“The Rehearsal” Season 2’s premiere episode title, “Gotta Have Fun,” contains a challenge within it. The raison d’être of a comedy series is exactly that, to entertain the audience and show them a fun time, but series creator Nathan Fielder acknowledges in voiceover that he has to start quite seriously, given that the topic of the season is safety and communication in airplane cockpits. Although the comedian diagnoses this roughly 10-minute section of “The Rehearsal” as one with “zero laughs,” the show is slyly disarming what could be a grim montage of airplane crashes, and it’s doing it in a particularly “The Rehearsal” way.
The HBO show is well known now for its production design’s meticulous recreations of real-world locations (shoutout to both New York City’s Alligator Lounge and to Nate’s Lizard Lounge, its state-line-crossing film set twin). In Season 2’s opening sequence, it appears to be continuing that trend with a detailed recreation of a cockpit as a co-pilot (Eric Barron) fails to convince his pilot (Gregory Gast) to break off a landing approach that feels all wrong. A slightly jittery camera bouncing between close and medium shots of the pilots and an earnest, slightly mournful score add to the mounting tension. This is as serious as any film would take a plane crash in the moments before it happens.
But in the resulting crash, as flames burst all around and the pilot’s bodies go limp, the camera in the cockpit finds Fielder, standing against the conflagration. We see that we are, in fact, on a soundstage, surrounded by an LED wall; then, in a wider shot, Fielder walks away from the cockpit set. Whether or not a viewer laughs at the moment — the inevitable intrusion of Fielder himself into the world he’s created — is between them and God. But this reveal is a masterful evolution of the ways in which “The Rehearsal” complicates our understanding of what we’re watching by showing us the artificial seams of how it’s being made.
Throughout the resulting montage of airplane crashes that Fielder runs through with former National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia, there’s a very delicate dance between Fielder and Goglia sitting at a lecture table, recreations of airplane crashes played dramatically, and moments where we see Fielder looking into the cockpit set from the soundstage with the LED wall behind him.
It’s not that the tension breaks each time we see Fielder staring down the “pilots” making the communication errors we know are about to get them killed. The stakes are too high for that. But the use of the LED wall creates a margin of safety that Fielder and the filmmaking team can adjust, giving us more or less of a realistic-looking environment. “The Rehearsal” can always pull out of a dramatic nosedive by showing Fielder looking on, even if the plane is about to go down.
In fact, Fielder makes sure to insert himself into almost all of the crashes’ aftermaths, continually reminding us that he is recreating these moments of death and destruction, maintaining the sense that we are in his world and he’s doing this for a purpose. We start to recognize the pattern, until by the end the montage is able to cut from a first officer (Jacob Tittl) on an American Airlines flight understanding a mistake has been made to the shot of Fielder staring into the cockpit post-crash, LED wall in flames.
This is very canny staging, shooting, and editing, of course, but it’s also a novel and engaging use of volume technology. Fielder and his filmmaking team are able to toggle between the LED wall providing realistic lighting and environments, and the LED wall as an absurd piece of artifice.
In so doing, the filmmakers are able to keep us in two tonal spaces at the same time. We are reassured that Nathan Fielder is going to pop up and reveal the intricate construction behind the heightened ‘reality’ he’s rehearsing in. But we’re also primed to take what he’s saying more seriously than we might if we were still waiting on that first laugh.
“The Rehearsal” is now streaming on Max.
