Nathan Fielder's TheRehearsal takes the postmodern concept and runs with it, until the lines of simulation become fuzzy.
Editor's note: The below contains spoilers for Season 1 of The Rehearsal.The first season of Nathan Fielder’s fantastical new invention The Rehearsal has come to an end, closing the lid on the open-top soundstage that had come to be his version of a finely planned and constructed life. Navigating life events through a series of meticulously crafted and practiced scenarios, Fielder’s new show parodies life as a farce of decision tree logic and surface representations.
If such a premise needed grounding , then Jean Baudrillard's 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation is where to look. The book, largely the basis for The Wachowski's The Matrix, proposes that in the postmodern age signifiers have slowly become detached from the signified to a place where, increasingly, it is not important what is real but merely what is represented.
Thomas, here, has gone so far as to essentially live as his primary, to the extent that his career, living situation and personality bear no resemblance to his own life. This works to completely blur the lines between reality and representation, almost parodying the internet age’s imitation of reality and giving us the most extreme representation of Baudrillard’s concept seen onscreen, outdoing even Mr. Postmodern himself, Kaufman.
This is by no means the crux of the finale, though. As Fielder starts to raise Adam on his own, he throws him his first birthday party. This is where the focus of the episode moves toward Fielder running into an issue with one of the child actors, Remi, who played Adam at age 6. After being swapped out for an older rendition of Adam, Remi is upset at having to leave the house where he has been playing out the fantasy of father and son.
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