The Banal Intrigue of the "Unconventional Crush"
As far as I can tell, Nathan Fielder’s new series, The Rehearsal — a pseudo-reality show where he goes to elaborate lengths to help ordinary people prepare for life events they’re anxious about — has inspired two main strands of discussion. One has to do with whether the show is “ok,” from a moral standpoint. This is pretty much a re-litigation of an ongoing litigation: new viewers are wondering what old-time fans have wondered, at times very eloquently, for nearly a decade. Because fans will continue to watch no matter what their conscience tells them, the question will always be relevant.
The other is whether Fielder is hot or not; or, rather, why everyone seems to find him so hot all of a sudden. “There are multiple streams of internet discourse devoted to identifying the source of his inexplicable attractiveness,” Lila Shapiro wrote, in a cover story for New York Magazine.
This is a genre of conversation so ubiquitous that deserves its own coinage. (You go ahead and coin it.) Whenever Pete Davidson begins a new relationship, or Adam Driver comes up for some award, or memes of Willem Dafoe circulate among people who weren’t sentient when rumors about his dick size first emerged — in other words, whenever an “offbeat” hunk is consecrated as such — people will make a fuss dissecting his appeal, as though it’s a great mystery. (I say “his” because the subject is almost always a man. To debate the attractiveness of a slightly unusual-looking woman feels crueler, and certainly less novel; it’s the territory of shock jocks.)
These discussions could be a lot more concise. Why are people attracted to Nathan Fielder? Well, he’s cute, and funny, and he brings us pleasure. Beyond that, he is good at doing what he does, and it’s attractive to watch someone do something well. “Perhaps it’s not so inexplicable,” Shapiro continues. “Out in the world, he is witty, self-deprecating, and successful.” The most evident standard by which Fielder is unattractive is his own: one of his longest running schticks is his supposed social ineptitude, which increasingly strains the imagination; I’m sure that Fielder was “dorky” growing up, but now he is famous and cool. These are points in the show where I feel like I’m being played, if not as spectacularly, or well, as his guests: Like most self-deprecation, it feels like a clumsy bid to make himself more attractive. (It reminds me of an annoying Louis CK bit — post-fame, pre-MeToo — where he joked about how sloppy he looked to the other tenants of his fancy doorman building.) The “unlikely crush” is strategic — you are more likely to “get” someone who is not in high demand — for the object, as much as the crusher.
So, why have these discussions at all? One reason is that it provides a pretense for the compulsion to slot, tag, and categorize desires of all kinds — to make them make sense. This applies to “alternative” attractions as much as “conventional” ones, and it’s often haunted by an anxious, taxonomical disposition, which works against everything that makes desire thrilling in the first place.
Still, I understand it. Attraction is, forgive me, ambiguously ambiguous. The matter of who is officially hot or not can seem pressing because it’s confusing: no such consensus exists, and yet everyone acts as though it does; there are clearly norms that favor some people and exclude others, but they’re harder to formulate than it seems — there is always some exception that explodes the rule. Moreover, to not understand our attractions has existential implications. From an early age they help form the basis of our identities. We learn who we’re supposed to want, and who we’re not supposed to; we learn to measure that against who we actually do or don’t. If we don’t understand our attractions, how well do we understand ourselves?
There’s another reason to talk about Fielder’s “surprising” hotness: it’s fun. It puts excess longing to use. Asking why so-and-so is attractive, you will never come to a satisfying answer, but that’s beside the point. Satisfaction is impossible; the point is sharing, or just articulating, the desire. As Marianne Eloise wrote in The Daily Beast, “There is something attractive about a person whose appeal is… so against expectation, that we have to spend time figuring out what it is.” The impulse to figure that out is, to borrow a friend’s phrase, a desire-exorcism of sorts. And it turns a lonely, languishing crush into a game for more than one.
The same could be said of all sorts of pointless questions that are asked again and again. In fact, my asking why one would ask is entirely rhetorical. It’s like replying, “Google it!” when someone asks you something obviously googleable. They probably just want to talk.
This brings us to the other Fielder talking point: whether or not what he does is morally defensible. I want to roll my eyes at the question, not because it isn’t valid, but because I’m as exhausted as everyone else by the tendency — more of platforms, in aggregate, than individuals — to litigate art ahead of every other response. But I’m finding the discourse around The Rehearsal strangely refreshing. The question of whether something feels right or wrong is part of enjoying art in general: weighing our strong reactions, understanding what provoked them, arguing about it — this is a pleasure, a lot of the time, and a more fulfilling moral exercise than deciding whether it’s good or bad for society.
The moral questions raised by Fielder’s work are serious ones, but generally made broad and abstract enough to allow for this pleasure. Informed consent is a recurring theme on The Rehearsal, as it was for Nathan For You: his subjects are used in narratives that aren’t entirely revealed to them. But it’s often staged so ludicrously that it feels entirely divorced from any concrete stakes. One of the first episode’s major conundrums is how to help his guest win a trivia game without telling him the answers. So Fielder invites him for a walk around the city, and plants actors to deliver clues along the way. (As they stroll past a woman on a bench, she spills a beverage on herself and announces, “It’s all over my DKNY pants. Donna Karan New York. DKNY.”) You could, very reasonably, call this a subterfuge for the more serious, and potentially galling instances of non-consent on his show. It is possible to hash this out forever. That is the man’s power.
People who love Fielder’s work, but find it manipulative, often justify their interest by arguing that he’s saying something profound about the nature of capitalism, or popular culture, or human nature itself. I don’t think The Rehearsal is telling us anything we don’t know about capitalism, pop culture, or human nature. But I don’t think it has to do that to be profound. Most insights are discoverable, I think, by means of common sense. The pleasure is the process — the plot, the argument, the elegance of needless twists and turns, which are exactly what Fielder does best.
As Shapiro writes, The Rehearsal bills itself explicitly as “the lengths one man will go to reduce the uncertainties of everyday life.” A friend told me last week that the spectacle of his budget is the most interesting part of the show. She didn’t mean it as criticism or praise. Fielder’s work is always in some way about pointless, extravagant process — the wild detours people invent to avoid ambiguity, or defer the self-evident. To quote Susan Sontag, a little out of context: “Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.” Jerking off the universe, like jerking off, can be sociable if you want it to be.