fielder, a terrible actor, was cast in the part of “Captain.” It’s horrifying to see, but it’s also bafflingly impressive, like a magic trick. “When you practice being other people long enough,” Fielder says in voiceover, “you can forget to learn about yourself.” The Rehearsal’s radical, maybe radically wrong, proposition is that it doesn’t really matter who yourself is. What matters is the role you agree to play.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal Takes Flight )
Also on site :