The rehearsal was one of the best TV series of 2022, not to mention one of the most innovative and fresh shows in recent memory. Nathan Fielder’s sequel to Nathan for you consists of ordinary people who are helped by Fielder to deal with difficult conversations or life situations while using simulation of said occasions. The show builds elaborate sets nearly identical to the person’s real-life environments to practice and work with actors to recreate the upcoming circumstances they face. Fielder designs complex decision trees to be involved in every possible outcome of situations, usually the information given to the actors is remembered without the client’s knowledge.
The show is often compared to Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary. The iconic film centers on Caden Cotard, a theater director (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) who begins work on a large-scale production committed to recreating reality as closely as possible, eventually blurring the line between reality and fiction. Both panned and praised, Kaufman continued to explore his interest in the art of representation and non-traditional meta-narratives in his earlier scripts for being John Malkovich, Amendmentand Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.
Both works by Fielder and Kaufman use the concept of rehearsal as a means to achieve better interpersonal interactions and understanding of the true self, respectively. While both pieces are postmodern art, the end result of the former is an absurdist docu-comedy, the latter a complex, at times incomprehensible, depressing, and overwhelming insight into an artist’s search for meaning at the crossroads between his personal, professional, and creative lives. In the light of The rehearsals success, it is worth revisiting what has been created Synecdoche, New York the modern classic it is today.
Life in (and as) Theater
After being left behind by his wife (Catharine Keener), Cotard begins an adaptation of his life through theater. He acquires a giant warehouse where he brings together a huge number of actors and asks them to help him create something connected to reality, to make it as close to reality as possible.
Throughout history, artists have drawn from autobiographies, drawing inspiration from their personal lives to create, sometimes disengaging from the facts and letting the imagination run wild. Others similarly create a hybrid mix of fact and fiction, while some value correctness and truth above all else. Theatrical performances involve repetition by nature and will always deviate from time to time. Caleb becomes obsessed with removing this from the equation; he wants to make something that becomes identical to life through rehearsal.
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The same concept is applied in The rehearsal, but in Kaufman’s film the seemingly imminent execution never comes, fiction becomes reality and rehearsal is life itself. The director becomes so engrossed in his work and obsessed with the idea of what is real that when his actors or people on the street ask him for a premiere date, he replies that the work is not done, even if it is 17 years since they started. rehearse.
The neurotic director tries to find himself, or his “true self,” through representation, in the romantic idea that art might find a cure for the human condition. The question then arises: if art reflects life and life has now become art, then what is real life?
The Meaning of Synecdoche, New York: Simulacra and Simulation
French philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 philosophical treatise, Simulacra and Simulation is seemingly one of the greatest sources of inspiration for the film and Fielder’s oeuvre. Simulacra refers to copies that had no original or that have now been diverted far from the original to become their own. Simulation is the imitation of a real-life system over time.
In his imitation of life, Caleb simultaneously develops aspects of his personal life, with thousands of actors (and real people in his life) portraying events from his daily life. The film still shows him dealing with real life situations such as having to go to his parents’ funerals or assuming the job and identity of a woman cleaning his ex-wife’s apartment. These situations are portrayed in his performance, but he can never escape the fact that they are a representation. The simulation, which grows year after year, eventually becomes a larger part of reality than reality itself, thus developing into Simulacra.
The rehearsal is Simulacra itself, as the practices with actors who are part of the show are just as much a reality as the practice Fielder’s clients will ultimately have to deal with. The word ‘synecdoche’ refers to the meaning here, suggesting that it is a mistake to confuse part of something (art) with the whole (life).
Fear of death, psychosis and rehearsal as coping
Synecdoche, New York has metaphorical meaning about many things, two of which are fear of death and psychosis. In one scene, Hoffman’s character yells at his ex-wife’s best friend because his four-year-old daughter, who left with them for Berlin, became the first child with a full-body tattoo (appearing absurdly in a magazine, which is how Caleb finds out). She replies that the girl is no longer four – she is eleven.
Cotard’s immersion in his Simulacra has removed him from the real world that fuels his play; his perception of what is real has now changed. Whenever he reads about the life of his daughter and ex-wife in Berlin, they speak in a German accent in their minds and have completely forgotten about him.
As the film progresses, his insecurities begin to cloud his perception, and he appears clear-headed only when engaged in his work. His growing psychosis is made clear by his name, which is an allusion until Cotard’s syndrome, a delusion in which a person believes that he is already dead. This works perfectly with the views of Jungian psychology, which Kaufman says are an important source of inspiration for his work.
From the very first scenes, Caleb is deeply concerned about his health, but as the movie progresses, it never becomes clear whether these concerns are real or delusional. By the end of the film, many years have passed, certainly more than a few decades, and Cotard is still alive. In his fear of death, he created a palace for life, an infinite rehearsal of things, a way of correcting the errors of reality by repeating them through a controlled fiction.
Synecdoche, New York is a comedy rehearsing a tragedy
Nathan Fielder proposes the same idea of controlling reality with a much more light-hearted and positive effect, namely the betterment of human lives, while Hoffman’s character does it to find meaning in his existence. In both cases, the concepts of repetition, rehearsal and simulation act as an antidote to life’s hardships, spontaneity and surprises. As such, there is awkward and surreal humor to be found in the believable fantasy.
They both try to find a cure for complicated parts of the human experience that make us who we are through systemization and perfection, but both are ultimately unattainable. Things don’t go as expected on Fielder’s show, and Nathan ends up making ethically questionable decisions to further his original goal. SynekdocheCotard’s vision is never fulfilled and ends in tragedy.
These two productions try to find an antidote to complicated things, but ultimately reveal that no matter how much preparation or improvement one tries to seek, these hurdles will always appear and will be limited to life’s unpredictable twists and turns.