August 2022

Bodies Bodies Bodies

This Gawker piece has stayed with me for months: A Tip for Living Well: Mute the Word ‘Trauma.’ I used to think no matter how grating I found someone, if they spoke on something valid, I would sit my ass down and listen. Then, I was annoyed all the time. I would want to listen—but I couldn’t. Was something wrong with me? Did I lack empathy? Was I problematic? Once covid and summer 2020 rolled around the answer was in front of me: no, it’s the children who are the wrong.

As I age into a different era and more of whatever dialogue festers in the air is driven by 24 year-olds, it’s gone from a “me” problem to not a problem at all. I thought it was wrong to be annoyed and then I realized it was ok to tune it out. We live in an echo chamber where the charged nature of words and phrases is so omnipresent they have lost all meaning. I used to believe getting annoyed at this stuff was the equivalent of being upset with “PC” language, but what’s truly insidious about it is all these words, terms, and phrases become dog whistles from a certain kind of people. They’ve graduated from buzzwords into talking points for those with the worst intensions, who then metamorphose those words into toxic versions of their former selves: these concepts bastardized to alienate well-meaning, good-intentioned souls, and molcajete these once-radical ideas into nothing. However in the middle of a conversation the minute someone says something I don’t like (I guess you could say…they trigger me) I immediately lose interest. We can’t just keep saying things until they mean nothing.

Semantics sidestep other odious traits, like attention-seeking behavior. This tweet haunts me because my biggest fear in life is being completely oblivious to the reality of my world to such a degree I am a laughingstock. I am completely out of step with reality. This is a sibling to impostor syndrome, which is real, but is another term in certain contexts can be a red flag intellectually. But if you’re inclined to skepticism, the solution is to constantly feel insane. Am I wrong, or are they wrong. Am I actually an idiot. Am I actually an idiot and everyone knows it but I don’t. Am I actually an idiot but everyone I know is an idiot too and none of us know. This deep confusion in the world is one result of the overuse of language, the laissez faire attitude toward serious topics, a real world syndrome of indignities such as developer-induced housing bubbles and every tiny microaggression the world foists upon us as it warps itself into clinging onto a 20th-century idea of existence. When the meme movie studio makes a horror-comedy where people argue about words like gaslight starring a man who himself is a meme then we know we’re firmly in the middle of an Overton window about all of this.

Bodies Bodies Bodies passes the sniff test: on the use of buzzwords as substitutes for personality; the entitlement of millennials and zoomers and the universality of male obnoxiousness (an inter-generational trait, every man in the movie is hung up on perceived slights); how people actually text; the disposability of experiences as they exist behind a screen. They didn’t have to write in overbearing parents, bosses, or easy jokes about the internet. It’s not mean-spirited, because the movie takes its time to establish the characters as real friends with tangible resentments. To dismiss them as “terrible people” says more about you than them.

They didn’t set out to make a movie about anything other than the glee of getting fucked up in a nice house and the horrible sensation of something going wrong when you’re fucked up. It puts you in that space between elation and dread and claustrophobia so well. The threat of a hurricane amps up the anxiety level to ten. The movie hinges on an ending I guessed halfway in, but the ride is fun enough to not be mad at. There’s no annoying meta wink-wink fourth-wall bullshit going on either, just good characters played by good actors convincing us of everything they’re feeling and saying in this moment.

The Rehearsal

The god Sam Donsky offered a criticism of Nathan Fielder so cutting I kept it in my pocket for years: “Mean people keep recommending Nathan For You to me.” When HBO premiered How to with John Wilson in 2020, Wilson, a protegee of Fielder, made an empathic, funny, and surgical show in the way it sweetly but firmly lampooned the eccentricities of modernity gone sideways. The second season lost some of its charm but I still preferred Wilson’s millennial-baby persona to Fielder’s crude Gen X-ness. An impish white man trolling small business owners was novel only during the Obama administration; we needed Wilson’s New Sincerity.

I liked the first episode of The Rehearsal and was impressed by what HBO money allowed for. I was enthralled by the second episode and Robbin, the man he sets up with Angela, a mom-in-waiting, who can’t stop seeing coincidences in numbers and injected “I totaled my Scion tC at 100 miles an hour” into the lexicon. The series took a turn when Robbin ditched the show and Fielder stepped in to be the stand-in dad. I saw Fielder as a smart guy playing a part and using a budget to draw his experiments from segmented A and B blocks on Comedy Central to proper lengths on premium cable.

It was around the third episode it became clear The Rehearsal was not a setup for a new slate of Nathan Fielder inquiries but an unsettling autobiography. It’s partly because he’s Canadian, but the emotional distance between Fielder as a person and actor and TV show host has always seemed apparent—he’s never one thing. He was not a jerk, but played one so well jerks missed the joke. He played Nathan For You and now, The Rehearsal, “straight” but played it nonetheless. The Rehearsal is supremely empathic, because its whole thesis is to demonstrate the attempt to artificially recreate the dirtiness of real life is not a substitute for real life. One cannot be a passive observer their whole life any more than one can recreate their life on a soundstage, hire actors, get a media conglomerate to foot the bill, and create a safe space to try out difficult situations. Even in the world of reality tv, where we acknowledge artificiality and buy-in, the act of producing an uncanny reality has deep ramifications I’m not sure we’ve capably processed or fully understood, and this has warped our reality since the nineties.

Fielder isn’t thinking as solipsistically or emotionally about life as Charlie Kaufman, which is the easy comparison. (The Kaufman to which to compare Fielder is Andy.) To the extent he is even “him” in this role, rehearsing life as a family man as a 38-year-old divorcee and not a character, is gray, which is fine because I don’t want the magic trick spoiled. I want to be thrust into the unknown and The Rehearsal is about preparing for the unknown. The ways in which reality collapses in on itself is a separate conversation from the art of the show, which is about how Fielder lives and how he wants to live, and what he thinks is the best way to go about it, and that angle is the most interesting.

The Rehearsal is a response to the unreality of technology and the uncertainty of growing old in this era—simulating reality with an HBO budget is the only way Fielder feels sane. He has always taken the joke as far as he can, excavated it, analyzed it, pieced it back to life. I relate to the fantasy of creating your own world to live in and I relate to the pang of craving life’s big moments but being terrified of them. It helps this show was occasionally so funny I laughed until I cried (an “aging mirror” that gives Fielder wrinkles, a static shot of a lamp, a man smoking a cigarette). Men would rather build a bar and an apartment inside a warehouse in Oregon and hire a family and a fake wife and fake kids than go to therapy etc etc and so on and so forth