Nathan Fielder and the Laws of Discomfort

On the 2015 interview that helped me understand Nathan Fielder

Nathan Fielder, directing with his laptop on the set of The Rehearsal

I’ve been thinking a lot about Nathan Fielder over the past few months. For those unfamiliar with him, he’s a performance artist who became famous through his reality TV show Nathan For You, which ran from 2013 to 2017. In the show, he plays a Canadian business consultant who approaches American small businesses with batshit crazy ideas to juice profits, like serving poop-flavored yogurt at a struggling frozen yogurt store, getting people to work for a house-moving company for free by pitching it as a weight-loss program, and getting an antique store to institute a “you break it, you buy it” policy and then luring in drunk customers to break things. My friend Jade described Fielder’s TV shows as him doing social science. Now that you can’t run Milgram or Stanford Prison Experiments though universities, he runs them through reality TV instead.

In a 2015 interview with the AV Club, Fielder said that he was inspired to create Nathan For You by the 2008 financial crisis. He said that he read extensively on it and found that lots of people “knew that something was wrong or unethical” in their business dealings, but that they didn’t speak up for fear of causing social discomfort. “All these terrible things that happened, these big world events, came down to basically two people in a room with one person being too uncomfortable to speak their mind,” Fielder said. Nathan For You, to me, is Fielder seeing that hole in the fabric of reality and testing how far he can stretch it. The show asks the question: What else can you get people to go along with because they’re too uncomfortable to tell someone they perceive to have authority “No?”

I’ve been thinking about Fielder again because he’s got a new show, The Rehearsal, in which he tries to use his ability to manipulate that authority gradient for good. At the start of the show, Fielder reveals that he got obsessed with plane crashes after Nathan For You, the same way he did with the 2008 financial crisis before it, and discovered they occur because junior airplane co-pilots rarely speak up to their captains when something’s wrong. Each plane cockpit has two pilots, one senior and one junior, and in the event that the junior can see the plane is heading towards a crash that the senior can’t, they’re supposed to take control of the plane using a special steering wheel and safely land it. Fielder analyzed transcript after transcript from plane crashes’ black boxes, and discovered junior pilots would rather let the plane crash than contradict their seniors. Much like the 2008 financial crisis, people would rather let catastrophe occur than have an uncomfortable conversation.

I’m only two episodes into The Rehearsal’s second season, and in the second episode, Fielder addresses this inability to communicate by having junior pilots reject singing competition contestants so they can practice delivering bad news to their captains. I don’t know how the rest of the season’s going to go, but I think Fielder’s addressing a symptom of these plane crashes rather than their cause. I have a theory that societies begin to fail when sycophancy takes precedence over quality, or when rulers choose to be deferred to instead of productively challenged. Western society is in that state of decline. I think if junior pilots were to start taking control from their seniors, the capitalist ruling class would discipline them because the lesson that imparts—that you should seize power from people about to cause mass death—threatens our ruling class’s existence. They’d rather let people die than have them wake up to the fact they can be actors, rather than subjects, of history.

I don’t know his politics, but I think Fielder sees on the ground level how unhinged and sycophantic western society has become. It cleaves further and further towards magical thinking as it decays. In 2023, he wrote and starred in a scripted drama about modern land speculators called The Curse, about which critic Jennifer Wilson wrote that “the speculative practices—the financial and cultural forecasting—on which [the main characters] have staked their futures would be considered occult forms of divination were white people not the ones engaging in them.” In Nathan For You, he gets business owners to agree to obviously insane ventures because they trust that he has mystical knowledge as a “business consultant” that they don’t. He uses reality TV to defamiliarize our economic relations to each other, and in the process, reveals that we’re all just blowing on our knuckles before rolling our proverbial dice. We’ve let society condition us into people who trust that the people in charge know what they’re doing, even as they lead the ocean to our doorsteps or convince us to serve shit-flavored yogurt.

I have to be careful what I write here because I’d like to pass through international borders at some point, but I think it’s worth thinking like Fielder as we move through the world politically. It’s worth looking at the holes in society and seeing how far you can stretch them in service of the left-wing things you believe in. In the same 2015 AV Club interview, Fielder also said he was inspired to create Nathan For You by watching finance workers “find loopholes that were technically legal but one step ahead of anything anyone else had thought about.” Those loopholes applied just as well to making reality TV as they did to making money. They can also apply to communist political work. There are plenty of loopholes that creative thinkers can exploit to hinder the ruling class’s efforts to seize what’s left of the world. If you see them, act on them.

Tāmaki (Auckland) Events

• The Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra is playing Handel’s “Water Music” at 7:30pm on Thursday, June 12 at The Holy Trinity Cathedral in Parnell. I’ve been really enjoying their work lately, having gone to their other concerts for the past few weeks, and I think it’ll be good.

• The Capitol Cinema Film Club is playing Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest on Tuesday, June 24 at 8:45pm at The Capitol Cinema in Mt. Eden. Per the club’s co-director, Tom, “Tarkovsky said [Diary of a Country Priest] was his favorite film, Scorsese listed it as one of the ten greatest ever made, and Hong Sang-soo said it was the film that inspired him to become a filmmaker.” You can buy tickets here.

• My friends have also recommended going to see Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan at Q Theatre, running from June 25 to July 5. They’re running a midweek special where you can get $25 tickets if you go on a Wednesday or a Thursday. You can buy tickets here.

Recommended Reading

• As I was studying to write this essay on Nathan Fielder, I re-read this essay by Sean T. Collins on what he calls “surveillance cinema” in Fielder’s The Curse, Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, and Alan Resnick’s experimental Adult Swim short horror film “This House Has People In It.” It’s really, really interesting and I strongly recommend reading it. Collins’s essay is embedded in Luke O’Neil’s longer newsletter, so I recommend command-finding the essay’s title “We ask that you refrain from talking about your experience inside the structure” to get to it in this link.

• I liked this essay by Rayne Fisher-Quann about what she did to start reading again and the weird metatextual significance that being a “reader” has taken on.

• I liked this Parapraxis Magazine essay by Hannah Zeavin about how psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich tried to marry Freudian thought and Marxism and ended up being persecuted by “Anna Freud, by the Nazis, and by the FDA” as a result.

• I liked this Bright Wall/Dark Room essay by a former worker in a care facility for troubled children about the film Short Term 12, which is about exactly that. It’s a good essay in its own right, and it’ll ring true to anyone who’s ever had to deal with the child welfare system as a kid or a worker, too.