Nathan Fielder’s way to madness

HBO Nathan Fielder renewed Rehearsal for a second season before the much-hyped season finale. The show stirred the minds of critics and audiences, leading to published opinion pieces and analysis on the show, Nathan Fielder, and his style of comedy. This, like many others, is another attempt to dissect the brain behind some of the best television produced in recent times.

Lately, viewers of the show feel like everything around is Nathan’s world and we are just living in it. He went a step further and created a world for himself that he could function in, a world that seems beyond everyone’s comprehension. The man behind Nathan Fielder’s on-screen persona seems impenetrable and unpredictable, and this adds suspense to his work.

The Canadian comic rose to fame for his show on Comedy Central. called Nathan for you, Spread over four seasons, it is a parody of the show Business Rescue Show. According to the show, Nathan, a business graduate with excellent grades, goes on a mission to help struggling businesses across the country, primarily through product innovation and marketing techniques.

In the very first episode, Nathan promises to offer his services to a struggling frozen yogurt shop. His idea of ​​increasing footfall? – Offer customers a choice of poo-flavored frozen yogurt. And living up to its promise, the store has a bunch of chilling out-of-towners waiting to try the poo-flavored frozen yogurt.

From Ghostbusters to Ghostwriters, Nathan puts every professional at his disposal to help his clients grow their businesses. Though quirky suggestions help in attracting the audience towards them, it is the willingness of their participants to implement these suggestions which keeps the audience hooked. Their wish can be credited to the camera crew who tag along with Nathan to help give the participants the illusion that their conversation has been removed from reality.

focus on participants

By putting the participants in uncomfortable situations, Nathan brings up a side of the contestants who are either masked in the real world or cut out in post-production by the editor. He seduces and distances his participants from his arsenal of traditional social cues, making them feel insecure and naked in front of the camera, prompting Nathan to paint a flawless portrait of the participant. He tends to drag a silence so long that it becomes almost unbearable for the audience to lay their eyes on the screen.

Nathan (a Jew) has very funny encounters with people of other faiths who talk about Jews in harmful stereotypes that border on anti-Semitism. What would have turned into a serious confrontation in an otherwise normal world turns into a painfully awkward conversation, all thanks to her breaking away from traditional social cues. And with the help of tools like these, Nathan makes sure there’s no room for hatred in his work—something a reality TV connoisseur isn’t.

Criticism of reality shows

Jeremy Hartwell is a cast member of the Emmy-nominated Netflix show love is blind A lawsuit has been filed claiming misconduct on the set. He alleged that the contestants were forced to do the film hungry, drunk and sleep-deprived for a long time. All this only goes to highlight the power imbalance that plagues the sets of reality TV shows. Often only a narrative is woven into the editor’s room in order to sensationalize certain behaviors and in the process influence the agency of the participants who are almost controlled by cameras. Nathan for you Underscores this power imbalance—imagine a frozen yogurt shop owner agreeing to sell a poo-flavored product without cameras you probably can’t. His shows also do not insist on having a set narrative; They focus on the more mundane things governing the stories.

The obsession of surveillance as well as creating narratives in reality shows is deadly. show contestants, love island, Sophie Graden and Mike Thalassitis died by suicide, and the show’s host, Caroline Fleck, had the same fate. 2018 season winner Jake Fincham confessed to attempting suicide.

Nathan highlights this Rehearsal — Angela, 44, who is rehearsing for motherhood, acts and talks a certain way when Nathan is around; She reverts to her original self and has normal conversations with child actors when they are left to their own devices. Dissecting this constructed reality is at the core of Nathan’s critique. The Canadian comic also protects its actors from becoming a victim of social surveillance with a smart strategy, where the audience isn’t sure whether they’ve been asked to exaggerate their feature or play themselves.

But Nathan’s work has its drawbacks. While working on a reality TV show satirizing power dynamics, the power dynamics on their set sometimes get skewed, giving Nathan a better deck of cards to deal with. in an episode of for you Nathan, Nathan hires 40 cleaning ladies for a turbo cleaning. The owner of the business, a 22-year-old Mexican immigrant, said she felt humiliated to learn that she had been featured on a comedy show.

Initially, she thought they were going to interview her about her success. Nathan regrets this and highlights that he and his crew examine the participants between scenes, but he also realizes that the power dynamics are such that a “yes” is always one of them. Doesn’t come from a comfortable place.

In the early stages of his comedy career when Nathan was embarking on this observational social experiment such as Comedy, his mother, a social worker, was incensed by his work and rightly so. However, a few days later, she came back and told him that what he was trying to do could be classified under ethnography.

Ethnography is a method of sociological analysis that examines how individuals use everyday interactions to construct a general-sense view of the world. The pioneer of this discipline, Harold Garfinkel, whose writings had a major impact on the social sciences and linguistics, also experimented with Nathan. In one of his more famous case studies, he asked students to go back to their homes and act as straight occupants for a week. The result – his parents didn’t respond any differently. When we get caught up in ourselves revolving around this common-sense view of the world and taking ourselves too seriously, Nathan does a brilliant job of breaking down this viewpoint and in the process, almost putting us at odds with reality. forces you to join.

criticism of child actors

Nathan casts the child actors in his own bizarre artificial world, which tells us about the idyllic lives of these kids. in an episode of Nathan for you Titled ‘Claw of Shame’, Nathan performs a stunt that if done wrong could cost Nathan what could be considered sexual assault with jail time. While Nathan completes the stunt, it is bizarre how the parents of the child actors agreed to let their children be a part of such a production.

the same line of criticism has intensified Rehearsal When in the season finale, we see a six-year-old boy develop an attachment to Nathan and believe that Nathan is actually his “daddy”. Can six-year-olds understand the complexity of acting – even if they do, is it ethical to subject their minds to such feats at an early age? Watching Nathan’s show, no one will take a favorable opinion on the subject.

In the wake of Janet McCurdy’s memoir, i’m glad my mom diedWhen talking about the lives of child actors and the logistics and ethics of their presence on film sets, Nathan’s nuanced critique trumps logic.

While Nathan Fielder’s world may seem absurd, on deeper inspection, it provides a way for us to navigate the world around us by helping us understand the people around us a little better; The fleeting moments of reality we experience in them, loving us a little more with the relationships we share.