Official Competition

         This is a fascinating, funny, often jaw-droopingly surprising backstage drama cowritten/directed by Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat.   The title both reveals and conceals this fascinating film’s levels of reality. As an art film it announces itself eligible for festivals’ official competition.It should do well there. 

         But its real interest lies in its variety of unofficial competitions.

The idea of a great film project originates in the ego of the financier. He spends big bucks to create — and have his name attached to — two projects as related as metaphor as in vanity. He funds two bridges. The literal spans across water, the metaphoric to an audience, against a vaster gulf. To achieve the latter, bridges must be built between the three isolated star egos.

His bridge to the arts is the brilliant eccentric director Lola — whose very name evokes cinema’s history of destructive vamps, from Louise Brooks on. She insists on casting two major figures, the box office star Felix (infelicitous) and the classical theatre purist Ivan (imperial). Their antithetical backgrounds guarantee disjunction. 

And disfunction. That central triangle houses several unofficial competitions. Of course the two male males mouth mutual respect but butt heads to establish seniority. Their objective is seniority within the production to preserve that in their respective egotisms. 

With a woman in the unaccustomed role of director, aka reigning authority, Lola here tries to free and synchronize her strafing stars by exploding the conventional modes of theatrical rehearsal. Her obviously suspect strategies to free her actors from their reflexes and ruts make for really Absurd Theatre, in the flightless wings. She sets the actors against each other, denies them their usual methods of preparation and performance and, in an ultimate violence against their self-respect, destroys their prized trophies and mementos. Lola makes Artaud seem like Hallmark.  

If the two male leads are competing for their own vain purposes, both for the imminent audience’s and for the boss woman’s approval, their respective egos are riven by the project. In turn each proposes performing both roles, as if to consume their rival out of fear of being consumed by him. The film -- happily? -- ends on the prospect of an actual attempted murder charge.

The ultimate unofficial competition, then, is internal, in each of the three leads. That’s how these three grandiose grotesques come to represent insipid little us. As they fight and scrounge for mere self-respect all three seem miniaturized by the large, industrial/theatrical sets through which they are deployed. The film uses the heightened world of theatre/film to externalize our inner turmoil in discovering and realizing our respective character -- and roles.     

A Mystery in Citizen Kane

I’ve long been troubled by an element in the newsreel company scene early in Citizen Kane. Uncredited Alan Ladd appears there, which is fine; he wasn’t a star yet. But Joseph Cotten appears and speaks in that scene ("Rosebud"). That’s Cotten outside his prominent role as Kane’s friend Jeb. And we’ve seen how Jeb has aged by then. 

Is that a mistake? How could that appearance happen? Couldn’t Welles find someone else to deliver that line? Did he think no-one would notice? Did he not care? Did he forget?  Was he so negligent with such an obtrusive subtle detail? Our boy genius Welles err so obviously?

Here’s my solution. Welles was always a magician. He did tricks as a kid. His F is for Fake exults in magic. So Cotten’s appearance out of character is magician Welles’s personal signature. Even more dramatic and subtle than that announcement: “A Film by Orson Welles.” 

Mere magicians can make someone disappear. More impressive, newly coined film magician can make someone appear.  He gives us two Cottens — first the unnamed, in the “outer" film— then the Jeb, in the “inner." With Cotten’s non-Jeb appearance in the film company’s meeting he embodies his master’s ultimate ability, to create a person out of thin air, beyond the material consistency of a “role.”

And light. One more brilliant touch in that scene. As one of the executives stands in front of the bright screen his head seems to emit a beam of — darkness. That's the newsreel company striving to find a Kane beyond the known and filmed — and beyond that, Welles creating that search for his own purposes. 

This force of abiding mystery returns at the end. When we finally learn what the fugitive “Rosebud” literally means — the sled burning in the furnace — we don’t get to rest on the fire's light (illumination) but we’re left with the thick black smoke rising out of the fire. That denies the sled aa  “solution” of the mystery. 

From all the divergent perspectives we get on Kane, the childhood scene and the metaphorically-laden “Rosebud” (“Gather thee…” etc.) don’t really solve the character’s enigma. The film is a testament to the complexity of its hero. The human — whether Kane, Hearst (with his more private Marion Davies’ “Rosebud”) or (by Welles's working title) “The American" — has dimensions beyond the crossword puzzles the mistress works on -- a tempting metaphor for the investigator’s search for “Kane.”  In confirmation of that continuing mystery, the film closes on the dark, foreboding “No Trespassing” sign and the ever-thickening fence that open the film. We all have No Trespassing signs that protect others’ probes to our core.       

Sharp Stick

One might expect a Lena Dunham Rom-Com to have teeth, candour, shock But nothing prepared me for the excellence of this work — the insightful script, intense shooting style, the uniformly detailed and delicate performances. 

As the title suggests, the film is about the pain of being a woman in an America under the lingering reign of phallicism. Even in this all-woman family, where all three principals have asserted their agency, the male power still causes damage.

At 25 Sarah Jo is a virgin already bearing embarrassing midsection scars from surgery. The emotional scars come here. She is an extremely competent caregiver for needy children, the Downs boy Zach in her opening job, the cerebral palsy girl at the end. Her free-spirited mother, Marilyn, has mastered the art of using men then dumping them. Sister Treina is a flashy assertive African-American, who usually appears in costume whether for or between shooting herself performing for video streaming. .

While Mother Marilyn cruises on her even keel — usually stoned — her daughters find opposing trajectories. Treina’s confidence is smashed when the boyfriend she’s thinking of marrying denies responsibility for her pregnancy and dumps her. In a remarkably current scene, her family honours her regretful need for an abortion and celebrates the child she would have had. 

In the central plot Sarah Jo’s surrender of virginity leads to her first romantic betrayal. She admires her employer Josh’s engaging relationship with his Downs son. She also believes his claim of detachment from his pregnant wife, Heather (an opulent performance by Dunham). The wife’s expensive pregnancy suggests Josh was not sexually engaged.

For her initiation Sarah Jo approaches Josh in the laundry room, where he’s playing the New Man, keeping it clean. To his credit he first resists the invitation — but then submits. With Heather away selling real estate Josh steadily increases his sexual activity with Sarah Jo.

Sarah Jo is initially discomfited by his oral performance on her, but comes to relish it as they grow together. Son Zach is a greater bond between them than between his parents. Josh even proposes they take him and leave together. But Heather, on the verge of delivery,  recognizes the chain Josh gave Sarah Jo. Confronted, Josh confesses his affair and angrily expels Sarah Jo. That cool New Man turns into a blithering betraying loser that his strut and warm energy hid for so long.

Shaken both by her sister’s and her own betrayal, Sarah Jo opts not to flee the sharp stick of romantic disappointment but to toughen herself by comprehensive experience. She proceeds to work through two poster-size lists of sexual practices. Now she is the aggressor, the user — but still not always successful. She doesn’t get her “necrophilia.” Her plan to use Josh’s buddy Yuli as recipient of her blow job — the metaphor of which Josh taught her — is thwarted by shared cocaine, that other “blow.” 

Josh also introduces Sarah Jo to internet porn. There she discovers her porn hero, Vance LeRoy, “king” of the tattooed studs. Her fan letter leads to his video message encouraging her to stop her trivial erotics and respect her possibility for a meaningful love affair. 

At this point this hard-headed anatomy of sexual politics reveals its true genre, romantic comedy. Sarah Jo meets the engaging Africa American Arvin when he answers her ad for someone to blow. As he’s not that casual, he brings her some drinks and wants to talk first. The free blow job doesn’t impress him, because his work on porn film crews exposes him to them daily. That career enables him to convey her letter to Vance and return with the video message. 

This could be the all-time classic “Meeting Cute” of the Rom-Com. Coupled with her new child-care job, this burgeoning romance makes for the genre’s happy ending. As for Josh, we last see him suffering in the relationship he could serially betray but not leave. That stick is not so sharp after all. 

Beyond the Jews: Philip Roth’s target in “Defender of the Faith”

  Philip Roth’s 1959 New Yorker short story, “Defender of the Faith,” curiously anticipates the controversy that would whirl around the writer’s later work. From Letting Go and Portnoy’s Complaint through his later Sabbath, Zuckerman and “Roth” persona novels, Roth was frequently criticized by the Jewish community for satirizing the Jews — as if antisemites need his help. Canadian Mordecai Richler was similarly criticized for fiction that putatively aired his people’s soiled laundry in public. As early as this story Roth anticipates and confronts that criticism. He weaves ambivalences into irony, especially when we consider the story’s various defenders of various faiths.

The eponymous character would appear to be Sheldon Grossbart, a slimy self-server who purports to defend his fellow Jews’ rights at an American army training base. But Roth is careful to undermine this character, indeed making him as repulsive to those of his faith as he is to their enemies.

Though the plot unwinds in an American army camp, the narrative frame sets the drama in the context of WW II in Europe. At the outset, First Sergeant Nathan Marx has to his surprise been rotated away from the last days of the war in Europe to train new recruits at Camp Crowder, Missouri. Away from the war, there is still a crowd, still a mass of humanity with which to contend. His war experience has moved him from horror to numbness. At the end, Marx and his men are despatched to meet their fate in the Pacific arena.  

Between those wars the story takes place in ostensibly peaceful America. But even here conflict remains, specifically between the aggressive Grossbart and his Sergeant Marx. True to his surname, Sheldon grossly trades on his Jewish identity.  At their first meeting he sits on the sergeant’s desk and tries to go by their first names. He assumes the Jewish sergeant will excuse the Jewish soldiers from the Friday evening cleaning of the barracks — and prevent the other soldiers’ resentment. 

In identifying Marx with his Karl and Harpo namesakes Grossbart assumes they share a historic kinship. He implicitly evokes the class politics of the former and the comic pathos of the latter, the quality that distinguishes the silent, magical Harpo from the slick, urban Groucho.

That sabbath intervention leaves Sergeant Marx feeling  “tender about myself…. I felt as though a hand were reaching down inside me. It had to reach so very far to touch me! It had to reach past those days in the forests of Belgium, and past the dying I’d refused to weep over; past the nights in German farmhouses whose books we’d burned to warm us; past endless stretches when I had shut off all softness I might feel for my fellows, and had managed even to deny myself the posture of a conqueror—the swagger that I, as a Jew, might well have worn as my boots whacked against the rubble of Wesel, Münster, and Braunschweig.” Marx recovers in his revived Jewish identity the connection lost in the war. His sabbath observance revives his feeling of Jewish humanitarianism. This reminder of his sensitivity and moral compass begins the positive representation of Jewishness that will balance out Grossbart’s debasement.

That ancient kinship dwindles as Grossbart exploits it. Even at that first service “I thought I heard Grossbart cackle, ‘Let the goyim clean the floors!’” He later purports to advocate for lantzmen Larry Fishbein and Mickey Halpern, but that only hides his self-service. In their supposed interest he writes a formal complaint — fraudulently, in his father’s name — against the non-kosher food. In a phone call from a superior, Captain Barrett deflects the political complaint: “‘Sir?’ he said. ‘Sir—Marx, here, tells me Jews have a tendency to be pushy. He says he thinks we can settle it right here in the company.’” Roth puts the generalized charge of Jewish pushiness into the mouth of a lying, unsympathetic Gentile officer. 

To excuse his belligerence Grossbart has the chutzpah to cite the war he resists: “‘That’s what happened in Germany,’ Grossbart was saying, loud enough for me to hear. ‘They didn’t stick together. They let themselves get pushed around.’” But Captain Barrett trumps that: “‘Look, Grossbart…. Who does more for the Jews—you, by throwing up over a lousy piece of sausage, a piece of first-cut meat, or Marx, by killing those Nazi bastards? If I was a Jew, Grossbart, I’d kiss this man’s feet. He’s a goddam hero, and he eats what we give him.’” Yet Grossbart keeps playing the victim card: “I don’t want to start trouble. That’s the first thing they toss up to us.” Another Grossbart letter putatively from his father strategically exalts Sergeant Marx for his efforts. 

After a brief pause in his campaign Grossbart maneuvers a weekend pass supposedly to attend an aunt’s seder in St Louis. Reminded that Passover has passed, he avows she plans a special ceremonial meal for him. He expands the request to include his two compatriots. In another defence of Jewish values Marx questions his reluctance to submit to Grossbart’s demands: “But my grandmother knew—mercy overrides justice. I should have known it, too. Who was Nathan Marx to be such a penny pincher with kindness? Surely, I thought, the Messiah himself—if He should ever come—won’t niggle over nickels and dimes. God willing, he’ll hug and kiss.” 

Having  granted the three their weekend pass, Marx learns the entire request was a lie. The promised gefilte fish turns into a Chinese egg roll. Marx throws out Grossbart’s gift, which delights one happy soldier the next morn: ”’Egg roll!’ he shouted. ‘Holy Christ, Chinese goddam egg roll!’” The oath makes the revelation comically religious. 

In Grossbart’s climactic fraud he evades the draft to the Pacific theatre. He gets only himself exempted, not his two coreligionists. Marx counters with his own deception. With a Grossbartian ploy he has Grossbart reinstated supposedly at his own request. At this Grossbart drops all pretence of kinship. In fake concern for his father, Grossbart attacks his erstwhile comrade Marx: “He hasn’t had enough troubles in a lifetime, you’ve got to add to them. I curse the day I ever met you, Marx! Shulman told me what happened over there. There’s no limit to your anti-Semitism, is there? The damage you’ve done here isn’t enough. You have to make a special phone call! You really want me dead!”

As the soldiers prepare for their possibly one-way trip to war, Marx resists “with all my will an impulse to turn and seek pardon for my vindictiveness.” Unlike Grossbart Marx has a conscience — and the ethical grounds here to suppress it. With his interference and false phone claim the sergeant has truly defended his faith as an American, a Jew, a soldier. To counter Grossbart’s selfish wiles he practices one. 

Roth clearly subordinates defending the faith to defending the values. That is the true difference between “a company of soldiers here, and … a company of boys,” as Captain Barrett remarked at the outset. The faith does not protect its abusers and malpractitioners. Roth uses Grossbart to remind us we can judge a Jew without judging the Jews. In Marx's subversion of his coreligionist Roth rebuts the traditional calumny that Jews place their own people against their state of citizenship and therefore cannot be trusted. 

The WW II setting provides a macro version of the title. America and its Allies defend their national values, their “faith.” The characterization of the officers may undercut that assumption, expanding Roth’s target from the Jews to include the gentiles too, indeed Western Civilization. Captain Barrett — whose name implies self-exposure — reveals his own instinctive bigotry: “‘Marx, I’d fight side by side with a nigger if the fella proved to me he was a man. I pride myself,’ he said, looking out the window, ‘that I’ve got an open mind. … Consequently, Sergeant, nobody gets special treatment here, for the good or the bad.’ He turned from the window and pointed a finger at me. ‘You’re a Jewish fella, am I right, Marx?’” The repeated "fella" reveals the good officer's detachment from any Other.

        Even the captain’s military manliness is undermined by “the buttons straining to hold his blouse across his belly.” That “blouse” jars against the military uniform. So too the primeval Corporal Robert LaHill, “a dark, burly fellow whose hair curled out of his clothes wherever it could. He had a glaze in his eyes that made one think of caves and dinosaurs.“  Roth here presents a spectrum of prejudice/civilization -- as he does a spectrum of defenders of the faith.

For the army as for the individual soldier the highest motive is to be guarded against the baser instincts of self-service, delusion and prejudice. There are many false “defenders of the faith” but their failings don’t detract from those of honest virtue. Here the principled pragmatic Sergeant Marx is the true defender of the faith, both against its fraudulent abuser and the somewhat ambivalent institution Marx serves. 

New Poems

 Poems

For The Symbol Minded

 

So what the hey is symbolism

any way?

The thing of it

is

You search

high and low

for the bulb that will cast

just the right light.

Le mot juiced.

The Rehearsal (HBO 2022)

  The Rehearsal could be the most fascinating series on TV. Amid the flood of whodunits, documentaries and international theatrics swamping our TV streams these days, The Rehearsal stands alone  — a unique, complex, self-referential masterwork. In an unusual layering of realities, the program purports to be a documentary about the staging of a variety of scenes intended to prepare its characters for a real event. The assumption is that in contemporary life we are unable to engage in sensitive exchanges without rehearsing them in advance. Indeed our daily lives are not free expressions but variously matters of performance.  

The mockumentary form additionally implies the importance of art in our daily life. The variety of rehearsals we witness form a fiction in which we can find our reality represented, transformed for distancing but still recognizable enough to help us understand our society and ourselves. To some extent this is a work of art about the function of dramatic art — its power and futility in our maneuvering of life.

The persona that writer/director/star Nathan Fielder presents is a well-meaning naif — a nebbish — who is out of touch with his own feelings, his family religion and his romantic potential. He is more comfortable composing fictions for others than addressing himself. Within this fiction Fielder is a social force — an artist lavishing great resources to let his clients rehearse for a difficult moment in their “real” life -- which is itself, of course, always part of Fielder's fiction. He lets them briefly live in the conditional tense before taking on the tension of the real incident. Here is a humanity unable to feel and express itself freely, spontaneously.

***

In the first episode Fielder’s director character recreates an entire bar where his client Kor Skeet can practice a conversation, rehearsing some of the innumerable variables. He needs to confess to a friend that he lied when he claimed to have a Master’s degree. The plan is to do it in a bar on Trivial Pursuit night. That the client is a portly black man adds another level to the social reality. As the racial element is not expanded into an issue, we’re in supposedly post-racial America -- or at least the personal not the political.

The core of this episode is honesty — and how to recover from its loss. But in the hugely expensive preparation, the honest admission is undermined by the variety of falseness by which it proceeds. Actors are hired to represent the bar folk and friend. Fielder directs a variety of scenes to anticipate potential incidents. The original small lapse in integrity involves a massive exercise in Performance, aka fakery. 

We expect fictionalizing to serve, to reveal, truth. But here the machinery aims at falsehood not fiction. The preparation is intended to make pretence seem genuine. So the liar’s need to confess stands “solidly” on a Pisan tower of fakery. The ostensible objective of truth is undermined by the theatricality of its preparation. The pervasive falseness even undercuts the actual event of apology. Determined to prove “honest,” Kor lies to a couple to procure the table he has rehearsed for. Claiming a grandmother’s recent death hardly serves his “honour,” especially as it touches the bar-goer who actually has lost his grandmother.

Kor’s guilt over lying shrinks before his determination to win the bar’s trivia contest. Winning the game becomes his driving motive. He’ll drop the confession to win the — Trivial, remember? — contest. At the end Kor is prouder of having won the contest of having confessed his lie. 

Even that victory is undermined by the fact that Fielder tricked the Trivia testmaster to get the answers for Kor. In the episode’s climax Fielder tells Kor that he won because he'd received the answers. Kor condemns Fiedler for exposing his win. “I just hate you!” he tells the man who spent so much money, imagination, time, effort, ingenuity, just to help him admit to a lie. Outraged that his game win proved false, Kor emerges even worse from his absolution. 

Amenable schnook that he is, Nathan Fielder could very understandably invite Kor Skeet back for a second, different shot at skeet shooting. Instead he expresses his unreciprocated affection.

***

After that in-effect pilot, the second episode opens into a series where again Fielder creates a punctiliously detailed world to serve a troubled client. As this pursuit -- motherhood -- is not so trivial it extends across several episodes, indeed to the series end.

At 38 Angela wants to know if she would enjoy being a mother. Fair enough. She could read a book. Spock?

Or Fielder could create a world as if it were a film of that book. To let her test-drive the motherhood experience, he arranges for her to live that fiction. He creates another fully detailed set, again acting like a film director creating a  story in real life. Here Angela will be sped through the experience of mothering a baby. Different babies are cycled in every few weeks to cover the years from crib to teen.The avowedly Christian Angela names the composite baby Adam.

Fielder is punctilious in performing the necessary niceties. He gets the babies’ parents’ permission at every juncture. To respect an infant’s labour rights several babies are deployed each day. A robot baby is used at night, though the “night-owl” hired to sync its crying to a real baby sleeps on the job. Fielder has to keep him company. 

For the woman’s experience to include having a man around, a round of brief dates produces a candidate. Like Kor earlier, this man is matter-of-fact black and a fervid Christian to boot — so he's eager to leave his atheist roommate for the experiment. The man does not share Angela’s commitment to pre-mariltal chastity.  

Now Fielder is himself drawn into the “plot.” To enable the couple’s first date he plays last-minute babysitter. When that partner drops out at the baby’s first night cry (sans carnal compensation), Fielder enters his fiction to play the “man in her life.” Fielder enters the simulacrum he has created for his “story.” The author becomes a character in his fiction — but without shucking his real nature.

***

The third episode centers on two needs, spirituality and developing emotions. In the opening scene, while Fielder and Adam wear Batman and Robin suits, Angela refuses to join their Halloween because she believes it derives from Satanism. With its alternative history of the festival, Google helps Satan conceal his existence. 

Angela’s spirituality is as limited as the lost partner. Instead of tending to her “son” or her garden, she works to flog skin creams on Esty. Her virtue is cosmetic. Inevitably, the couple hire a nanny named Destiny. As the baby Adam is replaced by an older one, the garden and the mirrors are rigged to create the illusion of passed time.

In the other plot, two brothers fight over their grandfather’s will. The older withholds  the money because he fears his brother’s girlfriend is a gold-digger. Continuing the Biblical echo of “Adam,” Fielder rehearses the brothers’ conflict over Raising Cane Fried Chicken.

An actor is hired to play the older brother, to enable the younger brother to rehearse expressing himself. In another staging, that actor asks the younger brother to help the actor’s grandfather (another actor) dig up buried treasure. Successful, the fake grandfather promises the brother some of the gold -- but then supposedly dies. The brother’s outburst of loss and grief over the fake death should release his emotions over the real one. But he skips the next rehearsal for a date with his girlfriend, inviting Fielder to join them at an amusement park. Fielder never sees him again. Far from preparing the brother for a family discussion the rehearsal doubled his grievance and drove him away. 

The two plots have a key scatalogical tie. The fake older brother claims he used to wipe his grandfather’s ass, which in the staged scene, the younger brother also has to do. Meanwhile,  as Fielder contemplates his own emotional detachment from little Adam, he so tires of the kid that he tells him to change his own diaper. That completes the cycle of embarrassing dependency from infant to aged. 

Defending her belief in Satan’s existence, Angela tells Fielder “Not everything is make believe. Some things are real.” To her, Satan is the real. In this drama everything is make believe. But it can still be real. When the fake grandfather objects to being in a “documentary” he’s assured he won’t be in the film. He's in this one.

***

The fourth episode luxuriates in the challenge of role playing. In trying to find oneself one can lose oneself. As the religiously virtuous Angela recalls, her teenage hatred of her father drove her to a life of alcohol and drugs. 

To get more actors for his rehearsals Fielder moves to Los Angeles and opens The Fielder Method acting school. He assigns students to follow and to engage with a real person, to test their lives, then to portray them. Uncertain of his effectiveness as a teacher, he casts a  batch of actors as those students and another as himself. Fielder witnesses the replay of his lesson. 

To experience his student’s experience Fielder assumes one student’s job, then his apartment and roommates. He ultimately hires actors to play those characters too. Fielder seems to lose himself in the shuffle. This proliferation of roles recalls the famous Norman Rockwell infinity of self-portraitures.  

Returning to “home” Fielder finds the 6-year-old Adam is a strapping 15-year-old. Well versed in his character, Adam greets his “father” warmly, as if he had not been absent for the fictitiousl nine years. But Fielder opts for a disastrous illusion of realism. He asks Adam to treat him as a remote, irresponsible father. In this Angry Teen mode Adam replays Angela’s self-destructive rebellion, culminating in an opioid overdose. 

As Fielder’s “life” is his own fiction, however, he can rewrite the plot so that the rebellious delinquent Adam can step into the top of the playground slide and emerge at the bottom the happy nine-year-old Fielder left for Hollywood. The slide is a comic image of rebirth, always the advantage in fiction.

***

The sixth episode picks up the theme of antisemitism limned in the two brothers’ debate in episode four. There an actor used “Jew” pejoratively. Hesitantly, the Jewish Fielder opted to keep the phrase in the -- weak -- interests of realism.

Here Angela wants to celebrate Christmas and refuses any acknowledgment of Judaism. She loves Jesus and Mel Gibson. Fielder can create an false outside winter but he can 't sway Angela. To prepare to confront her, Fielder hires an apparently Jewish actress to represent her position. She declares him unable to feel any emotion.

In this fake family, duplicity rules. Prompted by his parents' reminder of his Jewishness, Fielder pretends to take Adam to swimming lessons but instead takes him to the synagogue and to tutorials with a Jewish teacher, Miriam. She is eager to confront Angela but at her first resistance folds: “I can’t deal with antisemites.” (Perhaps Miriam should have rehearsed the confrontation.) “He lies a lot,” Angela warns, not surprising in a stager of fiction. 

Before the eruption over Christmas Angela objected to Fielder playing along with little Adam’s playing doctor. As Dr Fart, he prescribes farts to cure most ailments. In this comic version of the overall rehearsals Dr. Fart prescribes himself. To cure cancer Dr Fart orders Fielder to eat a turd. The lumpy chocolate bar evokes Pasolini’s Salo. Angela objects to Fielder’s encouraging the juvenile humour.

With his revived Jewishness Fielder realizes that this fake marriage has been replaying his tendency to submit to a partner’s domination. From the TV footage he learns that his LA absence enabled Angela completely to abandon the terms of their rehearsal. When he confronts her Angela announces she is leaving. 

The episode ends with Fielder happily playing the Jewish father with Adam. Miriam instructs him in the basic defence of the Jewish state against Palestinian rhetoric. But even sans Angela he is still living in her dream house with her fake child. Can he convert this fake life to real, as he manages when he gets a liquor license and reopens his stage-design bar as Nate’s Lizard Bar? He hires his theatre students to run it. However functional, however, his bar is still a stage set in an old warehouse. Can he make his fake family remnant at least seem to work as well?  

As usual Fielder prefers to imagine — or rehearse — scenes rather than directly living them. In his web of rehearsals and imaginings he loses his true bearings. Can making fictions out of his life enable his escape from the challenge of real experiences, real commitments? Behind the closing facade of the rehearsal home one reality remains unchecked: little Adam has a real family, real parents, a real home, elsewhere. Nebbish Fielding guards against dealing with reality by retreating to idle rehearsals and stage sets. There he wields a control — to rewrite, to edit, to rebuild — that life affords no-one.

***

In the series most emotional episode, the finale surfaces the moral issues in Nathan Fielder’s relationship with Remy, the six-year-old playing Adam. Lacking a father himself, Remy doesn’t want to give up his “daddy.” He doesn’t want “Nathan” but the actor playing his dad, because “My pretend daddy loves me.” Remy’s mother Amber comforts him and eventually assures Fielder the boy will be alright. “Could it be that the path to forgiveness lies in someone else’s eyes?” Fielder asks himself, trying to believe her assurance.

Here as throughout the series we have to remember that director Nathan Fielder controls every detail, with a perspective and purpose beyond the understanding of the “Fielder” he portrays onscreen. The performances, especially of the very young, are so convincing we might forget that.  Even if the six-year-old's lines were his own, not scripted, their impetus and use make them part of Fielder's fictional construction. Remy commemorates the event with his own minimalist drawing of himself and his pretend dad. It aptly goes to the fridge door .In his insecurity Fielder asks the nine-year-old Adam if he’s a good father. “You’re a great scene partner,” the child assures him.

The six-year-old crashes the birthday party Fielder is giving the nine-year-old Adam. In a comic replay of the character Fielder’s irresponsibility, as the actors playing the party guests are all “extras” they are not allowed to speak. That diminishes the party but saves the director character $15,000. 

        In another compromise, Fielder has to cleanse the older Adam of what Jewishness he has picked up. By reaffirming his Christianity this Adam will save himself from the Jew Fielder’s suffering and burning in hell. Still, Fielder drops the boy off at the Jewish school, where his real parents collect him to take him to his proper class. Fielder hires child actors to bully Adam so his pretend father can teach him to pretend not to care.

        Fielder remains locked in his penchant for staging his reality. When he visits Amber’s home he’s struck by the profusion of detail in her real world. He marvels that her home is “a work of art, but it was just real life.” 

To address his guilt about Remy he stages a variety of alternative rehearsals. He tries to play a less friendly father. He casts an older Adam, indeed even a grown man Adam, to test whether he could have rehearsed the scene without hurting the helpless child actor. He recasts Angela in hopes he could rewrite that relationship’s ending: “I’m sorry I am who I am.”

In the climactic rehearsal Fielder hires the actor who had portrayed him as the Method teacher to play him with a slightly older Adam. In a detailed replica of Remy’s house, Fielder then plays Remy’s mother, Amber. We still see Fielder as Fielder except for the woman’s sole appearance in a mirror. But he sports her purse, tattoo and lipstick. 

With Remy outside the psychodrama altogether Fielder tries to rehearse a solution for his own conscience. “That man didn’t want to confuse you,” he as Amber tells the actor playing Remy. He just made mistakes, as she did when she allowed the child’s casting: “Mommy’s not perfect.” “She” consoles this Adam with praise: His crying shows he has a heart; he can love. 

Here Fielder reaches a conclusion about his own compulsion to live by rehearsals: “Life is better with surprises.” Still speaking as Amber, he assures this Adam that “she” will always love and support him. But then he slips: “I’m your dad.” The child actor catches him: “I thought you said you’re my mother.” “No, I’m your dad.” Fielder’s emotions have at last overrun the detachment of his directing and performing. But his truth is still a lie: he's the director not the dad.

One last gag completes the drama, as Fielder and the new Adam rush off to play. As a reminder of the director’s embrace of his character’s folly and ineluctable vulnerability we get a flash of his ass-crack. The shot reminds us that the entire drama has been an exposure of the director’s persona. It also echoes the recollection of little Adam’s performance as Dr. Fart. 

There may even be an echo of that other mystical Jewish dramatist Leonard Cohen: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Or not.

                                    ***

  One effect of this remarkable series is to establish creator/star Nathan Fielder as a true auteur. Fielder is from Vancouver (cue chorus: Oh, Canada!). That makes him a living marginal, perched on the edge, watching and reflecting upon the weirdness pervading both sides of the border. He joins the long list of Canadian satirists — from Wayne and Shuster through Rich Little and the SCTV and SNL worthies — who went south to purvey their outsider’s, often parodist, perspective. 

More pointedly, Fielder did a mock Reality show on Comedy Central, Nathan For You (2013-17) where he deployed his persona against real people. He was executive producer of How To with John Wilson, a series with the same acerbic tone, as the central naif explored the  passing scene.

Nope

 

Notwithstanding the spectacle of the low-concept, high-suction flying saucer attack, the guts of this film lies in the title.

The “Nope” is first heard when OJ and Emerald note that everyone knows who made the very first film: white guy Edward Muybridge. But does anyone know who rode the horse in that film? There Muybridge sought to determine if a running horse leaves the ground. That man was black so of course: “Nope.” OJ repeats the word when he refuses to surrender to the invasion, to give up.

It’s writer/director Jordan Peele’s film mission to say “Nope” to the American tradition of marginalizing or omitting the African American from its history, values, consciousness. As in Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) he inflects the familiar genres by centering on the black experience and reversing its traditional suppression. Because he’s liberating a long vilified -- hence frightening -- force he naturally works in the horror genres, whether Monster or Sci-Fi.

As Emerald points out, “Since the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game.” Not just in the pictures, but throughout the fabric of American life — where permitted. The skin in their game was black so outre.

The Hollywood horse-training family supposedly descends from Muybridge’s unnamed rider. It names the unnamed and empowers the suppressed with a history.

This film is especially self-referential in the number of references to film-making. That is explicit in the opening scene and in the later attempts to film the outer space phenomenon. Jupe Park’s pitch for his neo-Western live entertainment show promises to transform the spectator by providing a manufactured new background. Though not in his intended way, it does — elimination. Kara Hagedorn reads Emerald's name as evoking the green screen by which film provides its performers with a literally different background.  

Indeed the theme is introduced in the Biblical epigraph:"Nahum 3:6: I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle." That could reflect upon the white’s oppression of the Black. And as film is the predominant spectacle of our age, if not our predominant filth, it is the proper field for rebuttal.

In the alien monster’s final attack the saucer is replaced by a flowery shape (more Georgia O’Keeffe than Melies) that keeps erupting into cinema-screen rectangles. Here again, films beget films. Emerald triumphs by feeding that creature a huge balloon winking Fat Boy — that she fatally explodes. As historic lies and myths eventually must.

The palimpsest narrative includes flashbacks to the TV sitcom that Jupe Park created and starred in as a lad. It also summons Peele’s own background in TV sitcoms, before he found his satiric voice in sketch TV. In this sequence the tamed chimp center of the TV series runs amok and slaughters the show “parents.” Figure Cheetah bloodily offing Ozzie and Harriet. 

That apparent tangent actually parallels the major plotline. Given the traditional racist equation of African American with monkey, the sitcom comic butt's revolt replays OJ’s and Emerald’s reversal of the reduction of the Black experience in American history and mythology. The sitcom family has treated their black pet as a comic tool. Its murderous revolt suggests the racist terror that underlies that attempt to diminish the Other.

Similarly, in naming his hero OJ, Peele provides a precise antithesis to the OJ we immediately recall. That’s the Simpson who was the college, NFL and Hollywood House N-word, who beat a murder rap, vowing to pursue his wife’s killer through every golf course in the land, and was finally jailed for the armed theft of — what else? — OJ memorabilia. Talk about self-referentiality. 

        Peele replaces that OJ in our consciousness with a reticent, courageous, shy, noble, generous and sensitive servant both to horse and to humanity, to art and to life. This OJ rides a real Bronco with stakes even higher than his forerunner's famed slow-mo TV chase. Hence perhaps the key in the horse's flank -- ignition for the parallel. In humanity, principle  and efficacy Peele's OJ ranks second here only to his sister, Emerald. In her character gender as well as race are freshly empowered.

In short, the titular “Nope” is a firm denial of the American abuse. neglect and denial of the Black experience. The heavenly sci-fi playground makes it a true (apres Melville) “No, in Thunder!”                         Guess Nope too springs eternal in the human breast.