5.13.25 - The Rehearsal explores Acting as Access to Reality
If you aren't watching the Rehearsal, watch it. It's a very cerebral show which epxlores the tension and tenuous boundaries between performance, simulation, and reality––all while being very funny. A shallow reading of the show is that its a critique on reality TV, but I really think its a more fundamental reflection on the power of representation (as in, depiction) and the role of images. Fielder (or Fielder's character) seeks to understand reality through depicting it, and to shape it through depictions, his ultimate dream––I think––to complete collapse the boundaries so that he can have full control over reality via depiction, and thus bridge the gaping chasm he feels between himself and others. The show is really about Nathan's, and everyone's, fundamental aloneness and separateness, and an exploration of whether the act of depiction––of making art I guess is the more charitable phrasing––can bridge those gaps.
The latest episode was probably the most explicit articulation of these themes and it reminded me of something I recently wrote about.
I recently wrote about the Fragile Absolute by Zizek, https://knxnts.xyz/blog-4.29.25. In a brief aside, I wrote a note on something Zizek said about the movie my Best Friend's Wedding, that the unreality of the relationship between Julia Roberts and Ruper Everett allows them to depict "real" love. I loved this point and wrote the following:
". . . because I often do think about how representation or performance of a thing is more real than the thing itself. Actors and Influeners are inherently "fake," but in trying to perform an idealized or fantastical reality, I sometimes wonder whether they live a more real human experience than the average normie. Actors, through portrayal, often have to "experience" a huge range of human emotions. They have to learn a broad set of skills and arts---many sing, dance, do fashion––in some sense isn't this a lot more real than our own lives? But they are only liberated to do these things BECAUSE they are doing it in the context of fantasy. Does the act of portraying a fantasy of a thing actually let you DO the thing in a much purer way than people who are trying to do the REAL thinng, unmediated by fantasy? Isn't this really what underpins our private (or I guess not so private, in our oversharing culture) preoccupation with BDSM/roleplay/CNC? We can only access the real through representation of the real . . . anywho that's an idea I think he was getting at with this anecdote. It's the kind of insight you sometimes tap into, or clarify when going through is streams of consciousness. I like it."
In last Sunday's episode, Nathan fully embraces this idea, that acting is what gives people permission to be real, and pushes the concept to a humorous extreme. Anyways, its worth a watch.
knxnts