An Experience for Me

Who is Nathan Fielder, really? Alexandra Tanner asks the question on many TV watchers’ minds, but if you’re hoping for an illuminating look at entertainment’s consummate man of self-made mystery, this isn’t it. Because, as Tanner opines, the more interesting question—the one Fielder’s oeuvre wrestles with—is who any of us are, really (spoilers for The Rehearsal follow):

[L]ast month’s Season Two finale of The Rehearsal, “My Controls,” felt in many ways like the closest the viewing public has come to seeing some stripe of truth—however veiled, however meta—about who Nathan Fielder really is, or might be, or fears he is not. Throughout the episode’s first act, in which it is revealed (to everyone who isn’t a real head) that over the past two years, Fielder has quietly earned not only his pilot’s license but also a series of certifications and type ratings—including a 737 type rating—we see footage of him in cockpits, in classrooms, in his office, in his yard; squinting, struggling, shrinking away from his controls in a montage of early aviation mistakes. In these sequences Fielder is unshaven, uncertain; seemingly uninterested, for very brief spectacular moments, in the cameras eyeing him through all of it. Then, at the midpoint of the episode, Fielder complicates what has begun to feel like an almost illegal sense of closeness by revealing—or by ostensibly revealing—he’s learned how to exist in the world only by “copying” what he refers to as “regular people.” Here he admits—seems to admit—that he, too, is a victim of the void; of a painful not-knowing about himself. He has assembled himself painstakingly for and through others, conscious always of something within him that’s innately not-right. We can’t know him, this episode posits, not just because of all the other reasons we can’t know him, but also because he doesn’t know himself.

“When you practice being other people for long enough,” Fielder says in a sad voice-over, “you can forget to learn about yourself;” in his delivery he emphasizes the word can, transfiguring a melancholy admission into a kind of flex, or a kind of punchline: like he’s saying Duh; Haha; No wonder; Oh shit; How do I land this thing? You can reach the middle of your life and realize that you don’t know yourself; that there might be no self to know. There’s no self, and this is tragedy; there’s no self, and this is comedy.